Looking for advice: Unreal Engine 5 + Niagara performance and GPU crashes

Development World Creation
1

I’m currently learning Niagara VFX in Unreal Engine 5 and experimenting with different effects. I’ve been running into some GPU and performance issues on my laptop, so I’d really appreciate advice from anyone experienced with Unreal Engine, Niagara, or real-time VFX.

The main issues I’m experiencing are:

• When I double-click a Niagara System, Unreal Engine sometimes crashes with “GPU Crashed or D3D Device Removed.”

• I have also received a “Video memory has been exhausted” warning.

• When Niagara does open, the editor can become extremely slow and laggy, which makes it difficult to work with the effects.

• Lowering the viewport quality improves performance, but then the Niagara effects become difficult to see clearly while working.

My current system is:

ASUS TUF Gaming A15

NVIDIA RTX GPU — 4 GB dedicated VRAM

16 GB RAM

Windows 11

Unreal Engine 5 / DX12

I’ve already updated my NVIDIA drivers and tried adjusting Unreal Engine’s rendering settings. I’m currently trying to find a way to get Niagara running smoothly while keeping the viewport clear enough to work comfortably.

I’m also considering a hardware upgrade and would like some advice before making any decisions:

Would an external GPU (eGPU) be practical for this laptop? If so, what type of GPU/eGPU setup would be compatible and reasonably affordable? If an eGPU isn’t practical, what would you recommend upgrading or changing instead?

2

To work you need a minimum of 12GB vram for the engine.

Essentially all epic employees are on the latest top of the line gfx and think that performance doesn’t matter, “so if you can’t afford the upgrade you are just a pleb and don’t deserve to use our engine ™”.

I would suggest you switch to some better engine. Particulalry since learning this locks you in into only this engine which isn’t all that.

Otherwise you need to upgrade just to learn.

A used 3090 would do though. Maybe you can find one…

Oh nvm didnt read the last part. on a laptop? Forget about. It’ll catch fire before being able to render a basic scene.

You need something intel based because of the engine’s swarm/Intel integrations like an i9 or i7. Plus the gfx and at least 64gb ram.