Unreal Engine New PC Build

samuelthomson · 20 Jan 2024 at 13:51

Hello, I'm a freelance game developer and my current PC build is starting to struggle when using Unreal Engine's new features like Lumen/Nanite. The editor is unusably slow, and I want to upgrade or build a new PC, but I haven't looked at hardware in 5 years and I'm struggling to work out how much I should spend. Money absolutely IS an issue, but I feel like I'll need to spend £2000-3000 for new Motherboard+CPU+GPU.

Currently I'm using the following (built in 2018):
Rog Strix AMD X399-E
AMD Ryzen threadripper 2950X 16-Core 3500Mhz 32 Logical processors
2080Ti Rog Strix
128GB RAM

The obvious thing to do is to buy an RTX 4090 (which seem to start at an unbelievable £1,579 at the moment). To get the most out of that, it'd seem worth also upgrading my CPU, and if I'm going to do that, probably the motherboard as well, however I don't know what to start considering for motherboard and CPU.

Any suggestions for parts or entire builds would be welcome!

samuelthomson · 20 Jan 2024 at 17:47

Thanks for the reply and questions! I don't know what the bottleneck is in my current system. I think the answer is basically that everything I have is fine for most things I'm trying to do in Unreal aside from advanced lighting effects (Ray Tracing and Lumen) and some real-time particle and fluid effects with Niagara. For lighting and fluids, everything I have is more-or-less baseline spec. For many kinds of game development it's unnecessary to have a development PC that's far in advance of the spec on the target device, but I also use Unreal for pre-rendered scenes and things like Arch-vis, where realism is required by clients. Plus it's exciting and fun to be experimenting with new features.

My GPU is at the low end of "recommended requirements" for Lumen and Raytracing in Unreal5. I think the RTX4090 price is eye-wateringly high, and I'd be happy with an RTX4080, but that's also hard to buy...I'd settle for a 4070 ti, which is about the lowest-spec I'd consider upgrading to from a 2080ti.

Regarding the CPU, I have a lot of difficulty working out how my current CPU compares to others. I can't believe the cost of modern threadripper CPUs...it's probably not necessary (or possible) for me to get something like that. A Ryzen 7900 or i7-14700 is probably a good call from what I can see at a glance...is there much point in going up from there in terms of consumer development PCs? It looks like rapidly diminishing returns from there...

The current RAM I have is 128GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3000MHz. This has easily been enough over the past 5 years. I'm not sure whether it's worth upgrading it, it seems like enough for now. It's one of the easier parts to upgrade, so as long as there's space on the motherboard to upgrade, I'd probably stay with what I have.

Regarding the motherboard, how important is that (as long as it fits the other components) and do you have any ideas?

-
Just a note on my previous build - it cost something like £5k+VAT in March 2019, but some of that spend was unnecessary (I had 2x2080ti cards, mostly just used one and not the other) and I'm trying to keep things within more reasonable limits this time. I usually try to get something that's around 85% of the way towards being a "top spec" machine as a rule of thumb.

samuelthomson · 23 Jan 2024 at 01:35

Thanks for this thorough reply. The RAM I currently have is 128GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3000MHz (8 x 16GB). I thought it'd be interchangeable with DDR5, but I now see it's more complicated. It looks like 2x48GB sticks of DDR5 would be around £300. From what I understand, having more than 2 sticks of RAM might be unstable on current CPUs. If I bought either the Z790 or X670E motherboard, then I could presumably look to upgrade the CPU and processor on the board at some point in the future if I wanted to increase the number of sticks of RAM. Is it worth thinking about other motherboards with a view to being upgradeable (or for any other reason)?

So at the moment
Z790 or X670E: £200
2x48GB DDR5: £300
i7-14700: £400
RTX 4070ti: £750

Total: £1650

I guess if I got a new machine built, I'd be looking at around £2250 including other drives etc. That doesn't sound too bad, although it's hard to tell how significant a difference I'd notice compared to my current build. Do you know of any websites that could estimate/visualize the difference in performance between two component lists so I can make a comparison?

It would be nice to imagine building a machine with a view to doing some machine learning stuff, I'd probably have an absolute entry point to doing that with this build, building anything more serious in that direction looks like a significant step up.

samuelthomson · 23 Jan 2024 at 14:38

Interesting about Capcom. I think a Threadripper 5975 would be out of my price range at the moment (around an extra £2000 compared to i7-14700). My current X399 motherboard only supports gen 1 and 2 Threadrippers, 5957 is way ahead of what I currently have.

Thanks for the extensive post above. When you say "I wouldn't recommend the 7600X though, because I'd imagine that you really want a decent upgrade in both short-run single core/thread and long-run multi core/thread". - Is there anything you'd recommend I look at instead? Unreal does a lot of things on a single thread (the main game thread) but rendering is done outside of that thread. Not surprisingly, the GPU makes a big difference for real-time lighting, and some physics can be offloaded to the GPU. Building and compiling are optimised for multithreading, and I have to build and compile several times a day if doing C++ work, but the problem I'm having is with real-time graphics.

I've thought about buying a 4090 first, seeing how much that improves my current setup, and then upgrading the CPU/Motherboard/RAM if I'm still having issues.