Hi everyone!
I have a Mac mini with i5 2.3Ghz, Intel Graphics 3000 and 2GB Memory RAM, I will change this memory to 8GB or 16GB, I don’t know. This is a good idea or is better buy other machine?
Thanks!
It would be better to get a new PC with faster hardware, that one will not perform well at all. You need both a faster CPU and a faster graphics processor.
That Mac Mini will be useful if you want to make game running on iOS thru
Intel HD 3000 is below minimum system requirements for UE4 and at the moment the editor is totally unusable on this card. UE4 renderer apparently hits some extremely slow code path in the driver, even on simplest scenes, but so far we weren’t able to narrow it down. We’ll keep investigating and hopefully at some point you will be able to use HD 3000, at least for mobile development, but for now you need a better Mac. Sorry.
What about the HD 4000? Is that usable? That’s what’s in the latest Mac Mini.
HD 4000 is much different. It supports OpenGL 4.1 (HD 3000 is limited to 3.3) and has no known issues in UE4. But it is a slow card, much slower than Intel Iris Pro that’s in some iMacs and MacBooks Pro.
Even the HD4000 is a little wacko… sometimes it has issues on stuff it should support, but goes nuts anyway. I try to steer clear of Intel integrated GPU stuff. Supporting it is a nightmare from what I’ve seen (might be better somewhat now).
I’m running a Mac Mini with Windows 8 (Bootcamp) as of the moment, with the HD 4000. I’m not noticing any serious issues, though it can become a little slow when handling heavy scenes. In order to solve this, I simply turn down the graphical quality and disable the lighting.
I believe certain ‘low-hanging fruit’ as Epic’s put it, will be improved in the forthcoming 4.3 release, so hopefully that’ll help speed things up more! 
Especially as they’ve mentioned improving performance on laptops and the like. Fingers crossed. Though, it’s more than workable for the time being!
Macs are only useful if you have extra money to burn, For the same price, you can normally make a absolute monster pc without even going for the best deals on parts.
The ratio is from twice to 3 times the price for the same hardware in a mac. If you are serious, get a pc by parts, and build it yourself. Ive helped some friends to create absolute monsters for 1000$ that are better than macs at 2500$
My experience is that UE4 editor is still pretty slow on the mac (MBP with gt 650m) I am sure it will improve over time.
But UE4 on the PC is awesome.
For now, use a PC to develop your game and use a mac for deployment.
Here’s the deal, if you’re looking at a Mac Mini, that says to me your price range is in the $500 or so range. I wouldn’t exactly say a $500 PC is going to knock your socks off compared to the Mini, but you probably would be in a better position to add onto the machine over time. New graphics card down the road, more ram, SSD, etc., those are your advantages to going to PC. Browse this site a bit, see what others are doing in whatever price range you can handle: http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc
I’m equally bored by both Mac and PC and the debate over them. Sure you pay a little more for the Mac, but it’s not a 1:1 comparison, especially not when comparing Xeon based builds. Given what I wager is your starting price, you’ll get a bigger bank for your buck on PC’s on the low end, but the higher you go in price that gap begins to narrow. (laptops are a whole other matter tho, but, that whole mess is boring too) Check out the reddit link and see what your budget allows, try to find a build with the best graphic card you can squeeze in there, but even if you go low end you’ll probably beat out the mini.
well i want to purchase this ,… any one suggest…
Suggest what exactly? A Mac? As noted, I’m running Unreal Engine 4 on a Mac Mini perfectly fine. It does, however, become slower on some heavy scenes (such as the Elemental demo), but that’s to be expected. The release of 4.3 will likely help increase the performance.
When it comes to heavier scenes, I’m using a Windows 8 based Wacom machine. However, I purchased them both with portability in mind, as I need to use them in various locations / on the move when required.
The engine will no doubt continue to be enhanced and optimised. I might recommend upgrading a Mac Mini from the default 4GB to 8GB, however. You’ll see improvements from doing so.
Intel 3000 HD
I also have an Intel 3000 HD laptop. (They seem to be ubiquitous).
Is there some way to be **informed **if/when you track down this bottleneck in the driver? 
Is there a list some where that is updated with lists of video cards that Unreal supports?
Also, I wouldn’t say it’s “unusable”. Just very very choppy (With the chair scene in Unreal 4.1.1: 8 FPS lit, 14 FPS unlit) . The main choppiness seems to be when moving objects in the scene.
But I’ve suspended my subscription until it gets fixed. Just need to double the FPS and it will be fine!
They’re missing out on a big market if it won’t run well on laptops!
According to the blurb for 4.3 “Unreal Engine 4.3 includes greatly improved mobile support, awesome new rendering features, improved Blueprint workflows, and strides toward an excellent experience on Mac and laptops.”
But according to people in this forum it DOESN’T work well on laptops. I don’t know who to believe!
An Intel HD 3000 will not run UE4 very well in anything but the simplest of projects. The hardware simply isn’t very fast. On OS X the situation is compounded as Apple’s OpenGL 3.3 implementation, which is all the HD 3000 can support, doesn’t provide some rendering features we require.
