Windows 10, ARM64 and Unreal Engine? On the same laptop? Is that a thing?

It soon will be. In this blog, I’ll show how you can get started porting your UE4 games and graphics to Windows 10 on ARM in order to prepare for a targeted version of Unreal Engine.

It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. Visual C++ compilers and libraries for ARM64 have been available since Visual Studio 15.9. And OEMs like Acer, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and Samsung have been selling Windows 10 on ARM devices powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon compute platform.

What may surprise you, though, is that Windows 10 on ARM is suitable for a lot more than just word processing, web browsing and checking email. Miguel Nunes demonstrated Zoom on a Windows on Snapdragon 8cx with up to 3x-longer battery life than a comparable x86-powered laptop. And Windows on ARM support for x64 apps on the Surface Pro X is here as well.

Even more surprising is the performance you’ll see when you start porting your UE games to ARM64 and running them on a laptop powered by Snapdragon compute platforms.

But maybe the biggest surprise is that you won’t have to run in emulation.

The icing on the cake: Native ARM64 support for Unreal Engine is coming

Windows 10 on ARM supports x86 (32-bit) and x64 (64-bit) targets with emulation, which gives you a quick way to deploy. Recompiling your code as native ARM64 apps opens the doors to faster processing, more-efficient power consumption and all the advantages of the Snapdragon compute platform and the Qualcomm Adreno GPU.

That’s why we engaged ForwardXP to create an ARM64 version of the venerable Infiltrator Demo as a proof of concept. While this demo is several years old now, it was created with the purposes of showcasing the capabilities of Unreal Engine 4 with high-end content. To this day, the demo still demands a lot from even a high-end, discrete PC GPU for credible, real-time performance.

We put ourselves in your shoes and decided to optimize the content of the demo itself rather than the core engine. Why? Because it better represented the journey you would take in porting your games to ARM64 and in scaling the performance for a wide range of hardware.

Besides optimizations to the demo content, the project required development work to add Windows 10 ARM64 support to Unreal Engine 4.23. For more information on targeting Unreal Engine for Windows on ARM64 visit the Unreal Engine for Windows on Arm64 tutorial in our Game Developer Guide.

Read more: Game developers: Windows 10 ARM64 support is coming to Unreal Engine

Posted By: Brink
09 Apr 2021