Lumen & Nanite on MacOS

Development Rendering
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Hi all, I have some news to report from Epic. A checkin just went in to both the 5.2 and ue5-main branches on github that adds very experimental and (for now) unsupported, disabled-by-default capability for Nanite on M2-based Macs. Here’s a link to the 5.2 commit. (If you don’t have github access that will give you a 404 error.) There are many caveats about this, but someone was bound to notice it so we may as well stay ahead of the messaging curve here.

The only way to enable it is to modify the code and build the engine from source. The modifications are as follows:

  1. Set PLATFORM_MAC_ENABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_NANITE_SUPPORT=1 in UEBuildMac.cs
    source.
  2. Enable UE_EXPERIMENTAL_MAC_NANITE_SUPPORT in spirv_msl.hpp
  3. Rebuild ShaderConductor per the instructions in UEBuildMac.cs where the Nanite define is.

And just to reiterate, this will only work on M2 hardware.

There are no guarantees about performance or it even working at all. It is really just there as a foundational step for further development. That said, you are welcome to try it out and report any feedback here.

Thanks for your patience about this topic.

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