All About Those Specs
With the new line of Nvidia graphics cards having been announced, computer specs have been on the forefront of my mind as of late. Because of that, I thought it might be interesting for some people to detail what I’ve been using to make Forlorn up to this point. I got this current computer a little over 2 years ago now after I finally saved up enough for something pretty beefy. Nowadays it’s certainly less so, but it still gets the job done. For the first 2 episodes of Forlorn I’ve been utilizing a Intel Core i7-8700K 3.7GHz for my CPU, an Nvidia GTX 1080Ti for my GPU, and 32GB of DDR4 RAM. In terms of software, I’m running the film on the latest version of Unreal, which is currently 4.25. When the project started way back in the early days, I was using 4.21, and have upgraded it every time a new version drops (and gets its first patch). The Pilot was made in 4.22, but the first two episodes were made in 4.25, and I don’t intend to upgrade to 4.26 at this time, as from what I’m aware there won’t be too many features to benefit me in that release, though I may be wrong. I’ve been careful to make backups, because even though I’m not utilizing any scripting or specific plugins, I’m always wary about how changes to the system might affect something in some way. For instance, the updated exposure model in 4.25 did change the look of the film, but for the better, which was a nice benefit.
It was always my intent to save upgrading any aspects of my hardware until every episode was released. My general plan was to finish the film with these current specs, then upgrade what I could and do a 4K remaster utilizing new component and Unreal Engine 5, which will be out by the time I’m finished. However, with the news of new GPUs I began to change my line of thought, given that upgrading mid project won’t change the look of the film, and in fact may allow me to get away with more. Due to my background in film making and not in games, as well as wanting to have everything be as film ready quality wise as I can have it, my scenes tend to be hopelessly unoptimized. They run fine, FPS wise, but when it comes to rendering it takes on a sizable chunk of memory, and with what I have planned I’m getting concerned I may be scrapping on that ceiling quite soon. I’ve already noticed it in a few places where certain shots would exhaust my memory limit without some trickery. Obviously if this were a game I’d be more concerned with getting things in a more optimized state, but for now I think I’ll settle with pure brute force. So I decided it’s probably a good idea to invest in more RAM, at least for now. I’m used to working with 64GB at work, so it’d be nice to have a similar setup. Hopefully the upgrade goes smoothly, otherwise you’ll probably hear from me about that. And maybe some time next year I’ll think about getting a new GPU. We’ll see how it goes.
