Unreal Engine Crushes and crushes my windows as well

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

I was making a scene, i am a newbie and im getting to know the program. Everything went well, until i put on grass from the Kite Demo. So it was very slow in the begining (also if anyone knows how can i delete a certian path on the grass would be helpfull) but when i press Play it says that i have to build lighting. When i press build it goes for 1-2 minutes and then it freezes and the program freezes my whole PC as well…

I am using a Dell Inspiron 5558 Laptop (Intel Core i7 5gen, nVidia geforce 920m 4gb, 8gb RAM, 500GB Hdd)

Please help.

2

Two things–first is that your GPU is not very good, typically a mobile GPU isn’t going to be powerful enough for UE4. Second, the issue could be the RAM, if you’re doing a large map or you have a lot of content (like grass) then you can run out of memory which is why the Kite demo uses dynamic lighting.

3

This is the main limiting factor for runtime.

This is the main limiting factor for “baking” (building lighting) although the rest of the system also matters.
You probably don’t have enough RAM to bake lighting for large scenes. I recommend 32 GB of RAM for Unreal Editor for real use, although many hobbyists get by just fine with 16 GB (including me on my laptop!)

4

I think the only thing I can suggest is to disable real-time on the viewport and try to lower the editor’s graphic settings by putting everything to low. It won’t look amazing but at least you’ll be able to work with it. Another thing you can try is disabling the live preview on your content browser.

That’s what I normally do since I don’t have a powerful computer. It helps a bit, but creating huge landscapes will always be problematic. You may need to use some creativity to work around this. Either by avoiding landscapes and making indoor levels instead, or breaking a huge landscape into much smaller parts and just put each one in a separate level so you don’t have to load everything all at once.

5

You probably don’t have enough RAM to build lighting for the level. Try using dynamic lighting only, or making very small levels.

6

The Kite Demo assets were made to show off the capabilities UE running on very high end hardware (GTX Titan level).

You won’t be able to use Kite Demo assets on your hardware. Even with all the scalability settings turned right now it’s going to be incredibly slow if it works at all.

If you want some decent looking grass that runs on low-spec hardware give this a go: