I want to start developing for UE4 since I believe it’s a great engine but am worried that it heavily favours development towards GeForce and heavily penalizes Radeon.
I’m a guy who avoids non-proprietary things like the plague hence why I chose Freesync / Vega 64 LC for my development system. Am I wasting my time trying to develop for UE4 using AMD hardware?
Reasons I believe UE4 may be biased against AMD:
UE4 has gameworks built in (otherwise known as GimpWorks for Radeon gamers) but not GPUOpen.
[FONT=Noto Sans]Several stuff in UE is optimized for Nvidia out of the box (lighting, apex, PhysX[FONT=Noto Sans], etc) So if developers don’t take time to rewrite and optimize lots of code for amd cards it simply runs slower.
[FONT=Noto Sans]Reported bugs of AMD systems going ignored?
Vulkan [FONT=Noto Sans]has been on the UE4 roadmap for years but Vulkan for PC is still not fully supported in UE4. I believe this is because Nvidia has told them not to implement “true” DX12 or Vulkan into the engine since Titans or 1080s dont show any performance gain at all; ignoring all benefits from AMDs GCN cards.
[FONT=Noto Sans]It’s no secret Tim Sweeney has favored Nvidia for a long time although this favoritism may have eased a little in recent years since seeming to take a more “anti-proprietary stance” with the whole Microsoft UWP thing. (speculation)
Regular Phyx collision happens on the CPU and not the GPU so there is no difference there between Radeon and Nvidia. It is indeed no secret that Epic and Nvidia has been working closely together for a long time and while it may benefit Nvidia users to have extra features available it doen’t penalize Radeon.
Unreal Engine ships a lot of games on Xbox and PlayStation and non of those use Nvidia GPU’s and it would be rather pointless to try to make the life miserable for Radeon users on purpose unless if you believe in conspiracies.
Whoever told you UE4 has GameWorks builtin lied or was economical with the truth.
GameWorks is a NVIDIA developed fork of the engine that you have to build from source.
Vulkan seams to be progressing well.
I think a lot of the points you raise are plain old FUD.
UE4 may have optimizations that benefit Intel/NVIDIA more them AMD, but I don’t know or heard of them doing anything that hurts AMD performance.
There aren’t any features in UE4 that are optimized for Geforce or that don’t work on AMD hardware, they specifically designed the engine so that it doesn’t favor one over the other. If there’s any performance difference, then it’s an issue with AMD drivers.
Sorry for necroposting but it’s not that Epic doesn’t want to support AMD but AMD simply doesn’t ■■■■ around for the last decade and they’ve started to regain more ground since the release of Ryzen, so it’s not that AMD was biased against (again AMD itself sucked for a pretty big while) but the current choices are too good and sane so there’s simply no motivation to change. It’s like there’s already a fortress built around the ecosystem of Intel & Nvidia and it will take time to destroy the wall.