GPU Memory : Honest thoughts.

Development Getting Started & Setup
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TLDR 8GB Video enough?

Hi very new and very green to UE5.

So the question : Should I be upgrading as soon as I can from any of the following:

CPU i5 13400F (budget choice from 6700k)
GPU 4060ti 8gb (don’t ask, upgraded from 1070ti)
64mb 3200mhz (from previous system)
Standard MB, Gen’s 4 NVME (pretty budget friendly)

Now, as much as would like the best, a new house and money says otherwise so should I be looking to upgrade the CPU or Graphics card first? or even things like memory, storage speed etc. And to what.

This is going to be used mainly for creating sequences and rendering them out as high as possible for a film. I’m still so new that there must be loads I can do to make it all work more efficiently.

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Hi Max,

That seems like a powerful PC to me. Even what you have in parenthesis would be enough to get started rendering sequences.

If you press CTRL + Shift + Escape and click on your GPU you can view how much GPU Memory you’re currently using. 8GB should be plenty.

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I very much regret going with an 8gig card - I’d strongly recommend at least a 12gig one - most people I know who went 10gig or less regret it.

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I’m curious to know where you’re running up against the limits. Is it just generally poorer performance as your VRAM gets maxed out, or something more along the lines of ‘Texture streaming pool size’ errors?

I’ve been running a 980ti (6GB VRAM) and haven’t been ‘hamstrung’ by it. (Looking to upgrade to a 4070 in near future though)

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The combination of Nanite, Lumen and Virtual Shadow Maps is the main culprit.

I have to run my game at Low settings, and no GI otherwise I run out of memory in the editor.

I have to reduce the amount of objects and force textures to low sizes - even while using World Partition and hiding many tiles. Many operations go over the memory limit and I get stuck with "you have run out of VRAM (paraphrased).

The can even happen with only the landscape, roads and foliage - I’ve seen numerous others post about it too.

And lastly - modern games prefer more memory - I have a 3070ti and I have to run FarCry6 at lower settings and it still runs out of memory.

I think the mimimum specs for gfx cards should be 12gig.

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I just upgraded from a GTX 980 4GB VRAM to an RTX 4080 16GB and here are my findings.
My system is a Intel 6700k, 16GB RAM, SATA SSD x 2 512GB (somewhat slow), Win10.

  1. Regular RAM (not VRAM) usage went down around 15 - 20% (I assume “graphics” memory was shuffled into regular ram as I was mostly out)

  2. Unreal 5.2.1 went from less than 30fps with almost nothing in the scene and constant out of memory warnings, to 120fps capped and no issues so far on EPIC settings. Even had issues on medium settings before the upgrade.

  3. I would recommend minimum 12GB VRAM as most new games seems to require it more and more, and of course Unreal needs as much as you can afford. I could only afford the 4080 but I assume it will last me 3 - 4 years. Anyway, good luck.

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Heya thanks for the question. its a hard to pin down as I’m too new, I’ve managed to speed it up a lot but seems like texture limits seem to be the biggest problem in slowing it all down. It gets to its limit then starts swapping a lot out. I’ve started looking at metahumans and that slowed it right down once they in the engine. And that was just on a simple cafe scene that’s very small and unfinished. I can see me saving and opting for a 16gb or higher card.

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Thanks I’ll try that when I get home. Appreciated

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That sort of feels like the problem to me at the moment

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Thanks, that’s interesting to hear. Good luck too!