While I’m been positively surprised with UE parity on Windows and OS X (there have been bugs where I was expecting to be OS X only, and then it turns out they are exactly same with Windows), there’s one thing that keeps falling short.
For some reason, input in OS X has issues:
hovering elements seems to drop frame rate (seems to be related to tooltip creation / display)
selecting elements causes frame drop
opening elements (e.g. opening a blueprint) cases massive frame drop, some times freezing even OS for a few seconds (some times it recovers, other times it will crash and bring up crash report)
dragging connections in blueprint has same effect described above some times
moving around in scene (seems that there’s issues with first interaction, some times rotation jumps to a weird position, input takes a bit to respond for example using move tool)
a lot of times you select an item in game view, but when you hover over other panels (e.g. details), but it is still forwarding input to game view, so instead of for example changing a property of object in details view, you’ll be selecting some other random element in scene (*)
when you click into play mode, frame rate will be some times considerably worse until you actually click in game view, then frame rate goes back to normal values
some times (rarely, but eventually happens) editor stays in reduced frame rate mode even though editor is in foreground, clicking in editor doesn’t fix it, you have to select some other application and then bring editor back to foreground for it to leave reduced frame rate mode
If all these inputs issues were fixed for 4.8, it would be great. These are major issues in actually using UE - specially (*) makes it very frustrating -, if they are fixed using UE in OS X will be much better. only limitation, which I’m still hoping that will be fixed in future, is being able to build for other platforms. IMO having OS X only build for apple platforms is a shame.
Thanks for feedback! There will definitely be some improvements in 4.8, though I don’t know how much will be resolved for your machine in particular. It looks like it’s getting a bit on in years and UE4 is very demanding, especially on laptops. Can you let us know your machine specs? You can find them in Apple Menu > About This Mac. Just copy paste all that (minus serial number). Thanks!
To be honest when playing performance is quite good when compared to first time I used it (don’t have anything in max), it just drops considerably when handling editor input (e.g. editor is at 30-40fps and I select something in content browser and you see it dip to 15fps).
Here are system specs:
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro8,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2,2 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 16 GB
Boot ROM Version: MBP81.0047.B27
SMC Version (system): 1.69f4
Chipset Model: AMD Radeon HD 6750M
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
PCIe Lane Width: x8
VRAM (Total): 512 MB
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
Device ID: 0x6741
Revision ID: 0x0000
ROM Revision: 113-C0170L-573
gMux Version: 1.9.23
EFI Driver Version: 01.00.573
Displays:
Color LCD:
Display Type: LCD
Resolution: 1680 x 1050
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Built-In: Yes
Thunderbolt Display:
Display Type: LCD
Resolution: 2560 x 1440
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Display Serial Number: C02GC03PDJGR
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Rotation: Supported
Connection Type: DisplayPort
With 4.7.6 in Default Map with Floor selected, we were getting:
Real-time viewport disabled ~ FPS: 88 / 11 ms
Real-time viewport enabled ~ FPS: 35 / 28 ms
Engine Scalability Settings - Auto:
Resolution Scale - 25%
View Distance - Near
AA - Low
PP - Low
Shadows - Low
Textures - Medium
Effects - Low
Most of what you’ve described is similar to what we’ve saw with this machine, and most of it is expected given hardware. One thing to note regarding frame drop and freezing when opening assets is that this can last longer depending on size of asset and isn’t specific to Mac.
We have also seen issue you described in which editor stays in reduced frame rate mode when it’s returned to foreground, and we have a bug report in for it already (UE-13882).
developers will be taking all of this into consideration for future improvements, but please keep in mind that engine is pretty heavy and will struggle more on laptops. If you run into any more issues or have any more feedback, please feel free to update us. Thanks again!