I’ve had the pleasure to finally dive into the unreal engine for the last month or so and I enjoy it quite a bit. part of which is less enjoyable is of course rendering time.
I would appreciate some insight/advice from the more experienced users on whether I should upgrade my system or need to tweak and optimize my setting more ?
Atm … a 5 second clip takes around 30min to render (sequencer not legacy) and this would be in fairly high enough quality for the purpose of social media sharing it.
I am using it mostly for animation and the gaming elements are something I’m picking up along the way.
my current system: I7-7700k 32gb ram 1070 gtx
for the purpose of mostly doing short animation but in high quality whether it be lightenig, shaders, pathracing etc… is my current system good for a pleasent workflow or should I be looking for at least a gpu upgrade and hold off on the rest?
and in terms of the GPU. would it be better to go for a 12gb 3060 for example or better off with the 3070 but 8gb ? I would love to get a 4090 but that price range just feels a bit uncomfortable and to a degree overkill for what I want to do?
p.s. I also got another 1070. is SLI rendering still a thing worth setting it up or a seperate mini pc with the spare 1070 to split the rendering speed by half like that?
I would have to say the biggest contributor for rendering is indeed going to be processing speed, but extra RAM does contribute. You do have to have a certain amount, or that will bottleneck you, but the 8GB 3070 has more than enough, almost certainly.
I’d suggest the 3070 8GB over the 3060 12GB. Close everything else using 3D rendering to free up space (that’s what the extra ram would be useful for) and make sure anything like OBS isn’t even open, and let her rip, you’ll see a world of difference from that 1070, even SLI (which, I’m not sure is supported anymore)
so my bottleneck will evnetually be the cpu because I can upgrade the ram and gpu but I am already kind of maxed out on teh CPU ( I believe there is maybe another one in the same gen that is supported but not worth the purchase )
now it might get a bit more more divided opionions about it but… 3070 or the 4070 TI at the double the price ? or it would be useless in my case because of the cpu bottleneck ?
on a more generic note… does Unreal eat SSD for breakfast, lunch, diner, snacks during the day when working ? had 2tb and only 450 gb left haha
Actually that i7-7700 will do you just fine for a good while. It may bottleneck you but it’ll be years down the road, right now it’s going to be your graphics card when it comes to rendering. Also make sure it’s using a SSD, of course.
Regarding the SSD usage… no, it should not be using that much. You may want to check out additional content you may have downloaded. 4k textures can be ~10gb sometimes.
Ah that is quite good news because I was already crying the fact I might have to move all my stuff to a new system if the cpu was the bottleneck already
I got atm 1tb ssd nvme as OS and another 1TB ssd. but yes I have been downloading as a madman lots of free and paid content to get my hands dirty working with different sites and different fileformat conversion and importing to unreal to understand more how I want to shape my workflow around what I want to do.