What should I upgrade? I eventually plan on 16gb of Ram, in the 2k zone. GTX 960, 970 depending on checks. I have a 950w 80g+ I bought because I wanted to be prepared for Crossfire/SLI in the Future. Maybe a Scaled upgrade?
AMD Phenom II X6 Thuban 1055T 2.8ghz 6-Core (~70°f Idle. 90°f Full Load)
8gb Patriot Viper Xtreme 1866mhz
HIS Radeon 6790 IceQX 1gb (~90°f Idle. ~115°f Full Load)
1920x1080 res
WD Caviar Black and Green.
Man, get a better cpu cooler, there are some at 20 dollars or so that are quite nice. That thing its going to catch on fire.
Well the editor doesn’t take advantage of SLI or crossfire, so don’t plan on that upgrade path.
Those temperatures are in Fahrenheit.
I would not spend any more on it, but save my money towards a new rig. The exception could be getting a new graphics card now and use it in your future computer. In any case, get a GTX 970.
In the meantime your current setup should work ok.
I agree, unfortunately you have to upgrade almost all of your parts. Haswell or Skylake 4-core with SSD and 16GB of RAM. GTX 970 4GB or 980Ti 6GB.
If your budget is $2,000 you should be able to squeeze a GTX 960 4GB into it and then upgrade that later (SLI is not really useful at this point for UE4).
In fact, Nvidia’s Pascal is out next year so by end of 2016 there should be some amazing GTX 1000 series cards (if they are named as such). It may not be worth getting a 970 or 980Ti right now unless you know you’re going to max it out.
Well it would probably better to wait for nVidias Pascal GPUs and AMDs Polaris GPUs. The R9 390 is not a bad GPU also, it has the nearly the same Benchmark results etc like the 970. And it has 8GB more than twice than the usable Memory of a 970 (only 3.5 GB are so connected, that it’s worthwhile to load from these instead of RAM.)
Thanks a lot guys. I’ll probably be moving soon so a new build will be at least a year away. This gives me an idea what I need to keep an eye open for in the mean time. I may be able to barter my way into some parts but certainly not retail although I would prefer it.
So, I’m assuming that an assload of Vram will be extra extra handy in say… The Witcher 3 size map? I don’t plan for the game to be insanely pretty like Crysis or something, but I do want it to look nice. Think a bit more than The Forest, but not crazy more.
I am seriously debating 21:9 screens and as a gamer I want to use them ALL. Upon earlier research I found the Sapphire R9 290x 8gb. Linus Tech Tips ran 10,320x1440 (Infrickinsane) on several games including The Witcher 3 with three of these bad boys. How would the Sapphire do in UE4? So if my assumptions are wrong (I am an absolute noob at UE4 but I want to learn). What does each piece of hardware do for UE4?
Well for UE4 and games, from what I know, because of huge resolutions (2K, 4K) and very high-resolution textures (4K, 8K, etc.) and very large map/level sizes, having as much of that in GDDR5 or better yet HBM memory means you can handle lots more visual information, faster, and with less “loading”/transitions between areas of the map/level.
I would say an Nvidia Pascal with 8GB HBM VRAM would be very nice and useful especially for developing and playing games at 4K, 8K, etc.
Of course you need a 1080 Ti or Titan Y or whatever they call it on the GPU performance side of things.
Suffice to say with 2GB of VRAM you’ll struggle with larger scenes in UE4, with 4GB you’ll be alright for now, with 8GB you’ll be sitting pretty for the next few(!) years.
Check out the requirements of the Unreal “Kite” project and you’ll get a feel of how/ what/ why it needs certain specifications to run.
I would not aim for a project that size for start…
Then you are ok with a ram update only.
Sometime ahead, when you know the tricks, you could update then.
I can not often enough say it, i work on an i-2500k (factory) 560-ti and now 16GB ram and i am very happy with that.
Have a look at ramrush(freeware) and watch your ram, but never use the autoclean function, when inside UE4.
Shut down UE4 and launcher, restart, free ram.
Every time i start play, around 200MB ram are away. You can easy calculate when i have to restart, to clean ram, but even that is no problem for me.
It reminds me often enough to save, when i forgot it about a hour.
Weird is, when Skype is running, my ram is filling quicker, feels like influencing my UE4 used ram in some way.
When skype is not running, i double up the time i could work, before restart.
I am not talking, about ram taken by skype.
If i would be you, then i would start making scenes, like in the wip section.
Cave or something small, then next scene, then connect, repeat …