Each week on Show Us Your Rig, we feature the PC game industry's best and brightest as they show us the systems they use to work and play.
Garry Newman trolled me. I asked the Garry's Mod and Rust creator to show us his computer setup and he told me, flat out, that he doesn't use a standard PC. Then I asked him to send pictures of the setup and he included male genitalia on one of his monitors. Dude is messing with me.
But when you're Garry Newman, looking in on the ridiculousness of the industry, you can do that. You can see the notion that a game developer should have some hand-crafted PC with a giant case and laugh. You can get an email from someone about showing off your rig and decide to have a little bit of fun. And his rationale for his non-traditional working setup is fascinating.
What's in your PC?
My work PC is a Mac Pro running Windows 8.1.
- 3.7GHz quad-core with 10MB of L3 cache
- 12GB (3 x 4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
- 1TB PCIe-based flash storage
- Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each
What's the most interesting part of your setup?
Probably the fact that it's a Mac Pro. It looks like a bin.
What's on your desk?
Mac Pro, 2 Apple Displays (connected via thunderbolt), a phone that I never use and a printer.
Do you have a gaming PC?
No I don't have a gaming 'PC'. The Mac is probably more powerful and sexy looking than any gaming PC I could build. I've never had any problems with performance. PC manufacturers have kind of got it wrong for 10 years when designing gaming PCs. I don't want a computer that looks like a motorbike, I'm not 12 years old. I want a PC that doesn't look out of place in my living room. I don't want to have to lock it away in its own room.
At one time I did build a smaller PC with a smaller case, but it was always a struggle to fit everything in, and even then everything was quite loud.
Even though I use a Mac I don't use OSX. This kind of makes me a sinner in both camps. PC users hate it because I'm using a Mac (even though it's just a PC) and Mac users hate it because I'm using Windows.
At home I have an iMac with Windows installed. OSX has a tool built in to let you easily install Windows. It's not running emulated, it creates a partition and you boot into it. I have one wire coming from my computer, and that's plugged in the wall to power it.
The only disadvantages to using a Mac are the price and the fact that you can't really upgrade them (except for memory). To me this isn't a big deal because I'm rich as fuck—so I'm more likely to just buy the latest model instead of trying to get 10fps extra in BF4 by upgrading the graphics card.
My days of taking my PC to bits to make it faster are over. In the same way that I don't take my TV or fridge to bits and change components. This stuff doesn't interest me. I just want to use it.
What are you playing right now?
What's your favorite game and why?
Ever? My favourite game ever is probably Black and White 2. I don't know exactly why but it's a game that I return to and play through at least once a year.
Mr. Newman also sent a picture of his "PS4/XBone/Steambox desk" for inclusion:
