UE3 Minimum and Recommended Specifications

Document Summary: Gives the minimum requirements and recommended specs for hardware in a computer that is intended to run Unreal Engine 3 - both for end users and developers.

Minimum PC Requirements for Users

• Windows XP with DirectX 9.0c
• A graphics card with shader model 3.0 support.

Minimum PC Hardware Requirements for Developers

• Windows XP SP2 with DirectX 9.0c
• 2GHz or better CPU
• 2+ GB RAM
• A graphics card with Shader Model 3.0 support, such as nVidia GeForce 7800

NOTE: Vista 64 is currently the mainstream development environment with a shift to Windows 7 64bit coming soon.

Recommended PC Hardware Specs for Developers

• Windows XP with DirectX 9.0c
• 2.4 GHz or better dual-core (or quad-core) CPU
• 2+ GB of RAM
• A PCI Express graphics card with Shader Model 3.0 support, such as nVidia GeForce 7800
• 2 monitors @ 1600x1200 or better

NOTE: Dual processor configurations are very useful if you are working on networking code, so you can run a server and client at a good speed on the same computer.

Graphics Card Drivers

For NVIDIA cards we currently recommend using the officially released ForceWare 191.07 drivers. Download here.

For ATI we currently recommend using the officially released Catalyst 9.8 drivers. Download here.

Performance Notes

• VTune can be an extremely useful tool for finding performance problems, but only works on Intel CPUs.
• To help with hitting the NextGen Game asset wall, we do the following
  1. All machines have 16 GB or more RAM.
  2. All machines have a RAID 0 (Striped) drive where the game is located.
  3. We have a companywide defrag process that runs on everyone's machine over night: Perfect Disk 8.0 by RaxCo.
     • Easy Centralized Management to install on remote machines, schedule runs, upgrade, etc.
     • Supported XP, Vista64.

Basically, the bottleneck is I/O so getting a RAID 0 and lots of RAM can help out a lot.

64-Bit Performance

Most people at Epic are running Windows Vista 64-Bit as their primary development OS. The biggest benefit is having more than 4GB of RAM as it speeds up iteration time immensely as you are no longer just constantly swapping to disk.

For programmers, the most obvious benefits will be in:

• Compile C++; link C++
• Compile UnrealScript
• Run editor; run1-2 copies of the game

Also, with Vista you get ReadyBoost which seems to help with Outlook 2007.