My PC is quite old now and it needs an upgrade. Unreal is running surprisingly fine, at around constant 60 fps.The problem appears the moment I add “too many” things on map/scene.Unreal starts to lag and even completely freeze for several minutes.
Here are my PC specs: CPU - AMD Athlon X4 750K (Quad core,3.4 GHz) GPU - AMD Radeon R7 200 Series (1 GB VRAM) Ram - 8 GB DDR3
**HDD **- 1GB
Because I can’t change all my parts at once (at least for now), what are the most important parts that need to be changed in order to boost up my fps?
And if you can suggest a substitution for each part.
I was thinking about upgrading GPU too,that is probbably weakest part.I saw Unreal’s reccomended PC specs and they really go huge on RAM.Waves,will more RAM (8 GB more,16 in total) really make some difference with this spec ?If it will I’ll buy it immediately.
If you don’t have an SSD that will help a lot more than anything else. RAM can help to some degree but it helps more with the amount of content you’re working with, a larger game map needs more memory. I’d say if you don’t have an SSD then get one, and after that the GPU will give you a more immediate performance increase.
Hmm, thanks for your suggestion.I think I know now my 'TO-BUY; list .I’ll get SSD asap but how large should it be? I read somewhere that, in order to see the results, it needs to contain all the assets that you use in your project and not only Unreal installation.Is it true, and if so is around 500 GB good size for a semi-large project?
I get by with a 256GB SSD with UE4, bunch of applications, a few games, several large UE4 projects, and a bunch of asset files. I’d definitely suggest going for 500GB, but 256GB is usable.
I recently upgraded my system after many years sticking with my old laptop. My compile times went from 10+ minutes to <3 mins simply because of a memory upgrade from 8GB to 32GB. Then I switched to the new include system and now I am down to a few seconds per compile. I can actually do stuff now rather than wasting 10mins everytime I made a few changes. A fresh engine source compile on my old system took ~2hrs, on the new one around 40mins. Again mostly due to the RAM difference followed by cpu
These increases are due to the fact that my new system does not rely on virtual memory anymore. The disk is not constantly being thrashed. Everything is faster!
What component you need to prioritize depends on your use case. For me it is definitely the RAM that has helped the most. For <i>my case only</i> I would prioritize ram > cpu > gpu > ssd in that order.
You need a whole new System. But if you are on a budget I’d suggest you get 16/24GB ram and a new gpu you don’t need an overpriced behemoth for a gpu just something recent. Remember you want to develop games not indulge in FPS benchmarking.
Don’t get the ram upgrade if you intend to replace you whole system in the near future. Any ram you get is unlikely to be reuseable in a brand new computer, it would go to waste.
Just read your post again if the goal is simply more FPS then yeah a new gpu is what you need ram won’t help with that. I was talking more from a general development perspective.
I really thought it would need more than only 256 gigs to work fine, I’ll consider both SSD sizes and see which one will fit best so I can also invest money in other parts.
More RAM sounds actually quite useful, I also hate to wait a couple of mins every time I need to compile something small. For now, as **darthviper107 **suggested, I’ll get SSD that will sure be usable when I change my configuration and later on I’ll get other things too. Slowly but surely
As I wrote up in previuos reply , 256 / 500 GB SSDs are not that expensive and I’ll get them first, after that probabbly GPU and RAM cause I’m looking for decent ones at around 500$ in total
RAM helps with the overall volume of content you’re working with, so it won’t improve things if it’s not getting filled up, 8GB is close but it’s something you can get by with for now.
I have a potato CPU too atm. The motherboard is most important as you want the option to upgrade your CPU down the road. There’s no point getting a faster graphics card if the CPU bottlenecks it.
Sample projects like The Boy and his Kite, needs at least 24GB RAM, or there is no deal. You should target at least 32GB RAM (for AMD 3200MHz DDR4 modules to utilize full capabilities, but you can save quite some money using slower versions).
GPU would benefit greatly having the best your money can buy, nothing with less than 8GB RAM, thou they are expensive as hell nowadays.
For the CPU, AMD’s Ryzen got very cheap motherboards and very cheap processors with lots of cores/threads (need as many SATA or M.2 sockets you would use - pay attention), which will speed a lot your lighting build times, shader compiling times, and if you going to rebuild engine from source code someday that will be greatly reduced as others stated. You should target a CPU with at least 6 cores/12 threads (AMD or Intel, they run at 4GHz+).
For SSD you do need at least one to hold OS (480GB will do pretty well with spare to grow, you can use lower sizes, but you need at least 10% free area to extend as much as you can the lifetime for your SSD). I use RAID 10 hard disk setup (4 x 2TB) which gives 1 hard disk failure tolerance, 4x read speed and 2x write speed with 4TB space == price of 1 SSD 960GB M.2 SATA where I live.
Well, now you just made me realize again how many things I need to change in order to experience engine at its full capacity.I’m wondering is it even possible to make (when speaking about graphical part) semi-decent, pleasant to the eye game with current specs. And if I understood you correctly, you don’t use SSD at all, you’re replacing it with more hard disks to have a ton more memory and to (try to) achieve the speed of SSD?
The idea is to get more speed with Raid 10 while having much more store space, priced to match SSD with a little more speed.
In my country I can find these prices (expensive ones since we have a ton of taxes)
a) SSD with 2TB at 6 Gb/sec (~= 700 MB/s) costs about US$1,000 - this one is M.2 SATA
b) SSD with 480GB at 2800/1500 MB/s costs about US$ 327 - this one is NVMe PCI Express SSD 3.0 x4
c) SSD with 960GB at 2800/1500 MB/s costs about US$ 630 - this one is NVMe PCI Express SSD 3.0 x4
while the raid 10 with 4 hard disks SATA 6.0 Gb/s = 4 * US$ 144 = US$ 576
with 4xreads = 7004=2800
with 2xwrites = 7002=1400
so pretty much I have same performance as in “b” or “c”, with twice the storage at “a”, got fault tolerance for 1 hard drive failure (with SSDs you don’t), for the price of “c” mostly.
I would suggest doing in steps: 1st GPU if your motherboard is capable of PCIe 3.0, otherwise you will really need to start with mobo, CPU and RAM. Leave storage by last, but keep in mind the amount of SATA ports you will need. Usually using NVMe disables one SATA port.
The highest CPU you can upgrade with that motherboard is the AMD 10 7890K which takes position 144 on this month’s Futuremark bench (March 2018)
You’ll get hardly any performance boost with the AMD 10 7890K as that socket is redundant for UE4.
If I were you, I’d make a budget for a second hand PC off eBay and sell your old system on eBay to get some money back if cash is a little tight at the moment.
If you look at the Futuremark scores, you can compare your old CPU to a CPU in a PC on eBay within your budget and see how much faster it will be. Your old system might fetch £60 or more for someone not into gaming.
