Hello. I’ve previously only used Bevy and Unity but decided to give Unreal a shot since I’m running into scaling issues with Unity and I’ve read that Unreal might be a better choice for a larger open world game but I’ve run into some issues getting Unreal Editor and Engine to work and was wondering if someone could provide some guidance.
I’ve first tried running UE5 on my linux desktop (an 8 core ryzen 5600G) and it was extremely slow. The editor is slow, the frame rates are poor, it takes 15 minutes to compile, it’s astonishing how much worse this is than Unity. So I tried it on my M1 Mac and found an even worse situation. Framerates in the sample games are in the ~24 range and after 15-20 minutes of compiling shaders it will simply show compilation errors and fail to run. I’ve tried going back to 4.26 and it’s the same story.
So my question is this: Is Unreal a realistic option at this point? I’m simply shocked at how bad the UI, UX, and performance is and am left wondering what I’ve missed or done wrong.
I really suspect that Unreal is the most appropriate technology for what I’m trying to achieve so I’d like to get it to work or at least understand why it’s so bad on my systems.
I suspect the RAM for M1 is 8GB - try at least with 16GB. And also, if you are sharing the performance, please include the vital spec eg RAM, CPU , GPU and Harddisk (SSD/NVME?).
In general, UE4/5 need higher spec machine compared to Unity…
linux has poor nvidia drivers.
Nanite and lumen only work with rtx.
You won’t get good performance on linux, and light baking will be slow.
The mac, you really need a second gpu. Unreal is not optimized for the metal gpu.
My suggestion is to ad another SSD to the desktop and give it a windows dual boot
You will get better performance and less compiling nightmares with windows.
Setting up a mac to compile/bake/package unreal is difficult.
Windows has 20 times the tutorials and resources to follow.
If you are intent on the linux, try the Steam Proton linux, it has better gfx drivers.
Thanks for the responses, everyone. I think I’ll try it on Windows next but this is disappointing.
My Mac has 16GB of ram with metal 3 and is not near maxing out when UE 5.20 (or 4.26) is in use. Though it is wild that the epic game store requires 2+GB (in addition to the editor) to give me a button to launch the editor. Everything feels very wasteful with this software.
My linux machine has 32GB of ram.
Are there lists of hardware combinations or something like a QVL I can consult to figure out what sort of system I need?
I already meet and exceed the requirements that Epic lists so my worry is that they are overselling the compatibility and performance of this software by quite a margin:
macOS Big Sur, quad-core Intel, 2.5 GHz or faster, 8 GB RAM
Linux Ubuntu 18.04, quad-core Intel or AMD, 2.5 GHz or faster, 32 GB RAM
I suppose the issue is the M1 graphics and the integrated graphics of the 5600G but while they aren’t top tier they aren’t slouches either, Unity was able to produce beautiful and complex scenes on both.