What's an Optimal PC build for UDK?

[PSYLNZ]

I'm looking to find out the Optimal PC build for UDK. I'm not looking to find the best bang for the buck, nor am I looking to waste money on components that will have no effect on performance. But lets say I was making a huge, and highly detailed level, and want to be able to build geometry, build lighting, and get through Swarm as quickly as possible. What components help, and what ones don't. I've looked at Epic's UDK specs, and while they say minimum and recommended, they don't really give maxed optimal specs.

Is UDK capable of using more than 4 cores?
Would dual CPU help?
I'm sure the amount of RAM matters, but what about the speed of the RAM
Does SLI or Crossfire matter ? Would 3 or 4 video cards increase performance?
How big a part does the amount of Video Ram play?
Would a SSD increase performance over a HDD?
Would a RAID 0 setup give a noticable increase in performance?

Thank You.

[Alex D]

The general rules of thumb when developing:

The more cores the better. Even if individual software doesn't make full use of them all, you will end up running multiple at once (common to have Max, Photoshop, UDK and VisualStudio open at once) which will spread across the cores. This rule also applies to multiple CPUs.

The more RAM the better. The faster RAM the better. You will never have too much.

SLI/Crossfire do matter if you're planning on making a crazy high quality game (E.Q. Samaritan level of quality) but aren't necessary for most. If you're not experienced with SLI/Crossfire then you're better off going for a more powerful single card than two less powerful ones.

Video Ram is important, especially if you're making use of high resolution textures.

SSD will increase read/write speeds immensely, however that's not exactly a benefit specifically for UDK. SSD are far less reliable in general, but far more reliable for mobile computers due to the lack of moving parts. Having an SSD for the OS while storing actual data on an HDD seems the best set up in my opinion.

RAID is pointless for workstation in my opinion and in my experience it's always caused more problems than it's solved, especially RAID 0. RAID should only be used for redundant drive backups, which makes RAID0 the counter intuitive.

[PSYLNZ]

Thanks for the Reply Alex D. That clears up alot for me.

But one question remaining....Say if If I'm bascially just running Windows and UDK, and building geometry, lightmass, and have swarm running - is there a limit to how many cores UDK will use? And if so, does anyone know what that limit is?

[Alex D]

It seems it scales to however many cores are available: A quote from the swarm page on the UDN:

Demanding applications are often designed to take advantage of every ounce of processing power your system can muster, with performance ideally multiplying perfectly with each additional processor core. This is what makes moving from dual-core to quad-core, or from quad-core to 8-core, so incredibly useful for these applications.

Unreal Lightmass, the high-quality static global illumination solver in Unreal Engine 3, is one of those applications because of its extreme computational needs. Even on an 8-core system, rebuilding lighting for a large or complex level can take enough time that iteration performance can suffer.

[kg777]

quad core = faster lighting build times.

ram = much smoother when using many programs and udk.

gpu= framerate when graphic features are enabled.


a 500$ computer is more then enough. i-5 quadcore,8gb ram, 200$ graphics card is a good spec system, similar to end user yet plently of power for making the game .i would say 2 monitors is more important then pc specs tbh. so wish i had got extra monitor over extra horsepower.:}.