dual or quad?

anonymous_user_a90cc131 · February 18, 2015, 7:16pm

hi,

FAQ
Quad-core Intel or AMD processor, 2.5 GHz or faster
Subscription
Dual-core Intel or AMD processor, 2.5 GHz or faster

dual or quad?
what’s the difference when developing games with Unreal 4?
Which of these should I consider when buying a computer to be able to run Unreal 4 to develop mainly mobile (iOS) games?

darthviper107 · February 18, 2015, 7:44pm

It depends on the processor, a quad core CPU isn’t necessarily faster than a dual core, there’s sites where you can compare speeds.

The biggest benefit of getting a faster processor will be lighting build times, which can take hours to do.

By the way, for iOS while you can develop for iOS and test using Windows, you still need a Mac to submit the final app to the Apple App store. Just keep that in mind.

anonymous_user_a90cc131 · February 18, 2015, 8:10pm

hi,
lighting build times?
while building the final game ( the publishing build ) ou editing/compiling the lighting changes in editor?

anonymous_user_272e36ca · February 18, 2015, 8:10pm

Excellent Question and then for the Answer. I was wondering of that as well. I think for a 3rd person mini game which I am getting ready to go into productions soon, an I5 4 core would do fine. I think even and 4th gen i3 would be fine.

darthviper107 · February 18, 2015, 9:24pm

You setup your lighting how you want it to be and when you’re ready you can Build Lighting, it will then calculate high quality GI lighting and render to lightmaps. When you’re done with your game it can package the game to make an .exe but at that point the lighting is already built.

anonymous_user_a90cc131 · February 19, 2015, 1:01pm

hi,
I understand the calculation of lighting happens in the editor each time you change something ( lighting ) and compile,thanks!

based on what you said and before last answer,I’ve been researching and saw reports of people
where the lighting calculation takes too long or never leaves zero and is worrying

anonymous_user_0df12f74 · February 19, 2015, 4:05pm

It really depends on the size of your level and the complexity of your meshes, both of which shouldn’t be an in your case (for iOS games). It will take 2x longer to build the lighting with a 2 core processor compared to a 4, but it shouldn’t be a big problem in your case again. I would personally get a quad core in your situation since a year from now who knows where mobile games will be at graphically, plan for the future I say.

anonymous_user_a90cc131 · February 19, 2015, 4:26pm

hi, and thanks!

since I will need to buy a mac mini " anyway "
I wonder if I could develop the game on it,but the little I researched,i did not see many good things about the mac performance

there would be any problem in using " the basic " mac mini configuration?

Mac mini 1,4GHz
Intel Core i5 dual core 1,4GHz
4GB ram
Intel HD Graphics 5000

anonymous_user_0df12f74 · February 19, 2015, 5:01pm

At first when I read 1.4GHz I was ready to say no way, but it looks like it runs at that speed as a power saving measure, with a 2.7GHz turbo speed. Intel HD graphics usually don’t play well with UE4, the HD 3000 won’t even run on the PC side, and the 4000 series has difficulties on the mac side. I haven’t heard any users reporting on the HD 5000 so far but there may be some in here, have a look through so you can see how a comparable system will run UE4. If you turn down all of the graphics options in UE4 it might work, but it will most likely still be really slow.

If the mini had a better graphics card I would say it would work for sure, but I can’t guarantee you will be able to work without issues in UE4 on those specs. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news…

These are the recommended specs from Epic:

But since you are getting one anyways, it would be great if you could let us know how well it works! I’m sure there are many others wondering about .

darthviper107 · February 19, 2015, 5:03pm

Performance will not be great, but it will run. I think they’ve fixed the recently, but you may even get better performance if you install Windows on there (Bootcamp), there were issues in the past that UE4 on Mac ran slower on the same hardware, but I think they may have fixed that.

anonymous_user_a90cc131 · February 19, 2015, 5:17pm

maybe Intel Iris Graphics?

Mac mini 2,6G
Intel Core i5 dual core 2,6GHz
8GB ram
Intel Iris Graphics
OS X Yosemite

anonymous_user_a90cc131 · February 20, 2015, 1:09pm

hi,

in the link,there is a report of a intel HD4000 running the scene with ALL LOW at 28 fps,then HD5000
" should " be able to pass the 30 fps to play around with the features and make the game…

and

about Intel Iris
intel HD 5000,iris and iris pro GPUs are almost the same thing
HD 5000
HD 5100 aka Iris
HD 5200 aka Iris Pro

Thanks!

anonymous_user_a96b2b2c1 · February 24, 2015, 3:24pm

Not sure about Mac’s but with PC’s and DirectX 12 coming out soon, more cores is the way to go.

At the moment most none Mantle game engines use a main or single rendering thread/one core and farm out tasks/threads to other cores. Mantle and DirectX 12 allow all the cores to feed the GPU as well as optimising the information sent between the CPU and GPU.

Result massive ‘Free’ boost in performance.

Check out the Microsoft DirectX 12 video where they adapt a 3DMark test to use DirectX12 and go from a main thread/core taking 6-7 ms a frame down to 2-3 ms a frame. So that 3DMark is twice as fast on the same hardware!

I’m guessing that’s running on a quad core CPU.

More cores spreads the load on engines that support DirectX 12.

Hopefully OpenGL Next(?) will be out soon as well.