Hello @Libran ,Welcome to the forums!
I don’t personally own a Mac, but I’ve been looking into this topic and it seems to be a fairly common scenario, especially on MacBook Air models.
From what I’ve gathered, one of the main factors is thermal management. Since the MacBook Air relies on passive cooling, sustained workloads like running Unreal Engine can lead to thermal throttling over time, which can impact performance. For this reason, many users recommend MacBook Pro models, as they include active cooling with fans and are able to maintain more consistent performance during longer sessions.
One particularly interesting insight I came across was the following:
"With the release of Unreal Engine 5.2 (preview) through the Epic Games Launcher, the editor introduced an official native build for Apple Silicon. Compared to earlier workflows—especially compiling from source—this version provides noticeably better performance and a more straightforward setup.
Previously, running complex scenes often required low scalability settings or even Mobile/iOS preview modes to maintain stable framerates. With the native build, it became possible to run relatively complex scenes (including high-quality Megascans and depth of field) at over 40 FPS on Medium settings.
Additionally, upgrading to macOS Ventura showed further improvements. In the same scene:
• Medium settings can reach close to 60 FPS
• High settings range around 30–50 FPS
• Epic settings range around 24–36 FPS
• Cinematic settings run at approximately 13 FPS"
So updating your operating system to macOS Ventura (or a newer supported version) could potentially help improve performance.
Some users also suggest trying the following adjustments:
- Change Metal API from 2.4 to 3.0
- Disable high DPI mode in Project Settings
- Change streaming pool size from 1,000MB to 18,000MB (half VRAM limit) in the console:
r.Streaming.PoolSize 18000 - Change anti-aliasing mode from TSR to MSAA in Project Settings (still looks great on a high-resolution MacBook screen)
I also found some videos demonstrating different ways to improve performance, along with several posts discussing this topic. Overall, these adjustments seem to provide noticeable improvements depending on the project and setup.
Video 1
Video 2
Hope it helps!