Target platform - Desktop vs Powerful Desktop

[DrMeatball]

Apologies if this has been covered.. did some general googling and didn't find anything very clear or determining of an answer.

Regarding Target platforms, Ultralight / Mobile / Desktop choices are all pretty obvious in which use case they make the most sense. I'm less sure about what Desktop vs Powerful Desktop offer. What are the differences and what should I be using? (I thought I saw something a long time ago about Desktop<>interactive vs Powerful<>prerendered but I could be totally conjuring this and can't find info about it)

I'm working on a 7*7km open world non-stylized environment. I'm HDRP and my targets are PC and XBOX One via UWP (maybe PS4/5 if there's a similar indy program, haven't researched this yet at all) with zero chance of mobile.

Thoughts? TY!

[Bryan]

Honestly, this depends on how much optimization you want to do. 
This changes the render settings and requires a much more powerful machine if you went powerful desktop. 
The best way to thing about the differences is Desktop is like this generation and slightly next gen where as powerful desktop is completely next gen. 

The actual definition of the target platform is this: 

The target platform / quality preset controls the different resolution settings on your terrain which influence the graphical quality of the terrain. In general the higher these settings are, the more detail changes you can make on the terrain at the cost of a higher performance impact. 

A higher heightmap resolution lets you make finer height changes on the terrain, a higher control texture resolution allows for better texturing and so on. 

[DrMeatball]

That makes a lot of sense now. Powerful Desktop is basically the Unity+Gaia equivalent of 'but can it run Crysis?' 😄

Totally right with optimization. I made some simple experiment maps today, 1 Desktop and one 1 PowerDesktop, both had HDRP and both were 1x1km. All of the rest of the settings were stock Gaia, hit randomize all once and then Generate World. Both in editor and in a release build, PD is significantly more resource heavy to the point that it was even taxing my 12900k / 6900XT setup. Desktop ran beautifully.

Sticking with desktop. TY!

[Bryan]

7 hours ago, DrMeatball said:

'but can it run Crysis?

Man thats an old saying I remember when they compared that to everything. 

No problem, and yeah desktop should be no problem!