Hey all. I am looking for a replacement GFX card as mine is NOT strong enough to handle UE for development purposes. Currently 4GB of VRAM so… yeah.
I was looking into a AMD Radeon™ RX 6800 Challenger Pro 16G OC, 16GB ram but before I commit to any purchase I was wondering what y’all suggest? What is an affordable ($500-1000) GFX that handles UE5+? I don’t actually do a lot of gaming on PC so that’s not an issue - just the rendering for development purposes. Currently sporting a B550-A Pro motherboard and 16 GB Ram so shouldn’t have compatibility issues…
16 GB RAM for your CPU with a 16 GB RAM graphics card will be a serious challenge.
(Also, 16 GB RAM is in general a serious challenge for any real Unreal Editor usage.)
You should absolutely upgrade your CPU RAM, ideally to 64 GB if the motherboard will take it.
One reason this matters, is that the graphics drivers will typically want to reserve more main memory the more video memory you have; not because of “shared memory” but because of “backing store” to be able to just drop memory from the GPU when textures/buffers aren’t used, rather than having to copy them back to main RAM when somehting else is more important.
Separately, I’ve had much better luck with NVIDIA graphics cards (even on AMD CPUs and motherboards.)
I’m not saying the RX 6800 isn’t a good card, just that I’d go with NVIDIA myself.
A RTX 4070 with 12 GB of RAM is about $599, which is right in your budget, with memory left over for main RAM.
Motherboard will take 32GBm but as 2 x 16GB DDR4. I mean, despite having 4 slots they seem cramped to me. As it is I couldn’t put my 2 8GB DDR4 side by side.
I’ll seriously look at upgrading. Thanks for the info!