Help for a newbie

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hello I am somewhat newbie to game development and unreal engine.
I plan to develop a small adventure game as a hobby and look for a suitable engine. after going through a lot of articles,
finally I decided to pick the unreal engine 4 because it’s completely free with pro features and only have to pay after exceeding certain amount with some small amount of royalty fee, which I think quite fair.
so first I thank for epicgames for giving us this opportunity for developing games at lowest cost with premium graphics and features.
anyway I have few questions regarding the Unreal engine 4, I hope someone can give me proper answers.

  1. I have a low end system (Q6600 3GHz Processor ,gtx 460 1GB GPU,4GB RAM) and I am wondering, how the editor performs in my system?
    I saw that by reducing the engine settings, the performance can be improved and I am wondering, how much performance does it increase by moving to lowest from epic?

  2. I used to have an old E5300 processor which was overclocked to 3GHz but recently I bought Q6600 processor at cheap price and overclocked it at 3GHz,
    when I had E5300 the compiling shaders of some chair scene which comes with the editor took ages ,I am wondering how long it takes to compile shaders with my current Q6600 processor.

3.the biggest reason why I decided to pick Unreal Engine 4 over Unity 5 is the ease of use and beautiful graphics.
I heard that Unity 5 has a lot of coding but Unreal 4 has less amount of codes because of blue prints ,though I have done some C# ,I prefer when codes are less
because visual editing is always more fun than codes, the other reason is Unreal has C++ which I am good at.
but I hesitate to move to Unreal Engine 4 because my computer is quite weak (I mentioned its spec in above) ,I dunno I might be able to handle the editor even at lowest settings ,beside can’t forget about CPU/GPU utilization when using the editor. if GPU/CPU utilizes 100% all the time when using the editor for few hours, it might increase the temperature and damage the hardware, I dunno whether unreal engine 4 has a mechanism to reduce the GPU/CPU utilization when the user doesn’t do anything or doesn’t move the viewport like in Daz Studio. can Real time rendering be turned off in unreal engine 4 when using the editor for making changes?
how long it takes to compile shaders of a small scene with few people and some objects? should I move to Unity 5 since I have a weak system?

Thanks.

2

I’m using UE4 on my laptop which is a 1.9Ghz and it handles it. I’m not sure how much better your device will run by having the engine running low. The shaders shouldn’t take long for you. Sometimes it can 5min to 45 for my laptop to load the shaders. Yes you can turn off real time during editor mode. And I think it varies on what you have in your scene to hire long it’ll load. I made a scene of an asylum and it built and loaded everything less than 30min. But one I’m currently working on takes about an hour. Not sure why since the asylum had way more objects. But everything could vary as well depending on the lighting you have as well. And any effects that you have

3

thanks :slight_smile:
could you tell me your laptop’s specification? like CPU model, RAM, GPU ,hard disk speed etc…?

4

It’s running on an AMD 1.9Ghz processor, 8gb RAM. I haven’t checked how the GPU is when the launcher is running. That’s all I know about it. I bought it refurbished so all the specs weren’t placed. But I mean i have had it for about 4yrs now and it still does the job. And runs windows 10. But you can also see what epic recommends that you use in your PC build.