Question about system requirements - slightly confused.

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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I’m seriously considering moving across from Unity to Unreal. My current development system won’t cut it, though. There’s no doubt I’ll have to upgrade the graphics card and memory (currently 4Gb DDR2 and NVIDIA 6600GTS). I have a fair idea of what I need in terms of graphics card. I am, however, in need of a bit of guidance with the processor.

I’m currently using an AMD Athlon II 440 tri-core CPU. The specs ask for a quad core. Unfortunately it’s a bit of a nebulous requirement. Given that the current generation of processors has faster dual core processors than my Athlon (even the current Haswell Celerons are faster), I’m not sure how Epic decided upon the quad-core requirement or why. Is there a general idea as to the lowest permissible processor model that would do the job? I tend to use Passmark whenever I make purchasing decisions. A low-ball CPU model would allow me to look up the benchmarks so I have some idea of what I’m looking for.

As you can probably tell, I haven’t much of a budget for an upgrade - my wife would probably flay me alive if she thought I’d spent £150 on a processor.

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You’ll need CPU power for building lights and compiling shaders, etc. But you dont need to go as high as an i7 if you are on a budget. Even an i5 3570 will be enough, which is around £150 right now i believe. Or an AMD FX 8350 which is probably cheaper.

3

The system requirements aren’t a specific minimum, they’re just a more reasonable place to start where going lower than that you’re going to have times where it slows down. There’s a good number of people that are using UE4 that don’t quite meet those requirements and are OK with it not running as fast so if you don’t want to spend that much money you don’t necessarily have to.

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Thanks. That’s useful information.