Unreal Engine has some specific hardware and software requirements for running the Editor. This page covers these requirements, as well as describing what is installed by the pre-requisites installer included in the Unreal Engine installer.
Recommended Hardware
| Operating System | Windows 10 64-bit |
| Processor | Quad-core Intel or AMD, 2.5 GHz or faster |
| Memory | 8 GB RAM |
| Video Card/DirectX Version | DirectX 11 or DirectX 12 compatible graphics card |
| Operating System | Latest MacOS Big Sur |
| Processor | Quad-core Intel, 2.5 GHz or faster |
| Memory | 8 GB RAM |
| Video Card | Metal 1.2 Compatible Graphics Card |
| Operating System | Ubuntu 18.04 |
| Processor | Quad-core Intel or AMD, 2.5 GHz or faster |
| Memory | 32 GB RAM |
| Video Card | NVIDIA GeForce 960 GTX or higher with latest NVIDIA binary drivers |
| Video RAM | 8 GB or more |
Minimum Software Requirements
Minimum requirements for running the engine or editor are listed below.
| Running the Engine | |
|---|---|
| Operating System | Windows 7 |
| DirectX Runtime | DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2010) |
| Running the Engine | |
|---|---|
| Operating System | macOS 10.14.6 Mojave |
| Running the Engine | |
|---|---|
| Operating System | Any reasonable new Linux distro from CentOS 7.x and up |
| Linux Kernel Version | kernel 3.x or newer |
| Additional Dependencies | glibc 2.17 or newer |
The requirements for programmers developing with the engine are listed below.
| Developing with the Engine | |
|---|---|
| All 'Running the Engine' requirements (automatically installed) | |
| Visual Studio Version |
Visual Studio 2015 is no longer supported in the current release of UE4. If you are developing with the current release of UE4, you need to use either VS 2017 or VS 2019. |
| iOS App Development | |
| iTunes Version | iTunes 12 or higher |
| Developing with the Engine | |
|---|---|
| Xcode Version | 11.3.1 |
| Developing with the Engine | |
|---|---|
| Operating System | Ubuntu 18.04 |
| Compiler | clang 6.0.1 |
| Optional | |
| IDE | Visual Studio Code, CLion, QtCreator |
Software Installed by the Prerequisite Installer
The Unreal Engine includes a prerequisite installer that installs everything needed to run the editor and engine, including several DirectX components and Visual C++ redistributables. When you install Unreal Engine through the Epic Games Launcher, the Launcher automatically installs these prerequisites for you. However, you may need to run the prerequisite installer yourself if you build Unreal Engine from source, or if you need to prepare a computer with all the Unreal Engine prerequisites for a specific purpose—for example, if you are setting up a fresh computer to act as a Swarm Agent.
You can find the installer, with separate executables for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, in the Engine/Extras/Redist/en-us folder under your Unreal Engine installation location.
If you use Perforce to get the Unreal Engine source code, you'll also find precompiled binaries in the same Engine/Extras/Redist/en-us folder of the Perforce repository. The source for the installer is under Engine/Source/Programs/PrereqInstaller.
The following table lists the software that is installed by the prerequisite installer.
| DirectX Components | Visual C++ Redists |
|---|---|
| XInput 1.3 (April 2007) | Visual C++ 2010 CRT |
| X3DAudio 1.7 (February 2010) | Visual C++ 2010 OpenMP library |
| XAudio 2.7 (June 2010) | Visual C++ 2012 CRT |
| D3D Compiler 4.3 (June 2010) | Visual C++ 2013 CRT |
| D3DCSX 4.3 (June 2010) | Visual C++ 2015 CRT |
| D3DX9 4.3 (June 2010) | Visual Studio 2019 redistributable |
| D3DX10 4.3 (June 2010) | |
| D3DX11 4.3 (June 2010) |
The most important DirectX components from that list are the XInput, X3DAudio, and XAudio dependencies. These aren't included in standard installations of DirectX (and aren't distributed with Windows by default), so they have to be installed manually or distributed with the application.
Graphics Card Drivers
We currently recommend using the latest stable releases from each card manufacturer:
Performance Notes
This list represents a typical system used at Epic, providing a reasonable guideline for developing games with Unreal Engine 4:
-
Windows 10 64-bit
-
64 GB RAM
-
256 GB SSD (OS Drive)
-
2 TB SSD (Data Drive)
-
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
-
Xoreax Incredibuild (Dev Tools Package)
-
Six-Core Xeon E5-2643 @ 3.4GHz
If you don't have access to Xoreax Incredibuild (Dev Tools Package), we recommend compiling with a machine having 12 to 16 cores; however, we encourage you to read the Hardware Benchmarks (2017) reference to learn more about compiling with and without XGE.