U4, retro and system requirements

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

So I got this game idea that I’d want to prototype and was just wondering. If I make a game that emulates PS1 graphics with very lowpoly models, low resolution textures, super low resolutions and all that, how demanding would the game stay? Does the engine alone require lots of power from the PC even if the game isn’t demanding at all? I’m not very experienced with engines like U4 so I don’t know how where all the ‘demand’ for computer power comes from.

Also, how low resolution can I make my game and does U4 support 4:3 resolutions with letterboxing on widescreen monitors? I know U4 isn’t really designed for this stuff, but it would make for an interesting project to do something like this for fun.

2

You can do whatever aspect ratio you want, that’s not an issue. The engine does have some requirement regardless of what you’re doing with it, though you can possibly get things to run well on most hardware systems these days.

3

I use UE4 editor on a really old system and it works ok on simple scenes, but it laggs on more complex ones, like Cave or Temple demos.

Here are my specs:
CPU: intel core 2 duo 2.66 GHZ (dual core)
GPU: Nvidia Geforce 8600GT with 1GB vram
Ram : 6GB

  Hopefully, UE4 supports DX10, otherwise it wouldn't work. A game requires less resources than the game+editor. In your case, I think you could build a game in UE4 to run on an older machine. You should experiment and see.

In my case, until I get a new PC, I’m using this one for learning and simple games.

Also, here is a video with UT4, running on Intel 3000, a integrated GPU with lower performance than mine:

Unreal Tournament 4 on Intel HD Graphics 3000: http://youtu.be/OQLnObqKoQI

4

Woooo that even older then my and i have 2GB RAM less, Core2Quad Q9xxx, GF9600GT

One note, UE4 only has DX11 renderer (aside of OpenGL3.0/4.0 which can also be used on Windows if you start editor with -opengl or -opengl4), but DX11 support SM4.0 GPUs simply some features won’t work (most notably Tesselation), same with DX12 as long GPU manufacture update driver. GPU don’t have anything to do with DirectX (this is something that was brainwashed to people in DX10/Vista marketing), its DirectX that operates GPU and it’s depends on DirectX on what GPU it supports, or rether what features of GPU it supports

5

A bit more detail about the above video linked by mahri726 - This is a pure BSP map that closely reproduces the version from the original UT (the one from 1999), most of the weapons and pickups are temporary stubs from UT3 (last released UT game from 2007). So if you’ll keep the polygon budget on what was normal 16-17 years ago, it may work.

6

Thank you everyone for your replies. This has been really helpful. Now I tried my game in 640x320 resolution, but it seems that the image gets blurry instead of having crisp pixels. The (intented) lack of aliasing looks very (unintentedly) ugly due to the blur. Is there a setting to change how the image is ‘filtered’ or something like that?

7

Here’s a way to fake it.

But it doesn’t look like there’s a way to easily change the filtering Rendering at 320x180px and point scaling up? - Rendering - Epic Developer Community Forums

8

Thanks, mate! That pixelation shader could work pretty well. I just gotta play around with it. Probably a right amount of pixelisation could sharpen most of those blurs away. My game is supposed to be kinda smudgy and pixely (you know the indie horror type these days) so it doesn’t really have to be 100% accurate.

9

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