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UE3 Home > Unreal Engine 3 Basics > UE3 Minimum and Recommended Specifications

UE3 Minimum and Recommended Specifications


Minimum PC Requirements for Users


  • Windows XP SP3 (32-bit only)
  • 2.0+ GHz processor
  • 2 GB system RAM
  • A graphics card with shader model 3.0 support.

Minimum PC Hardware Requirements for Developers


  • Windows XP SP3 (32-bit only) 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: Windows 7 64bit is currently the mainstream development environment.

Recommended PC Hardware Specs for Developers


  • Windows 7 64-bit
  • 2.0+ GHz multi-core processor
  • 8 GB System RAM
  • NVIDIA 8000 series or higher graphics card
  • Plenty of HDD space

PC Hardware Spec Used by Epic Games


HW Spec for Epic's Programmers

  • Lenovo ThinkStation D20 (Model 4158-C95)
  • Windows 7 64-bit
  • Dual Quad-Core Xeon Nehalem Processors (3.17GHz)
  • 24 GB DDR3 RAM
  • nVidia GeForce GTX 285 (1 GB DDR3)
  • 3x500 GB Hard Drives (1x OS Drive, 2x Data Drives in a RAID 0 configuration)

HW Spec for Epic's Level Designers

  • Dell Precision Workstation T7400
  • Windows 7 64-bit
  • Dual Quad-Core Xeon Processors (3.0GHz)
  • 16 GB DDR2 RAM
  • nVidia GeForce GTX 285 (1 GB DDR3)
  • 3x500 GB Hard Drives (1x OS Drive, 2x Data Drives in a RAID 0 configuration)

HW Spec for Epic's Artists (same specs as L.D.)

  • Dell Precision Workstation T7400
  • Windows 7 64-bit
  • Dual Quad-Core Xeon Processors (3.0GHz)
  • 16 GB DDR2 RAM
  • nVidia GeForce GTX 285 (1 GB DDR3)
  • 3x500 GB Hard Drives (1x OS Drive, 2x Data Drives in a RAID 0 configuration)

HW Spec for Epic's Testers

  • Custom built PC's with
  • Windows 7 64-bit
  • Intel Core2Extreme Quad Core Processor - Q6800 - 2.93 GHz
  • 4 GB DDR2 RAM
  • nVidia GeForce 8800 (768 MB GDDR3)
  • 1x320 GB Hard Drive (OS Drive), 1x500 GB Hard Drive (Data Drive)

HW Spec for Swarm Farm Servers

  • IBM BladeCenter HS22 [7870AC1] (14 Nodes)
  • Spec for one node:
    • Dual Quad Core Xeon Processors (2.53 GHz)
    • 24 GB DDR3 RAM
    • 73GB SAS Drive

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.

Compile Times


Below are typical full rebuild times for UDKGame, Win32, Release mode that we see when using a typical Epic programmer spec machine (8 HT cores @ 2.8GHz with 24GB RAM):

single system 2 minutes 50 seconds
distributed using many XGE (IncrediBuild) agents 1 minute 37 seconds

64-Bit Performance


Most people at Epic are running Windows 7 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