Perforce P4

Perforce P4, formerly Helix Core, is version control for code and large binary assets, self-hosted or as a managed cloud, for game studios and chip designers.

Perforce P4 tracks source code, 3D assets and AI-generated changes in one version history, for projects whose files are too large or too numerous for Git to handle well. It was called Helix Core before taking the P4 name. Perforce Software, a Minneapolis company founded in 1995, owns and develops it beside its testing, static analysis and infrastructure products. The P4 Server stores every file revision and reaches distant offices through proxy and edge servers, so large files arrive without a long wait. Streams, the structured branching model, maps how work moves between development and release lines. The P4V client shows branching, merging and the change history of assets visually. P4 Code Review runs reviews on changelists, where reviewers comment and vote, and its workflow rules can reject a submit with no approved review. The Git Connector mirrors Git repositories into P4, files stored in Git LFS included, while jobs record bugs and enhancement requests against the changelists that address them. P4 is built for game studios, semiconductor teams and other engineering groups that version very large files, including teams moving off Git as their repositories grow heavy. Administrators set permissions down to individual files for users and groups, and staff sign in through SAML or OIDC identity providers, which suits embedded and regulated work. Art and design teams use P4 DAM to manage their assets, and producers and project managers work in P4 Plan. Teams run the server on their own hardware or cloud account, or choose P4 Cloud, a single-tenant service that Perforce hosts and maintains. In game development P4 holds the Unreal Engine project itself through a native integration, and Epic Games uses it for Unreal Engine development. Unity, Visual Studio, Jenkins and Slack connect to it through integrations, as do GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket for studios that keep some repositories there. The P4 MCP server connects AI assistants such as Claude to P4. Across these jobs P4 serves as the single source of truth for code and for the assets built around it.