Hello fellow VFX creators. I am in a bit of a pinch here as I need to upgrade my personal computer. It’s a relic that is about 15 years old. I’ve always used a computer provided by the company I worked for at the moment and I’m not a very big gamer in my free time to have the need to upgrade my computer.
However, now companies are opening up again, I’d like to come back to my office 2-3 days/week. Problem is that right now there’s a shortage of equipment and I can’t be provided in the following year with another PC/Laptop to take to work. So my only solution is buying a new PC for myself (the plan was in the works, but starting next year).
So basically, what I’d like to know from other people what processors and video card you have that runs Unreal Engine 5 smoothly (most of my work is in Unity at the moment, but slowly I’m transitioning towards Unreal). Thank you very much and I’m sorry if the subject is off-topic. Most of the resources I’ve found out are either old or focus on gaming performance.
An i7 or higher end i5 intel processor, or equivalent. My personal PC seems to run ok with my GTX 980Ti, and the one I use for work I think is a 1060? So anything newer than that will probably be solid, although for UE5 you’d probably get more longevity from a RTX capable card.
Biggest hardware suggestion I’d recommend is ram. I have 32gb in my personal work station, but my at-home work station has 16gb. I’ve ran into memory issues several times already, including UE4 crashing because it ran out of memory competing w/ Chrome or Photoshop. So I’d recommend 32gb at minimum for UE5, especially if you’re working on a full production project for work.
First off: maybe you can also talk to your company about remote access on your office machine like over VPN or Parsec (or similar). Plenty of studios (even super small Indies) have that setup already. I also am working remote like that and it works absolutely fine.
Even if you buy a new rig you should do that, because actually having data of your company on your private machine is a bit iffy and can backfire depending on your company.
So for new Rig:
For priorities on development machine I would say:
RAM
CPU
GPU
Hard drive
At least a modern Ryzen 7 or i7 as CPU. I suggest even higher, if projects get bigger you will be thanking yourself. For GPU even a GTX10-Series would suffice. But if you go UE5 you may need Raytracing compatibility. For that a RTX2080 or RTX30-Series is needed. (I have a 2060 and that struggles with Raytracing)
As Travis suggested, have as much RAM as possible, I have 32GB at work I upgraded to 64GB. Furthermore, invest in multiple hard drives. One SSD for OS, one SSD for main programs and a HDD for data like music or documents… and of course: don’t skimp on cooling/airflow and make sure the power source delivers the watt needed to actually run the components.
That’s awesome. Thanks a lot for the suggestions. Do you have any delays or problems regarding remote work through a VPN? Some programmers told me that they sometimes have a few milliseconds or in worst case scenarios seconds delay. Thinking about it, it doesn’t bother me all that much given that if I add sub-emitters in Unity I have a 2 seconds delay .
Do you mean like working on a mirrored/puppet machine that you’re connected remotely to through a VPN? I think in that case it would probably just be internet speed and the studio’s hardware that would be the determining factor in speed? But I don’t have any experience working with that kind of setup
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