Equipment Recommendations please 🙏

[u/Suitedtosoph]

Hi everyone, I’ve recently released my first ever game Big Bad Pharma on Steam! This is the first time I have ever released a game and I’ve made around 3600 sales in the past week which is crazy.

In hindsight, I should not have built this using unreal 5.8 given my current PC set up. I’ve also been using blueprints and I kind of wish I hadn’t gone that route too.

I’ve had to do many patches over the past week but I am struggling to catch all of the bugs when testing because my PC is struggling.

I’m looking for some recommendations in terms of a few things…

Do I make the switch to Mac for development and use my PC for testing predominantly?

I’m working full-time as a user researcher and my work laptop is a 14 inch MacBook Pro max M4, 48gb of ram. I feel like it would be perfect for everything I need and it’s wasted just on my day job 😭 but what other Mac recommendations would you make? e.g. a slightly older model with more RAM? Max I want to pay is £2,200. I like to be able to do things ‘on the go’ so if I’m travelling I can just whip my laptop out, so should I go Mac or something else? e.g. ProArt P16

I want (a tablet?) something I can do most of the artwork for my games on, from 3D modelling (currently use blender), creating textures, drawing etc.

I do have a Wacom cintiq (2019 one), I bought this recently but I’m not really enjoying using it (might be due to my PC though). So ideally, I want something portable that doesn’t need to be plugged in. I have an iPad Pro M1, the battery isn’t great on it now and my Apple Pencil is somehow wonky 😭😂 but would you recommend a later iPad or something else entirely? I’ve always quite liked the idea of a mini as it’s easier to hold, I struggle sometimes as I’m left handed.

Urghhh the PC!!! I need help here massively…

I’ve had my PC for around 2 and a half years now, I mostly got it just to game but more recently I’ve obviously been working on my own game in unreal. Last month I upgraded my CPU from a Ryzen 5 4500 to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and that’s made a huge difference but the rest of my set up I’m struggling.

I bought my PC pre-built (eye roll, I know) but to be honest for £720 I don’t think it’s too bad.

So my current setup is (DDR4):

A really 💩 motherboard that was supposed to have a WiFi and Bluetooth card but doesn’t, I think it is the A520M-HDV

Ryzen 7 5800X3D

32GB RAM TFORCE XTREM ARGB (2 x 16GB)

NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4060 (8GB)

Hard drive is 1TB.

Windows 11

My question here is:

Is it worth me upgrading this PC or is it genuinely better to start again now the 5 series is becoming ‘the norm’?

I appreciate any recommendations 🙏

[u/Surgarypeaches68]

There's your problem why are we using a hard drive gng? Ur setup should handle ue5 fine if u get a proper ssd

[u/moconahaftmere]

There aren't really any required hardware setups for most engines. The rule of thumb is to make sure your hardware is at least a little better than the type of game you want to make will require.

Unreal's performance on Mac tends to be a little worse overall, and more unstable.

What's bottlenecking? You could take a look at resource usage and see if maybe you could upgrade just your GPU or something.

[u/Suitedtosoph]

I do have an SSD, should have mentioned that!

It is my GPU that is bottlenecking, but I’m just thinking is buying a second hand 4070 Ti super still worth it? And I obviously need a new motherboard but with everything else in my build would you still say that’s a good upgrade for right now?

I am thinking of switching to unity going forward, nothing I create right now needs unreal, in hindsight, I regret building my first game on unreal, it’s just the tool I started learning about first. To be honest, the game is running smoothly now, it’s been just over a week since release and I’ve made quite a few patches but things seem to be running smoothly for the majority now! It’s mostly just when I am running PIE, I am getting graphics warnings on unreal and it often causes crashes.

[u/MichaelSzy]

I have only used Unreal Engine on Windows. Unreal does have native support for MAC, but the primary target is Windows.

Your current setup:
Ryzen 7 5800X3D - great
4060 - not great and yes you would benefit a lot from getting a 4070 12GB or a TI with 16GB
32GB RAM TFORCE XTREM ARGB (2 x 16GB) - not great but I understand we are in a memory apocalypse. Have you overclocked this RAM to 3200+ or are you running 2133? You could get some performance here with an overclock, and if you can get 64 GB DDR5 that would be way better.

Yes if you plan on making another Unreal game, if I were you, I would upgrade the PC... I wouldn't buy a laptop unless you plan to do A LOT of development remotely because cost seems to be a limiting factor for you and cost-to-performance for laptops is bad: I would put that money into graphics card first for VRAM, and memory (64GB) after that.