It’d be interesting to hear if anyone with some UE4 experience has thoughts on the min-spec machine (CPU/GFX/memory mainly) it may be possible to aim for with a PC FPS game. Potential min-spec for a game with simple graphics / gameplay (UT2003?) to an FPS with graphics and gameplay features comparable to those shooters from the past year(s).
Aiming for high-end all-bells-and-whistles is tempting with all the graphical features in UE4, but it can severely limit the potential audience. Something very important to consider for many smaller devs.
I understand UE4 is still in heavy development and will be for a long time - no games have yet shipped with it. There are probably a lot of optimizations still to go in as AAA developers optimize in the months before shipping and we (hopefully) get some of these optimizations in the github repo (perhaps some optimizations from fortnight is planned to be merged in as well?).
I think this way: The engine per se is already a bit heavy; then build a kickass game with it or go home. I don’t really care about mobile so this is my point of view…
For mobile I would aim only on the best hardware like the Nexus 5 and such. If you want to bring your games to the largest audience possible you end up making another generic **** like everybody else, if you are ok with that; ok then.
If you make a GOOD game and it requires people to upgrade hardware to play it, they will do it. However there are great games that require low hardware specs to run. Those are exceptions btw.
I can’t comment on the CPU/memory part but IMO I think GTX 680 would be “good” minimum, only because I have it and Epic demo UE4 with the GTX 680 early on. I’ve tested some of the sample maps, on the more demanding ones I get 30 fps with max at 60 fps this is running at 2560 X 1600 resolution.
Currently with my setup of Geforce GTX 460 1gb, 2.8ghz quadcore with 8gb ram I’m getting 25-30 fps with all graphical settings set to epic. I would imagine a GTX680 would therefore be a good choice for a minimum if I’m still able to somewhat survive on my ancient card at the moment. Another thing to note is you can always allow the player to scale the quality of the graphics. Think of Battlefield 4 for example, it is a beautiful game when everything is maxed out, but not everyone is able to do so. With different graphical settings, you can build the ideal world you want, and have an option to tone it down a bit for those who have fallen behind in the hardware race.