Hardware for Unreal, and substance painter??

Challe

Hello there! At work we have the following computer
CPU.I7 3.2 ghz
Ram :8gb
Graphic card: Geforce 450

I wonder what kind of hardware do you recomend  to run Unreal and substance painter? Im thinking a a hardware that you can work with 4 k textures in substance painter.

igi

Your CPU and RAM should suffice for hard tasks on Unreal and Substance. Can't say the same for video card. Take a look at Nvidia gtx1060 at least. But upgrading to 16gb ram wouldn't hurt.

Mark Dygert

8gb of ram is going to give you problems. You can probably get it all working but it might be slow, buggy and crash a lot, especially unreal it is a ram hog.

I would step up to 16gb of ram and probably invest in a better video card. I run a Nvidia 970 and it can have trouble keeping up sometimes.

PolyHertz

The sticky should cover everything you need to know:
http://polycount.com/discussion/173350/upgrading-or-building-a-new-pc-this-is-the-thread-for-you/p1

Axi5

For working with Unreal you're going to want a lot more RAM than that and a much more powerful graphics card

For reference, the "Boy and his Kite" demo will happily chew up 32GB of RAM when all world instances are open (not very often you'd do this but the point remains that large scenes take up obscene amounts). For the most part you'll be fine with 8, it's just a few occasions you'll need more than this. I've currently had 16GB RAM for a few years now and have only ran out a handful of times, it depends what you're doing though.

Your graphics card is about 7 years old, it really needs to be updated to work with the UE beast.

Can't say much for your CPU without a model identifier. I'd be a little concerned because it sounds like you're working with a fairly old computer so I'm assuming your i7 is first generation clarkdale or something. You'll benefit a lot from rebuilding this PC and replacing most parts, but honestly I think your CPU will probably just about manage.

poopipe

Working at 4k in painter is ambitious .  I've got a 1080 in a shiny new 8 physical core Xeon that can't manage work smoothly at 4k on anything halfway complicated. 

Klawd

Recommend? The best you can get your hands on. What you have barely suffice and will give you more headache than anything trying to work with UE4/Substance. I would only keep the CPU, maybe overclock it. Ram hopefully is ddr4, should at least be doubled, but better quadrupled. Gpu at least a geforce serie 900* to even load 4k textures. But to work fluidly in 4k you need way better hardware.

Challe

I like all your adviced and i know what i must upgrade. What we will use Unreal4 is archviz so  we wil begin with upgrading ram and our videocard.

GreyJke

As old PC user i will suggest you to "bake" your textures until you upgrade your PC. What did i mean? When you texture your model you create a lot of layers, generators, masks, etc. And SP goes slower and slower... When you approach unmanagable condition - simply export your textures (if you are happy with current result), create new scene with your model, create 3 fill layers (or 1, it depends if you want to modify them separately or not), plug exported textures in their channels... continue to work. It works for me. Typically i create "shiny and clean" textures in SD, export them to SP, add dirt, scratches, etc. And export from there in 4K. It is the only way to work in SP, SD with 4k on old PC in my opinion.

poopipe

That is solid advice,  it remains nondestructive but avoids a lot of heavy lifting.. 

Challe

Good advice. Does this mean i save alot of memory if i use your method?

GreyJke

Challe said:

Good advice. Does this mean i save alot of memory if i use your method?

I ran a few tests, just by curiosity. That method have almost no effect on RAM, slightly reduce load on GPU and dramatically decrease CPU load. It makes sense. CPU does all calculations (generators, masks, blending modes... etc.), GPU - visualize all of that (AA, post-effects, screen resolution, textures resolution). RAM - ... probably all that stuff already loaded into there... can`t say anything about how to reduce load on RAM. In my case it is around 2,7-3,2 Gb.

poopipe

Um,  the gpu does most of the work in substance - including calculating all the blending etc.  The reason usage doesn't drop is that it's constantly working as fast as it can to show you pretty pictures.

Axi5

It wouldn't have much effect on RAM either since the textures would be stored on VRAM... 

GreyJke

poopipe said:

Um,  the gpu does most of the work in substance - including calculating all the blending etc.  The reason usage doesn't drop is that it's constantly working as fast as it can to show you pretty pictures.

Axi5 said:

It wouldn't have much effect on RAM either since the textures would be stored on VRAM... 

Ok, so what is bottlenecking framerate (not just framerate but overall perfomance) if you overflow SP with a lot of smart materials, masks, generators, etc..?

poopipe

It's because you're giving the gpu a crap load of things to do. 
Smart materials are often very expensive because they have a load of generators in. Its easy to build up a pretty heavy layer stack quite quickly by using them,  especially if you're just grabbing them from source or whatever . 
At that point I imagine there's  quite a lot of back and forth between the gpu and system memory which will slow things down. 

One of the main selling points of both designer and painter is the gpu processing - that's why it's so fast. 

In painter's case its been like that since the beginning - I know this because I had it for testing well before v1 released and also they told me to my face during a demo. 

Engine plugins are cpu based iirc.

GreyJke

poopipe said:

In painter's case its been like that since the beginning - I know this because I had it for testing well before v1 released and also they told me to my face during a demo. 

More likely that you are tottaly right about GPU/CPU load, but i made my conclusions purely from observations and they are controversial, so yeah... (i feel like we went a little bit off topic xD)