Hardware Specs for a big open world game

Loxli · October 16, 2014, 10:07am

Hi all,

I’m making a big open world island and I would like to know what kind of hardware I need in order to make a very detailed graphic in a region of 5km x 5km.
For Now I have a I5-4440, 8gb, gtx 750ti. Should I upgrade everything?

Do you know what kind of light should I use to build the game?

I tried the world composition system but everything is too slow and sometimes the pc crashes.

anonymous_user_923c79df · October 16, 2014, 2:49pm

-for big worlds I personally would use dynamic lightning, because otherwise it will take ages to build the light
-the recommended specs always depends on several aspects:

do you use very low poly meshes
lod’s
material complexity
culling
level planning (e.g mountains that block the view of the player)
…

jCoder · October 16, 2014, 3:05pm

Read threadfor details on how different people’s systems perform.

Crashes are often due to resource constraints. Check your disk and make sure you have a lot of free space to work with.

You’re going to need more ram. At least 16 gb, preferably 32 gb. should help with the crashes, and possibly speed things up as well.

Then upgrade the graphics card to a 9xx series, if it’s still slow.

Then the CPU last.

anonymous_user_0df12f74 · October 16, 2014, 4:20pm

Definitely use Dynamic Lighting. As an example, the “Landscape Demo” download from the market place uses 30gb of RAM to build the lights ( has been reduced in UE4 ver 4.5 down to ~10gb). Also due to the size of the world, you will need more than 8gb of ram if you have all of the levels visible at once placing more content into the scene, it could cause the program to crash when it runs out of memory (has happened to me, I have 8gb at the moment as well).

anonymous_user_a006f79c · October 17, 2014, 1:18am

Seriously as much as you can get your hands on, think big when aiming for open worlds… Top end I7, 32GB ram, GTX 980, SSD…

Loxli · October 17, 2014, 10:37am

Do you mean a Static directional light? because I don’t see how a dynamic light can improve the performance.

Loxli · October 17, 2014, 10:58am

Also I have another problem, if I play at the end of my region, the game doesn’t start.

My region is now 8 km x 8 km that I divided into 6 x 6 tiles.

Do you know why?

iniside · October 17, 2014, 11:42am

Oh it will.
Consider that my simple map which consisted of:

Single landscape, about 1km across
Some static meshes (not even 1/6 of landscape filled).

Took more than 500MB space, most of it are lightmaps.
Without Lightmaps the same map takes about… 40MB.

Lightmaps are simply not suited for big open world games. You will run into memory issues. Unless your big open world is completely empty ;p.

Loxli · October 17, 2014, 12:35pm

Thank you so much! I’ve found the solution to all my problems.

I’ll upgrade my pc later in the future.

Jezcentral · October 17, 2014, 1:19pm

Yeah, don’t think you have to buy the latest tech, right now. If you are doing okay now, then you already have what you need. It sounds like the amount of RAM is the only thing that is stopping you at the moment.

All the other stuff, GPUs, SSDs, CPUs etc will make life nicer, but won’t let you achieve anything new.