The first year I was doing UE dev, I was working on a Mac Book Pro. To put it as civil as possible, the development experience was less than ideal.
I built a desktop computer and it changed the experience entirely.
The benefit of working on a was great for presentations and booting up a project while on vacation. I’m looking to purchase a in the future that is capable of doing UE development closer to the desktop experience. I understand it cannot be the desktop experience, but I’m wondering if anyone out there is primarily working on a or has a good on the go machine?
Just to ask, anyone out there have an nvidia 9xxm series and can provide some feedback on how it handles UE?
I dunno a lot of benchmarks say the 980m has better performance then the desktop 770 so if you got a high end gaming laptop it could give you the desktop experience, anything from 780m+/870m+/960m+ should have perfectly usable performance. I use a laptop(that’s slowly dying:() but its good enough for small 3D or 2D projects.
I don’t yet but I ordered an with a 980m on the 26th which should arrive soon(fingers crossed;)) so I could let you know the performance once I’ve tested it, also someone said they’ve tried an asus rog with 980m and they had good performance in UE4.
I use a Lenovo Y560 as my travelling development environment … I upgraded it to 8GB RAM and it behaves itself. I don’t do any packaging or multiplayer testing on it (i.e. more than 1 client in the editor) … but it is usable enough.
It is a Intel Core i7 720QM / 1.6 GHz CPU and a PCI Express x16 - ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730 - 1 GB GPU … and it is responsive. As I said, it works as well as my desktop … except for not being able to run multiple instances of the game … and I don’t do the packaging on it … cos it just takes forever. 8-}
out of curiosity what kind of FPS are you getting in editor with that?
I wish I was rich but I’m not, been saving up for a new for a while, I looked at the razor blade but just like a MacBook its really overpriced and underpowered when compared to others.
–EDIT–
found the thread with the guy that has an asus rog with 980M, here’s the thread
well it took me a while to find that link but I knew I saw it somewhere:), I was thinking about the asus rog as well but apparently quite a lot of people have had to send the back for repairs, I agree it will be interesting to see how well it’ll performs with the kite demo.
Ranges … but is typically 45+ FPS … my desktop gives me 120+ … obviously a lot of particles will reduce the FPS … hence I really only use it in an emergency and mainly it is used for either running a dedicated server for the game or a test of the game client on medium level hardware.
I have a low end that I use as well for testing the game client on low level hardware.
My gtx980m has been doing just fine with everything I’m working on…although I personally want a proper workstation when I begin to get real serious with ue4
Both are great laptops. Each runs the GTX970m for the GPU and comes w/ SSD storage and i7’s w/ 16gb of ram. In fact today my partner was running Witcher III on the razer at ultra settings and 3k resolution at a pretty consistent 30 frames.
As far as how the engine/editor performance is concerned, you needn’t worry. I just ran the Elemental Demo on the MSI while on battery and am getting around 30 frames in the editor. When plugged in however, that shoots up to 60.
Here is a bench I did on the MSI shortly after getting it:
The hardware is nearly the same between the two laptops, but there are some differences. For example the battery life on the Razer is better, but the screen is larger and is an IPS panel on the MSI.
that’s a pretty decent/usable FPS, I think I was getting slightly higher FPS when my current/old was working properly:p.
ok so I got my new today and while I haven’t really had time to set it up let alone do a proper test on the performance I did have a quick play and the results so far are pretty good, I made a new BP-FPS project and both in editor and playing in a new window I was getting 60 FPS but then I remembered on the stream the other day Zak said about the FPS being capped by a frame rate smoothing option, anyway when I turned the option off both in editor and playing in a new window whilst shooting as fast as I could + running around I was getting 230FPS, as I said it was just a quick test so I might be able to get more by tweaking some settings but I cant really say how good it is yet until I test with a proper scene as the FPS will drop quite a bit from that with a full scene:).
I’ve had a Clevo P170HM for over 4 years now, which consists of an CPU Intel Core i7-2720QM 2.20GHz, 8gb memory and a NVidia 4GB 485m, and use that for all my main development at home and whilst travelling. I have a 1650p second monitor which I use for testing the game on, which is alittle easier on the card that a full 1080p.
In my first person game project I can run around with hundreds of static meshes visible and around 50-60 AI characters active, using AI and firing particles whilst running at 108op@25-60fps and using a mixture of medium-high on the GFX settings.
I suspect the framerate will drop as I start adding in more mesh variety and material complexity, but at the moment the biggest issue is light building and packing times. I’m not sure how much of an advantage I’d gain by getting a newer CPU though. I’m planning on a getting a 980ti/Fury and SKylake combo desktop in the autumn and using that for main development, but keeping the around for when I need to work on the go.
I’d be curious to know how much more performance gains could be made throughout the editor though.
I literally melted my MBP with the same specs as yours doing UE dev. This was partially due to Apple using substandard solder, but maybe their future models won’t suffer with this type of issue. When doing UE dev with the editor running, I found the was thermal throttling at basically the max operating temperature of the processor.
Basically I’m looking for something that is proven it can handle the heat
Also, I don’t think Apple is going to move away from something like the 650m because of its lower operating TDP and I’m a real big fan of the 9xx series.
small update: now that 4.8 has been released I just downloaded the kite demo stuff, I opened the “overview” map(which took less then a min(my old took like 4 hours to do that;))) first but my was only using the integrated graphics so I was only getting 15-20 FPS, after that I switched to the dedicated graphics(the only thing I don’t like about that is it requires a reboot every time) and opened the “showcase” map, I moved the camera so the screen was full with the assets(so no background visible on screen) and I was getting 60FPS(that was fullscreen with editor not minimized in the background), I didn’t test with the smooth frame rate option off but the 980m seems to handle things pretty well.
This is funny, since my laptop’s GPU cooked as well, so I cooked it. Yep, 15 min in the oven to fix the soldering issue, and the is working again. (The motherboard only, with all plastic removed, and clean the stove afterward.)
Fixing heating issues with more heat is so ironic.
