Talk about anything

On my previous laptop, compiling godot took maybe 20 minutes, but developing on it never had totally prohibitive problems until I touched anything slightly gpu intensive, but that wasn't just Godot. Blender was always a 50/50 shot if it would crash when the shaders compiled.
Developing on powerful hardware is always better if possible. You should leave the low end hardware for testing alone. Growing up poor, I know how much it's appreciated when a talented designer produces games that are not locked behind a hardware paywall, so I've kept all of my older machines. That especially includes the ones knocking on death's door.

See, opinions differ :-)

Yeah, I've experienced Unreal as a real resource hog as well.

But then, if you have that big fat threadripper, 64gb of negative latency ram, gpus in parallel or how that is called, and fans that blow the neighbourhood away (and 100 bucks/month extra on the utility bill), con you be sure your game will run on a Walmart/Aldi/Worten PC from 3 years ago without your customers walking out on you with the pitchforks in hands ?

Not totally serious, ofc :-)

Maybe it was a different thread but this came up before.

Basically Dev on the fastest machine available to you. You want your workflow to be as fast as possible and whatever you can justify paying for will make that process faster. Does GPU matter? well for high-resolution 3D texture baking for exame it can hugely speeds things up, but I feel like a lot of Godot devs probably don't care about this so much amd ultimately it won't 'stop' you if you dont have a good gpu, just slow you down.

Target deployment is trickier as in an ideal world you would just have the hardware to hand to test on. Ultimately this would be where early marketing to target Alpha builds to happy testers comes in, but generally I would just eyeball the approx difference in performance between your Dev card and target card and apply this to your FPS targets.
This won't pick up on things like OpenGL compat differences though, but there's no perfect solution really.

My personal 'need' for a high-performance GPU is not as simple as 'because hobbies', as I also use my GPU for my day job (I'm an ML/Data Scientist for a Startup/SMB, and believe me running my own hardware is a lot cheaper than AWS at our size). As such I'm happy to pay fairly hefty amounts as its tax deductible and the gains would be in the order of saving 20-30hrs/month, but also cognisant that my current solution IS sufficiently workable still, so waiting for new gen to drop to see how it affects price/performance ratios is fine by me.

I won't be waiting till January though lol.

Bimbam You want your workflow to be as fast as possible and whatever you can justify paying for will make that process faster.

If you spend 100x the time thinking about what to code than you do running the development tools, as I do, a fast computer doesn't necessarily make the process significantly faster. But when I got a new computer a few years ago, which I seem to do only about every ten years, I bought more power than I really needed (an Intel i9-9900K 3.6GHz CPU with 8 cores / 16 threads, 32GB RAM, two 500GB SSD hard drives) so it wouldn't become obsolete too quickly.

I assume bit fiddlers who ponder over an algorithm probably spend more time just staring at the screen with funny symbols on it than a person who crunches a lot of data and spends more time waiting for the result (42) with a miner running in the background. All those cache misses, tststs ...

I hate to say it, but a more responsive OS may also have an influence on the personal perception of felt speed ;-) Otoh, even the lowest level PCs today have so much power ... aww, scrub ... they don't run Windows

DaveTheCoder If you spend 100x the time thinking about what to code than you do running the development tools, as I do, a fast computer doesn't necessarily make the process significantly faster.

It depends what you are doing, but this is generally true. Most of the time, when I am working, I am not even typing code. I just sit there and think. Sometimes I will lay down on the bed and take a nap, I've gotten good at programming and designing games when I am sleeping. Then after thinking for maybe an hour, I will write a few lines of code, and they usually work. One time I wrote an entire physics engine in a DX12 compute shader, it took about an hour for coding (after a full day of research). And I didn't compile it until it was done, and when I compiled, it worked perfectly with no errors.