Choosing the right graphics card for Development in Unreal Engine 5

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Hi everyone!

I’ve recently started learning & creating in Unreal Engine 5, on a very low scale graphics card (1050ti with 4GB of VRAM). It’s been okay for development, but when I go to level design, and all that stuff, it’s very bad, lags even on the lowest editor settings, and I can never get the lightning right, because of hardware limitations.

I’ve decided to invest in upgrading my setup. There are two options I’ve been considering:

  • GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Windforce OC 12GB
  • ASUS ProArt GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB OC Edition

In my country, to get them brand new with warranty, they both cost the same (somehow :smiley: ). The price is around 703$ for either one of them.

Now, which one do you think is better for game creation in Unreal Engine 5? I’ve been browsing the internet, asking Chat GPT, they all lean on 16gb 4060 version, but it’s usually because the 4070 is more expensive and it’s not worth the upgrade.

To stretch my budget completely, I could maybe go for:

GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER EAGLE OC 16GB GDDR6X 256-bit

Bit te price for this one is almost double, at around 1187$, so it’s going to tighten the budget for buying assets, environments etc.

As a bonus, is there any way I can still reliably use 1050ti for development? I don’t want to create a high tier graphics game, I’m happy with ~2015 style graphics, which 1050ti can run very easily.

Any help is much appreciated!

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Hello Nikola,

After many years with a 980ti I upgraded to a 4070 SUPER (founders edition)

If you set your engine scalability settings to ‘low’ I think you’d still be able to work comfortably with the 1050ti. But - for fancy new graphics features like Lumen, (‘High’ Scalability setting and above) your framerate will suffer. - So while I was able to do everything I wanted with my 980, being able to have fancy graphics at high FPS was a breath of fresh air.

The 4070 Ti Super is probably overkill. And not worth it at that price. (Any 4070 will be adequate IMO)

The 5070 (550 MSRP) comes out in February, might be worth waiting…

I don’t think that GPU RAM is something to focus on. (There are just a few games that use a lot of VRAM on high settings?) So I’d lean more towards the raw performance of the 4070 over the 4060 Ti.

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Hey @Astrotronic! Thank you so much for the response. I’ve been also thinking in a similar way, although 4060ti has 4gb of memory more than 4070, the performance difference is really noticable on all benchmarks, and with Unreal engine being updated constantly, they probably will develop something new and shiny very soon, which 4060ti will struggle to handle.

I go by the logic of being able to handle everything on very high settings in Unreal Engine, so that I can optimize it and really see the FPS difference it makes, But, optimization usually comes at the end, and with everything lagging, it’s a real pain to work with it. I use low settings all the time, but the issue is lightning, it’s never the correct lighting on those settings, and since I’m developing a horror game, lightning is everything :expressionless:

For the 50xx series, the tricky part is that although it might be released in February, to my country, it probably won’t come before April or similar. And they will be waaaaaaaay overpriced in my country, like every time they release a new series of graphics cards.

So, overall, I’ll probably go for 4070. :slight_smile:

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