Newbie here. I’m into linear content and wish to use UE for this. I’m on a MacPro late 2013 either with Mojave (UE4.27) or Bootcamp (UE5.01). UE4.27 on Mojave plays (and edits) smoother than UE5 on Bootcamp but I think UE5.01 looks noticeably better because of Lumen.
Which should I use to begin my 1st project that will use the sequencer (static mesh animation (but no Skeletal meshes), physics animation like chaos, some materials made from video footage that will have to play, maybe some particle systems) with relative confidence that a 3-4-5 mn job can be successfully rendered, be it in multiple parts if my computer struggles ?
UE5 gives me Lumen (works on my Bootcamp, Nanite does not) which I prefer but if I cannot complete my project in UE5, then I’ll probably be stuck because of what I understand to be the “no downgrade” roadblock to UE4.27 ? Is this not a danger?
Any input much appreciated because UE looks to me a big leap in the unknown.
perhaps somebody can say definitely about the hardware but even so I’d advise testing thoroughly on your own to be sure.
What we do know for certain is that you can relatively easily upgrade from 4 to 5, but you cannot easily go from 5 to 4.
Most of what you’ll use remains the same from 4 to 5, so the bulk of your setup could be made with 4, and then when it comes to look development where you want to use those newer rendering features, you can duplicate the project, upgrade to 5, and test things out. At that point once you have a close to finished project, if you confirm that things run well with your hardware, it would be safe to just upgrade and continue forward. But if you upgraded before doing a complete stress test, you could get yourself into a problem where you’ll have to redo a lot of work.
It will help to make testing version upgrades more easy if you setup version control for the project, then you can do version upgrades on a feature branch and easily change branches if there is a problem.
edit: one thing i should have mentioned, you can disable lumen and do other things like lower the quality level to keep viewport running responsively, so if you are able to quickly make a stress test scene in ue5, can try easy stuff like that first there. even if you dont have your own content ready to go, you could grab any of the many example projects from learn area or marketplace to use as a stand-in. many are for ue4 but you can usually upgrade them with a button push and no problems.
I’m late on this (I thought email alerts were on, but apparently they were not). So, many thanks for this quite comprehensive answer. I did tutorials in both UE4 and UE5 to see if the thing was manageable in the two OS’s and that’s why I could tell that I thought I “had the choice”. I will start in UE4 though since it will be my first time with UE and I have no precise idea of what my computer can swallow and how painful the kind of project I intend to make in UE will be to it.
PS: “you can disable lumen and do other things like lower the quality level to keep viewport running responsively”: you mean Scalability settings in the viewport ?