I’m planning to buy a pc, to use (among other things) UE4. I’ve never used to editor before so I have no idea of what kind of performance I need to do what I want, so I were hoping for some help from the almighty internet.
I have no intention of making a full game, just design scenes/landscapes and make them look pretty, somewhere along these two links from the youtuber Maverick’s channel:
The laptop I’m thinking of buying is the . It’s got a , and 16GB ram max, however it’s only got a with 2GB of vram. Is this enough performance for what I want to do, or would I need something like a 1060 or 1070?
both will work perfectly fine just for developing in unreal, you really only need 8 gb of ram (though make sure you pay attention to what type of ram your getting! my dell has 16gb but its about the same performance of having 8). My desktop has a 740 and unreal runs perfectly fine. However, if your developing for the Oculus rift, Youll probably want to have at least a 970 as that is what they recommend, though i dont know how neccessary that really is. I have an alienware laptop i also actively use that has a 970 and 8 gb of ram, and a slightly slower processor, the only real difference ive noticed is that it gets ■■■■■■■ hot and Unreal drains the battery. if you dont NEED a laptop and you are ever trying to decide, Always choose the desktop, you will get way more for your money and it will last longer, not to mention you can switch out the components much much easier as time goes on, and wont have to replace your battery. If you do go with an Asus laptop, i used to have one, and i can say it was really old but a total powerhouse, and never lagged on unreal once. though i must warn you, I ran into all sorts of Bios problems with it multiple times, and it HAD to have at least 30% battery or it refused to even turn on. idk if thats the case with all of their laptops but its definitely something to keep in mind. I sold it and got alienware because Dell has the best tech support ive ever seen, so when you run into problems, theyll fix it. OK im done ranting, but get a desktop your life will be so much easier
what i always say is: your specs should be slightly better than the one you would need to run the game you’re gaming to make, if you want to make a lowpoly casual game you could do it in almost any computer, if you want to make a very realistic looking or a VR game you should have better specs, i have a FX 6300 8GB Ram and a R9 270 2GB, and it runs ok for most of the time, but it takes more than 1 hour to build lighting in one of my maps, as your project gets bigger and you add assets, materials, particles and folliage to it, it starts to demand much more than a blank project.
CPU: this i7 should be more than enough, as i said my fx 6300 can take it, so the i7 would be totally fine, also having a better CPU makes building lighting and packaging your game faster.
RAM: as ViceVersa said 8GB are enough (usually), but having 16GB is something good, i when i begin my project unreal was using something around 1GB of RAM, now it uses something around 3GB (it’s probably going to increase), i remember i tried to open “the infiltrator” demo project once, and it took 7,5GB of ram (the rest was being used by the system), and when it finally opened the project there was a warning on the screen that unreal was using something around 2GB from “the windows swap” because it ran out of RAM, so i recommend you to stay at 16GB, 8GB may not be enough sometimes.
about the GPU, well, it should be ok, but as i said you would not be able to run ultra realistic maps or VR, if you just want to make simple games it would be ok.
about chosing between a desktop or a laptop
well, if you want pure performance you should look for a desktop, the i7 from a desktop is better than the one for a laptop, the 960 is also better than the 960m (because laptops don’t have enough space to dissipate heat, and don’t have a perfect power supply, so they have to reduce performance).
desktops are usually cheaper, the best “pro” for a laptop is that it’s easier to take it to wherever you want, is up to you to see how much you can speend, the performance that you want and how much you need to carry your computer around.