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Comment by Daub | Hacker News Reader

Off the shelf yes, but wow…. The requirements for Unreal are unreal.

Recent versions handle real-time global illumination (Lumen) and dynamically render geometry to insane levels of detail (nanite). Both of these are groundbreaking achievements. But having had to install this in a bunch of university computers I can tell you that it comes at a cost.

Interestingly, the most significant issue is the space these installations require. We have optimized our installation as much as we can, but we nonetheless had to introduce systems whereby local storage was wiped clean every two weeks.

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Wait, disk space was the limiting factor, not GPUs?

I couldn't find the exact video, but Digital Foundry did a great breakdown on the performance bottlenecks in Unreal 5. They showed how disk speed directly influenced asset streaming, and it was pretty interesting to watch. Their HDD-speed drive choked constantly when running the UE5 demo, but a SATA SSD had enough bandwidth to handle the assets.

So, it's kinda a weird spot to be. Not every scene was streaming 250mb/s of assets, but when it did the worse drives took a notable hit to performance.

Are these types of assets typically compressed?

Depends on the system, AFAIK. Modern consoles have so much disk bandwidth that compression is completely unnecessary, but PS5 and Xbox both have APIs for streaming and decompressing compressed assets. I haven't seen any titles using them, and it's doubtful that we'll reach a point where it's required with modern systems.

That being said, compression would be an interesting avenue to explore for SD cards and SATA drives. The performance add can be pretty marginal, but sometimes that's just what these drives need.

Yep, unreal is surprisingly efficient on the graphics side of things, but it also wants 70-something GB just to install and that's before it starts setting up the graphics cache which adds another 40 GB iirc.

1TB SSDs are $90.

Yes, but it's a bit hard to convince your boss to allow buying a lot of them (just 10 is already $900).

I found it harder to justify those VR goggles.

HN is rich and detached from reality in other parts of the world. People still have to manage their savings to buy storage in non rich world.

How much is the rest of a VR setup?

And thanks to inflation, while $90 used to be like six to eight bags of groceries not that long ago, now it's only two or three. So that's not like you can buy much else with that $90.

And 2TB is like $120

Yep. The install size of unreal is a known issue: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n7vwGnKSbmE&feature=youtu.be

Our lab computors have 500gb of space. Each time a new profile is activated by a student, that eats up around 5 to 10 gig. In addition… Video editing eats up storage space like there is no tomorrow (the Cache requirements of Resolve are another issue). Nanite supports scene with very dance meshes (downloaded directly from Unreals online store). These add up quickly in terms of file size, especially as each comes in several versions, with multiple levels of detail.

Ideally we would have liked to install more than one version of Unreal. Unreal updates regularly and files created with each version cannot be guaranteed to be opened by subsequent versions. However, this was one saving we made.

There are sample files which are actually very instructive but which we did not install.

All of these issues compounded and towards the end of sem we were having a tough time.

A 2tb ssd is little over 100. There's no good reason this isn't upgraded

Exactly. I don’t understand why universities don’t factor in human costs. If it requires manual intervention every 2 weeks, investing $100 should be a no brainer.

> Our lab computors have 500gb of space.

There's your problem. Development and content creation machines need far more disk than this. It doesn't have to be the OS drive; a data drive or two is usually fine, but 500GB in total is far too little.

> The requirements for Unreal are unreal.

This has been true since 1998.

True. But the recent releases are a little better. We looked into using Unreal at school a few years ago but rejected it. This year was the first time we felt that our lab machines were equal to the task.

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