Increase engine performance on a low-end system?

Had to recently sell my desktop and I’m stuck on my old laptop that I used to use for Unity development. Having moved away from Unity long ago, I came to UE4 when it was still a subscription based service and since then, haven’t had any issues. However, my laptop is sputtering at ~20-30 FPS with everything dropped to the lowest settings. I don’t plan on doing any serious game development as of right now, but I would love to at least toy around every here and there with rendering scenes. I can handle Zbrush, Maya/3DS Max/Photoshop/Substance tools perfectly fine but I just cannot seem to get a decent enough framerate in UE4.

Current laptop specs are as follows:

Intel i5-3210m
Intel HD 4000
4GB RAM

Weak, yes. But like I said I’m not trying for any actual game development right now until I get my new PC. Tips and tricks please? (:

UE4 will require more from your graphics card than the other programs you listed, so that’s probably why you’re seeing the disparity in how your system handles it.

These are the recommended minimum specs for using UE4:

  • Desktop PC or Mac
    
  • Windows 7 64-bit or Mac OS X 10.9.2 or later
    
  • Quad-core Intel or AMD processor, 2.5 GHz or faster
    
  • NVIDIA GeForce 470 GTX or AMD Radeon 6870 HD series card or higher
    
  • 8 GB RAM
    

That’s what I figured. I’ll figure something else out then. Thanks!

are you getting these low FPS with an empty scene?

Happy to help, though sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Best of luck! =)

Well, if you switch to mobile renderer preview in UE4 you get 2 to 3 times higher framerate than the framerate you normally get with all scalability settings set on low. Also, check out “Disc Jam” solution, for packaging games for PCs with integrated graphics.

I get 20-30 with an empty scene, yes. It’s my laptop haha. Intel HD 4000 is much weaker than the newer integrated chips.

That’s okay! I pretty much knew the answer. I just figured I’d ask some people to see if they knew anything.

Wow, this is incredible. I’ll give it a look-see more in-depth in a little bit and let you know how it went. Thanks!

I’m glad that you found it useful. I’m curious how it went for you.

I’ll let you know my results once I’m done actually messing around with it.

i dont know why i have 8gb ram intel 9th gen cpu and it still having lags i dont know why?