It won’t be bad but since it is a laptop with 8 threads it has its limits. Compiling the entire engine and all the programs probably would take between 1h 30m and 2h. Compiling just a small project would probable just take a dozen minutes for the first time around when it generates the pre-compiled headers. Small changes to your project should take seconds.
What does compiling the entire engine actually mean?
Hi all! I have bought a new laptop (omen X, i7-7700HQ base clock 2.8GHZ turbo to 3.8GHZ, GTX 1070 8GB DDR5 dedicated, 16 GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB HDD + 256 NVME M.2 SSD, 17.3 inch FHD 120HZ with nvidea G-sync 1080p display). I wanted to know whether my CPU (i7-7700HQ) will give me good compile times in unreal C++. (I am a beginner and following Ben Tristem’s Udemy course of unreal C++)
If you download the engine through the Epic Games Launcher then when you compile you will only be compiling your project module and project plugins.
If you want to make modifications to the engine then you need to download the source code from GitHub and compile everything yourself.