Hi, I am building a project for PC and mobile (Android and iOS). I’d like to build the projects via FrontEnd for iOS which requires a Mac to do so. What are the minimum Mac specs i’d be able to build the project with given the mac can run 10.9.3? I.E not open the editor, just deploy via FrontEnd to iOS from a shared project drive. Would the graphics card requirements still stand even tho i’ll never be in the editor?
Thanks
Hi b14de -
Here is our recommended specs for both PCs and Macs:
Desktop PC or Mac
Windows 7 64-bit or Mac OS X 10.9.2 or later
Quad-core Intel or AMD processor, 2.5 GHz or faster
NVIDIA GeForce 470 GTX or AMD Radeon 6870 HD series card or higher
8 GB RAM
Your build computer would have to have a graphics card with the ability to render the level and play it.
Thank You
Eric Ketchum
Thanks Eric, that’s actually quit interesting. I’m curious as to the need for a mid-level graphics card to build and package, is this perhaps due to Slate being used for UI of the tool’s? How about a build & package via command line? Is the build process somehow partly GPU accelerated?
Either way, to be safe i’ll invest in a higher-end Mac for the purpose.
Thanks again
Actually, UnrealFrontend (like all Slate apps we have except for the editor) uses a simplified renderer that works just fine even on Intel HD 3000, so in theory you should be able to use it on an old, low end Mac that doesn’t meet system requirements for the editor/games. That said, building and packaging a game can be a lengthy process, especially if it has to do some texture compression and shader compilation, so a Quad-core CPU and a graphics card that’s not extremely slow is highly recommended to minimize the time you spend waiting.
Ah that makes sense 
the mac prices seem to go sky-high once a nice graphics chip is placed in the mix, so that’ll be good to know for us on a budget.
Thanks again!
Yeah, sadly. Intel Iris Pro is surprisingly good, though, so I believe that for example the $1300 21" iMac would work pretty good for what you need. Or the $1999 15" MacBook Pro. For building and packaging a quad-core CPU is far more important than the graphics card, that’s for sure.
I’m seeing build times of greater than 4 hours (and resulting crashes near the end of that time) on my Retina Macbook Pro 15" with 8gb of ram. Do these specs still hold true? Is a build on a mac really supposed to take four plus hours?
Hi there. I have a Macbook Pro 2011 - would my graphics card fit the min-spec?
Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB
Short asnwer: No.
No support for DX11 or Shader Model 5.0.
Besides that 512 MB RAM is your system RAM (allocated to the GPU)