So I subscribed to Unreal and downloaded it, and loved it.
Literally loved everything about it, and I prefer it to Unity in every way. Unfortunately, the only thing that is stopping me is the heavy hardware requirements. Everything runs perfectly on my specced out PC, but UE4 seems to have a vengeance against integrated graphics cards. It wont run at all on my 2013 MBP (Intel HD 3000), or my Windows Laptop (Intel HD 4000). Both of these are capable of running some pretty graphically demanding games (you’d be surprised how good these Intel HD GPU’s are). On my Windows laptop, I can launch UE4, but even the Tappy Chicken demo is unplayable, and a blank project is just as bad. On my MBP, UE4 wont even load up! (Just for clarity’s sake, the CPU and memory usage are not the problem, they both meet the requirements).
Unfortunately, I just can’t justify locking myself in a room for hours and so my laptops are my go to systems for the most part. They both run Unity perfectly, and this, and only this, is why I’m sticking to Unity for the time being.
I know I’m probably not the target market for Epic for the most part, but are there any plans to improve performance on lower end systems?
I was having a similar problem even with a really nice video card. It was actually fine at lower resolutions but at 2560x1600 my frame rate was awful. I ended up buying a Geforce 770 and my performance greatly improved.
I wanted to try Unreal though because it’s cheaper than Unity Pro. Unity Pro would be cheaper than Unreal + New Laptop
I just wanted to know if the hardware requirement is something that may change in the future. I don’t want to buy new hardware, because quite frankly I can’t afford it at this moment in time.
One thing I did notice, is when you open up a menu (e.g show) from the preview window, my FPS sky rockets because the preview window gets paused. Makes me wonder if we can’t just have a “pause” option for the preview pane, at least then I could work on blueprints etc, and save the pretty stuff for when I’m back on my desktop.
I posted about this and found this actually increases CPU usage in OSX, so I don’t think this a universal solution (although it should be in theory).
Can you tell me what your idle CPU usage is? On my 2013 Macbook Air (in OSX) UE4 Editor will drain my battery in just over 1 hour (and I can get up to ~8 hours of dev time in Unity).
Thats strange, it runs fine on my Air (Haswell GPU makes up the difference I guess), it just consumes the battery way too fast and causes the CPU/GPU to produce a ton of heat.
It depends on what i’m trying to do. Running high end content and many windows the battery lasts a few hours. Running “tappy chicken” i think i got 4 hours once.
I tried this as well, even restarted the editor to make sure the changes took affect; the CPU usage didn’t go down, only the visual quality. I found in another post the “t.MaxFps” setting and using this in the editor console I can get the usage way down, but only by making the FPS limit unreasonable (i.e. <10 fps) otherwise the CPU usage is just too high. I’m guessing (and hoping) its just a lack of optimization on the OSX side of things; from the sounds of it you are getting good performance and battery life with a system that specs a fraction of the battery life of the Macbook Air (not dissing it, the Razor laptop is awesome!), but you are obviously running Windows
(Just for clarity’s sake, the CPU and memory usage are not the problem, they both meet the requirements).