OpenGL/DirectX in UE4

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hey all!

I’m fairly new to UE4 and have spent the last month and a half going through UE4 tutorials and making some small projects on my own.
I have some coding experience (just finished my MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering), but nothing related to computer graphics.
Based on my somewhat brief experience with UE4, I’m concluding that the editor already provides a big layer of abstraction when it comes to all the rendering and overall graphical tasks. I am curious, however, in how important it is to have a good and deep understanding of OpenGL and/or DirectX, as a UE4 professional. Is it often in “real-life” studio projects to need to go into a more detailed, low-level programming in either OpenGL or DirectX? I’m asking this because I don’t want to simply skip all the low-level details if the engine’s layer of abstraction ends up not being enough in a significant amount of cases.

Thanks in advance!

2

Very few people would need to do that type of coding. For a AAA developer with a very complex game you would probably need it so that you could fix performance issues on your own, or if there’s a particular feature you want to use or change.

3

Thank you for your fast reply!
So I’m assuming that, as a beginner, I can still accomplish pretty great results without delving too much into the OpenGL/DirectX specifics.
I’ll probably still do some studying on the topic nonetheless, just to be aware of how optimizations and features can be done (specially when it comes to performance, which is usually an important aspect and it pays to be informed :)).

Thanks again!