I recently saw the paragraph that I attach below and I was wondering why a typical PC in Epic Games needs that much RAM and a CPU like this.
The paragraph is this:
Performance Notes
The spec below represents a typical system used at Epic (a Lenovo P620 Content Creation Workstation, standard version). This provides a reasonable guideline for developing games with Unreal Engine 5:
This is quite comfortable PC to use as WORKSTATION for unreal.
Why unreal EDITOR needs so much? Because when you develop you are running quite heavy game like application, tyhat is editor). Then you open content browser on another display with 50 HDRI 8k textures (each about 200mb), then you create one master material from some of those textures, then you make two (or more instanced materials each with different HDRI tex), then you run your game in standalone mode to see if everything runs fine.
So you are running 5 times more textures than some AAAA games do now (like DOA veliwhatever). And this all needs RAM, VRAM and cpu, oh and fast SSD.
ps.
what i would change about this setup is separating some of ssds into UNREAL only drive. Like those two 2tb drives: one for unreal, second for unreal cache (marketplace, projects backups etc.)
So, as a normal (maybe future) Unreal Engine user, should I stick with the recommended specs and I will be 100% fine? I mean, I do not work for a big company or something like that, but I want in the future to make the jump to Unreal Engine, from Unity.
By the way, if you know of course, which should you suggest right now? Unreal Engine 5 or Unity 6?
I am not sure if you will be 100% fine, it is all about personal preferences and what you what to do.
However i can write how my most recent PC build went (well 2 most recent ones). I kind of live in two places summer in one (2-3 months) rest of year in another.
So in 2018 i bought main PC for my longer term place. It was some intel i7, with 16gm ram and 2080TI (got pumped on RTX and all that marketing bs about rendering). So that PC is still my main dev PC (working on it now) i just upgraded ram to 32gb (was tempted for 64gb).
This PC i7 + 32gm + 2080TI is still quite comfortable to develop on, however i am coder, i do not make huge streamed levels. PC sometimes complains about lack of VRAM (when i load 10 HDRI textures in content browser and edit 2-3 materials with those).
Other PC that i bought in 2020, has 3070 + some AMD + 64gb of ram. Yes it is much more comfortable to work, but mostly same performance (just does not get to maximum fan speeds and constant whine under load. And more ram makes it more responsive.
So both are 5 - 7 years old, but were on that more enthusiast side of PC when i bought parts.
As long as you mainly are coder. Some enthusiast grade card will do (just do not get fooled by nvidia messing with what is enthusiast what is not ex: 2080TI was at a time the max card. Now 5080TI is a lie it should be around 5070 or so if they kept old naming policy. So do not get fooled by this, check places like Linus tech tips.
If you plan to be artist/level designer, add SSD, and get 64gb ram. Also card with more than 12gb is a must.
If you want to make (comfortably) huge streamed levels, get 128GM and best card you can get (more VRAM). CPU wise, specs that you find ok for coding, should be fine for anything else.
I am currently in an entry level and I still have to learn numerous things. I did not know what you mean by material. Do you mean the colour of a game object? If yes, is it so demanding task?
Moreover, what is the streamed levels and HDRI textures?
I want to get better at coding and I would really like to do level design. Maybe it could be a plus if I started learning the basic stuff about 3D art.
I was thinking about getting a Ryzen 7 maybe and RTX 4070 Super which has 12 GB VRAM. For now, I do not think that it is wise to get a super high-end PC, as I am still in the start of my career. I do not do so demanding tasks currently.
Bruh I’m working with a Laptop
GPU: RTX 3060 6GB
Ram: 32GB DDR4 3200
CPU: I5-10300H 2.5 Ghz
OS: 2TB Samsung 980 Pro M.2
I still use an external 2nd Monitor via HDMI and don’t have many problems with developing in Unreal Engine 5.5, sometimes I have even 2 projects opened at the same time “I use one project as marketplace assets collector and the other for the game I’m developing”. Sure I can’t run massive projects with high FPS but for a solo developer is more than enough. My opinion that if you starting out is better to start with a normal gaming pc because you will be forced to learn optimization only to have smoothly developing experience. If you will learn good optimization practices during development early you will develop good games without the need to rewrite half of your project months or years into development because during alpha testing or demo most of common gaming pc’s wasn’t able to handle your project
Yes, I understand what you are saying. I think that it is wiser to first do the jump in Unreal Engine, while I am above recommended requirements. As the years go by, then I can upgrade my PC. So, for sure, I will start with my current PC and while I do not run massive and heavy projects, then I will be fine in my opinion. I really do not know anything about optimization and I would really love to learn many things about that. I believe this is one of the most crucial things in games.
For optimization if you need an advice learn as early as you can the following topics:
Data Assets (alternative are Data Tables but they are bad for optimization)
Soft References (you can pass anything as soft reference and avoid loading too much staff in ram when you don’t need it)
For Soft References learn to use generic references like Object, Actor etc and use Cast only to generic systems like static mesh, textures etc.
Never use Cast to blueprints you make unless you know what you are doing otherwise you will fill up a 32gb RAM even with a small project. Instead you need to learn to use Interfaces and Event Dispatchers
Learn to bake materials into simple textures to avoid overloading the rendering at runtime
Learn how to decrease the max texture size and when you get marketplace assets decrease them to 1024
Learn a proper way to work with lighting in order to prevent too much overlaping
There are many other topics related to optimization and sooner you will learn them all sooner you can avoid worrying about your and your future clients hardward because if your products are optimized they should work even on low end gaming pc’s
Cross referencing (cast to, hard references, see in reference viewer) makes web of things that reference things.
At some point it makes impossible to remove assets that are unused, because some master material somewhere has it referenced, or some blueprint has it as default value.
Also that cross referencing forces unreal to always keep referenced actor in memory.
So if for eg. you make blueprint that has default manequinn as default static mesh but you use your own mesh with default skeleton. Because that skeleton uses default mesh in preview, that default manequinn mesh will always be referenced, and always loaded, even if its never visible/used in game.
Now let me make another example: bunch of HDRI textures (quite big) to make skyboxes. Master material has one, then instanced material has one, then i had idea to instance that instanced material. Web of connected textures grows. Then i had idea for make separate skybox blueprint, used some on those materials, added stuff for planets particles etc. Then i had GREATEST EVER (sarcasm) idea to make data assets for level skyboxes, so my level can just load skybox without editing it. So i made ARRAY of those skyboxes (as array of data assets references). My pikachu face when i loaded single level and all was out of memory instantly.
Luckily solution to that second example was soft references.
For the mannequin, a little advice if you need. You can remove the mesh from the skeleton this way it will load only the skeletal hierarchy needed for animation. This will reduce the weight of it to a few kb. You still can use another mannequin while working on animations and use it as preview.
If you see the metahuman solution, they do a similar strategy for retargeting by using only the mannequins hierarchy.
That manequinn was example about how sneaky unreal is. Another example: you preview material on some custom mesh, then create instances of that material, and this mesh is reverenced in every material.
I tried to make content plugins (blueprints only) with sk mesh, skeleton and animations, just to force separate those dependencies. Yes it forced to split them nicely, but unreal started crashing (because it could not follow/create them with plugins).
Even 16GO of Ram is far enough. And the CPU with 4 * 2.5 Ghz you also have enough, especially if it’s a little FPS (For strategy it will depend the scale and the optimisation you did). Still an SSD is highly recommended without it might, this time, be much more slow.
The Epic Team have obviously Gargantuan setup but it’s the Epic Team. Everyone would be kidding if they would have less. But a Solo Dev you can not compare.
And don’t forget If You can NOT run it your Customer will not be able to run it too.
