Mac Mini or New Machine to Unreal Engine

[anonymous_user_46c5bce7]

@zooby;109542

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.