Obviously, my laptop is not great. But I figured I could intentionally develop games with low requirements - something like Mount & Blade - by keeping things as simple as possible. I'm doing this as a hobbyist rather than as a professional games developer (my job is doing physics simulations on supercomputers), so I'm not really wanting to invest money in buying a good laptop.

However, I've found that even the built-in FPS demo where you shoot spheres at cubes is too slow to really be playable on my laptop. Are there ways to cut things down so I can build & run decent low-poly 3D games with Unreal Engine 4, or is there a pretty high minimum requirement for the physics & rendering of UE4?