MacOS High Sierra – Is it viable or nah?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hello, dear UE enthusiasts (and pros).

I’ll get straight to the point: I am thinking of upgrading my machine later this year and I am thinking if I leave my warm and cozy macos and switch to win10 machine.

I am interested in creating cinematics with UE+Houdini combo, and I saw the WWDC presentation this June, which is kinda promissing but really is light on any information as of yet.

So, currently I run on 27" imac @ GTX775m [2GB of vram] and the inflitrator demo gives me 20FPS on MacOS Sierra 10.12.5 whereas it goes around 30ish FPS on win10 creators upd (same machine, installing windows on different partition). When particles and distortions come in play, macos just commits suicide and drops below 10fps (the shot where the inflitrator is hiding behind an optical shield).

Which brings me to my point: is the situation any better on 10.13 (presumably with UE 4.17) – like, Metal2 and other features? Or should I just give up and get a win10 machine? Current disparity between macos and win10 is around 45-50% in pure fps count, which is, well, a disaster.

2

You’re probably not going to see much of a difference on the same machine

3

Personally I built a beefy windows 10 pc to tide me over and I use it whenever I need the power. I will wait and see how metal 2 & thunderbolt 3 external GPU enclosures performance pans out, and will consider upgrading my old mac if things look promising - I dont really expect parity with windows though, not for a long time at best.

4

Parity is not something I am looking for, I am well aware of how hard could it be, but I get the point – I would be better off with a win10 high spec system.
Thanks for replying!

5

Look here, I have a 2010 MacBook Pro and the 2017 MacBook Pro (the one which apple recently just updated). I have installed macOS High Sierra Beta in both and both have UE4. The 2010 MacBook Pro which has a NVIDIA Gtx 330m was delivering an amazing performance of about 15fps (for a graphic card so bad) while the 2017 MacBook Pro gave 45fps. Apple has also announced the iMac Pro and I am getting that when it comes out for app development, software development, website development and website development.

6

High Sierra brought us one great thing and that is eGPU support, currently running MBP 2017 with ASUS XG2 external box with RX 480 in it, UE4 editor works perfectly.

7

Made the leap to beta 5. on my 2016 iMac (with SSD) its all running very well, I think the OS is a little snappier than 10.12.

On my 2012 iMac its maybe a tiny bit slower.