Summary of my experiment: Yes the Unreal Engine EDITOR works great on a 2 core system without any lag. You can code, use Blueprints, move things around, animation and particle systems will run smoothly. You can use a dual core integrated GPU laptop to work in the UE4 editor and submit content to whoever is in charge of building the game.
HOWEVER… Building/Packaging a finished game is a different matter.
You will die of old age waiting for your game to build. Or by the time you’re finished the human race will have colonized another solar system and will not care about your game as their watches will be able to create virtual environments for them to live in. If you think that’s cool guess again. You won’t know jack and won’t have any employable skills so you’ll be homeless.
If you’re interested in the specifics of my experiment read on.
I decided to try it out on an older laptop.
The subject: Acer Aspire 3 (A315-21-95KF)
AMD Duel-Core A9-9420 with Turbo Core up to 3.6GHz
12 GB RAM (I upgraded from 6)
AMD R5 Graphics with 500 BM of dedicated Vram and shared video memory. How much shared video ram doesn’t matter at all in this experiment.
What game did I build?
I didn’t build a game. I opened up the demo and did the tutorial for learning the layout and Blueprints. I made that brazier/fireplace and turned it into a Blueprint. That’s it. That’s all that was in this build. I then packaged it for Windows 64bit and watched the magic happen.
My social security number was issued in 1986… but now I’m almost fifty! My girl friend is an old maid who never married. My parents don’t recognize me. My brother got married and raised seven girls. One of them is about to go to college!!!
You get the idea.
It’s been a few hours since I started the build of that tutorial demo scene with only the two chairs, table, and my cone shaped fireplace with the offering of my tutorial particle effects ascending to the compiler gods. It’s still processing the build of that tiny tiny demo scene.