Multiple issues with UE 5.1 under macOS, help.

I have a lots of problems with UE 5.1 on my M1 Max MacBook Pro.
I don’t even know where to start…

Basic Third Person template doesn’t look as it should.

M1 Max TRD Person Template


Intel i5 MacBook Pro, TRD Person template

PC Version

I attached screenshots, as you can see basic character doesn’t look right, some parts of the character are white for some reason. Shadows are just pure black, with no skylight and global illumination at all.
And speaking about GI… Lumen is not working completely on M1 chip (both versions x86 rosetta 2 and native apple silicon) and it looks like it’s bugged on my 2018 intel MacBook Pro, and I can’t even turn it off. I have weird shadow artifacts that I suspect caused by lumen.

Lumen was working just fine in UE 5.0.3 even on apple m1 processor.

On my 2018 intel MacBook character looks right, but I have different issues, as I said above I have weird shadow artifact on walls, and I can’t do anything about it, i can’t find a way to fix it.

Native apple silicon version of UE 5.1 is very unstable and has no performance gains. Despite the fact it was said in roadmap “The UE team is actively working on porting the Unreal Editor and its dependencies to support natively the Apple Silicon platform, thus offering increased performance and stability.” A lot more unstable than 5.0.3 86 rosetta version of the editor.

Switching shader standard to Metal 2.4 cause even more rendering issues.


Weird flickering when using temporal super resolution.
Sometimes all static geometry just disappears and I have text on the sky that says «your scene contains a skydome mesh with a sky material but it does not cover that part of the screen»

Metal 3.0 crashes both intel and apple silicon versions of UE 5.1 on both of my machines.

Even iOS rendering preview have issue, UE glowing logo is missing.

I tested this on my M1 Max MacBook Pro and 2018 intel core i5 MacBook. Both of them have rendering issues.

I also tested this on two different versions of macOS. Same thing on macOS Monterey and macOS Ventura.

I don’t know what to do, i saw a lot of videos on youtube where people testing ue5 on their macbooks and have zero issues. Maybe im doing something wrong, I’ll appreciate any suggestions.

Here on an M1 Max chip, I am also experiencing all of these same problems

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I’m having the same issues on my Macbook pro M1 from 2022 Monterey 12.6.2.

Me too! please fix it. I appreciate it!

Same kind of issues on Mac mini M1 16 Ventura,
found a quick fix UnrealQFEInstaller that resolved some issues,
quick search to reference it in this post led to

Tech Note - QFE: Multiple updates for Mac fixes in UE 5.1

This article was written by Laura B

This QFE available at CL23230400 addresses multiple issues with Mac builds in UE 5.1:

  • Removed Apple Silicon from default build architectures if installed from Epic Games Launcher, as it is not yet supported in UE 5.1 as a default option. Apple Silicon native build will be available in UE 5.1 through Epic Games Launcher at a later time, but for now please build from GitHub
  • Fixed a Mobile Preview crash on Mac when Mobile Deferred is enabled and Preview Rendering Level set to iOS Shader 3.1
  • Fixed an issue that was preventing movable lights from properly casting light on Mac

The original link where I found this file

the Github link has a bad reference now

Hi ! Same problem with dark shadows in scene templates on my Macbook Pro 16 M1

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Same issues - everything is dark, even with the new 5.1.1 on M1 chip

same here, I have mac M1, same issue with 5.1 and 5.1.1 , I have downgraded to 5.0.3 . I hope this issue will be fixed soon, missing out on a lot of features

Same issue here. M1 Ultra on macOS 12.6.3. Issue occurs with both 5.1 and 5.1.1, but not with 5.0.3. Unfortunately downgrading is not an option for us.

Just adding a +1 to this, Lumen seems to be broken on MacOS.

Was able to test with some more machines and can confirm the GI/black shadow issue is not occurring with a 2019 Intel Mac Pro (Radeon Pro 580X) running macOS 12.6. My guess is that is due to the Radeon card.

Every other machine seems to have the issue, although not on 5.0.3.

Same here with M2 Max on 5.1 and 5.1.1…

Same on my MBP M1 Max. Lumen works fine in UE 5.0.3 but is broken since 5.1. I filed several complaints but no one seems to care.

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tenho os mesmo problemas, com as sombras na unreal 5.1 e 5.1.1, e vejo que infelizmente temos que utilizar a 5.0 para resolver alguns problemas, onde a UE se encontra mais estável para MAC M1, infelizmente o suporte para Mac ainda é muito falho, e espero que resolvam logo e que também adicionem a Tecnologia Nanite para Mac M1 junto ao Path tracing.

I have the same problems, with the shadows in unreal 5.1 and 5.1.1, and I see that unfortunately we have to use 5.0 to solve some problems, where the EU is more stable for MAC M1, unfortunately the support for Mac is still very flawed, and I hope they solve it soon and that they also add Nanite Technology for Mac M1 along with Path tracing.

Hello guys, I have some updates for you all. Looks like almost all issues that i mentioned back in December were fixed in UE 5.2 Preview (Let’s hope nothing breaks when it’s released.)

In addition to what I posted, there are even more fixes and changes in the engine.

Changes that I personally found:
Subsurface Profile Shaders are finally fixed. The only stable version of the engine with which it was possible to create a realistic face with SSS is 4.27, since the release of UE5, skin rendering was not displayed correctly.

Media Player now sees webcams and microphones on Mac. Interestingly, this did not work even on engine version 4.27 (which, until recently, was the most stable version), but the engine does not yet see external capture cards.

So far, there are 2 problems that I found in preview 5.2 is that the editor does not release the cursor after PIE was closed and the Editor asks for access to the documents folder too often, about 10 times (I guess the only way to get around this problem is NOT create projects in the Documents folder)

Thanks to everyone who left comments and promoted the topic, I think thanks to you and everyone else who was not silent, Epic Games drew attention to us. Here is the screenshot of the basic third person template. As you can see it looks great on M1 Max chip.

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