Just curious…Can you afford to go all out and buy the …I read that the fully maximized version of the costs a cool $10,000!!! I bet that would just make any game play butter smooth 
So I guess for now UE4 is (still) aimed at creating AAA type games for consoles, PC and Tegra powered smartphones. Rather than for developers making indie games in Starbucks on their laptops. Which I suppose they should use Unity3D instead. Which is kind of confusing as the new price system seems aimed to be affordable to indie developers. Oh well. I’ll stay tuned anyway as I’m interested in how the Blueprint system evolves. And I can still experiment with the blueprints despite the sluggish framerate. 
Strange thing is I don’t know many people who actually OWN a PC these days - apart from my friends who work in games companies! (Why would you if you can run Batman Arkham City on your laptop?) They’re kind of on the way out.
http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/PC_2013_Market_Share_NPD_By_Class_Wide.png
This is like the age old problem of the games companies having the fasted most up to date computers to make the games on to improve productivity but then finding out most of their customers have slower computers. I suppose it was OK when Unreal engine was just an in-house product or they were just selling to other large game companies. But I think targeting the wider indie game making public, they might have to consider a different strategy. Those are my two cents worth.
Also I would disagree that Intel 3000 Graphics is particularly slow. It is faster than some desktop dedicated graphics cards of just a few years ago. It can run things like Batman City, and Spore, and Unity3D. It can do HD video editing. What I would call slow would be an iPad 1 or an Android phone. But I suppose we have different definitions of what is “slow”. In fact I read Intel 3000 is roughly equivalent to the XBox 360 graphics. Hardly slow.
Here’s Skyrim working on Intel 3000.
If you look at the Steam hardware survey:http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ which has info on people that actually play games, you can see that 80% of people there have a dedicated AMD or Nvidia graphics card.
And just because it’s able to run a game doesn’t mean it runs well, like that video example looks bad and has framerate issues. And it’s not all that impressive if it has better capabilities than the Xbox 360, which came out in 2005 and wasn’t all that high powered in the first place.
The Intel GPU’s aren’t actually meant for gaming, they’re meant for people who don’t need much graphical capability. Used to be you didn’t have a choice since the computer requires a gpu to work at all, but many people don’t need that. So by doing it this way, it uses a lot less power and saves on space which made laptops much nicer and more portable.
Ah, but of course Steam is aimed at the PC market so the results would of course come out like that.
I mean if you did a survey on a Mac Games website you would find out that 99% of people use Macs. :rolleyes:
Unlike the olden days though most games these days are bought by “non-gamers”. There are still the pro gamers with their home built PCs and their dedicated graphics cards but that’s not the majority. It’s fine if Unreal wants to aim at this niche market. But it is still a niche (albeit a profitable niche as they tend to spend a lot on games).
Picking a number out of the air, I would guess that 25% of people who want to try out the Unreal Engine own laptops and that would probably go up in later years. I’m not saying it’s bad if Unreal wants to target this market. It could be a good thing to be profitable in a niche rather than try and be something for everyone (see: Windows 8!)
And, mobile GPUs integrated and dedicated will continue to advance in power and efficiency over time. You are speaking as if the problem is just with UE4 and are discounting the hardware impact. It really is only in the past couple of years that we have had some decent options in the PC space in terms of having a laptop that isn’t as thick as a brick, (think Alienware) with decent battery life and that can handle playing what we all consider to be AAA games at passable frame rates without everything turned down to their lowest settings or off. You may wish to have an engine that performs well today across all ranges of hardware (Unity) even archaic, but I am more concerned about having an engine that is forward looking. Be patient and give the hardware time to catch up with the software. We’ll see how well Unity 5 performs on older hardware and what has to be toned down or turned off to have a passable experience on that hardware.
Lastly, comparing the HD3000 to the Xbox 360 is only fair computationally - not in real life. You have operating system overhead and restriction on both the Mac and the PC as opposed to a console where you are able to really play with the guts of the system in a much more unrestricted fashion. Mantle gets you closer to the metal, DirectX 12 will supposedly afford the same opportunities and Metal on iOS is a potential game changer in the mobile space. Things are looking up in a lot of ways in terms of eking out performance on lower powered devices.
I am one of those people who believe the PC market (Laptop or Desktop) will continue to shrink even more in the years to come as the processing power of phones and tablets continues to advance year over year. I also believe this is the last generation (Nintendo will probably have another go around) of consoles. The future is pointing toward the AAA experience on the phones in our pockets streamed to our TVs played using Bluetooth game-pads. Everything else for now is just a stopgap to that eventual future. Is it five years from now that we will attain that AAA experience using the little rectangles in our pockets? Is it ten years from now? I don’t know, but it’s going to happen and I am completely unworried that a company such as Epic won’t be able to keep up if my opinion (and a lot of people’s opinion) of where the future is going actually becomes reality.