Hello! Soon I am going to start a college game design course. Which laptop should I pick for game development?

I bought an HP with Ryzen 3, for dirt cheap. I use it for OpenGL/C++ programming – it's not the fastest, but it does the job.

Speaking of Chromebook, to play the devil's advocate: it may (or may not?) support WebGL, which is based on OpenGL ES. If you plan on using JavaScript as your primary language, then a Chromebook might be all that you need. A Chromebook can be hundreds of dollars cheaper than a PC with Ryzen 3, but you lose flexibility – a Chromebook is literally a notebook that runs Chrome, and that's pretty much it.

Tom Sloper said:

Are you going to be doing design? Or are you going to be doing programming? Is money an issue?

Don't get a Chromebook.

Hey!

Well im gonna do design mostly and just a bit of programming. Money isn't really an issue as I am willing to invest in a good laptop for the long run.

I got me a Lenovo Y540-15IRH. It's decently beefy with its 2060 RTX, and packs a thinkpad keyboard without all that RGB lightfest stuff other gaming laptops seem to go for. It's black and professional-looking. Has 1TB SSD and a decent battery. I can recommend it for sure!

I don't think it makes much sense to see a laptop as a long term investment. A desktop computer, yes, but desktop isn't going to get lost, or get stolen, or get dropped, or get water damage, or lose battery capacity. Or at least it won't if you keep it safe - shit happens in college dorms, so I wouldn't take a high-end desktop computer there either.

Think of your laptop as a disposable tool, and get the cheapest one that does what you want it to do. Chances are that it'll break before you need an upgrade.

To be fair, there is Visual Studio for Mac. Unity uses it.

That said, I had a Mac for a few years, and in the end I still prefer Windows 10. Oh, and OpenGL support on Mac is horrible. It only supported OpenGL 4.1. They've only had like a decade to write drivers that support the latest OpenGL, those lazy dogs.

@Tom Sloper Don't go to college to study Game-Design definitely not worth your time and experience. I recommend studying programming for four years not the entire subject of Game-Designing since it's completely useless and does nothing in the real world. Yes you're going to learn crucial lesson except it will not be beneficial because most of these courses are just going to tell you whatever that is probably outdated and does not follow the current trend.

What I recommend you should study in college instead is these:

1. 3D Modelling and 3D Animation
2. Programming
3. Graphic Designs

The first two is the most important part of game-development and if you ask me I recommend Programming and study which game-engine you'd rather develop games on. There are plethora of game-engines which are highly accepted in almost all Triple-A studios or smaller studios since many of us demand our new guys to know at least one of the followings:

1. Unreal Engine 4
2. Unity 2D/3D
3. CryEngine
4. Go Dot Engine

If you know one of each and have launched / released a game in the market either yourself or with a team you should continue with that experience.