I am very excited to see the Unreal Editor finally come to OS X. I just downloaded to give it a try and was quickly disappointed by the performance. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining here, just giving feedback and I understand that the “Mac OS X support hasn’t undergone serious developer testing yet”.
During my tests, I didn’t get more than 20 fps with any of the example projects. Not even with the simplest ones (Tappy Chicken). I also realized that this doesn’t seem to be a rendering performance issue, because it’s not just the game view that is slow, but the entire editor, including sliders, buttons, scrollers etc.
To rule out that my machine was too slow to handle the load, I also installed the editor on Windows (same machine). On Windows the editor runs smoothly. I get 60 fps for the simpler projects and even on the more complex ones I get a usable 30.
I was/am intending to work on some mobile games and it would be nice, if I could stay on the OS where I am at “home”. I certainly would expect a relatively fast laptop to be able to handle mobile quality graphics, even with the added editor overhead. Thanks for the otherwise very nice work so far!
System:
OS X 10.9.2 / Windows 7 SP1
(Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2012)
2.6GHz Quad-Core i7-3720QM / 8GB / GT 650M 1GB GDDR5
My dev partner runs one of the new machines. He was having some major issues recently after installing the latest update. Turns out the graphics driver was completely broken, and the only fix was to restore to an earlier version.
Granted, you are running the MacBooks, but that hardware should run this just fine. Which makes me wonder if it wasn’t just the new pros that got fudged in recent updates.
The UE 4.2 update should work around the more egregious OpenGL bugs introduced in 10.9.3 on the new and we are working closely with the Mac OpenGL driver teams to get them fixed properly going forward. I’m not aware of any problems on other Macs/GPUs in 10.9.3 at present.
As for performance on a 9,1 (2012, non-15"), 2.6Ghz Quad i7, 8GB RAM, Nvidia 650M GT 1GB, using the UE4 4.2 Preview build:
10.9.3: BasicCode: ~45fps/22ms, RealisticRendering: ~40fps/25ms
Win8.1/NV335.23: BasicCode: ~47fps/21ms, RealisticRendering: ~42fps/24ms
(Windows tests run with -opengl argument so that both OSes run with the same OpenGL feature set, no other programs, esp. not UnrealLauncher, were running on either OS)
I’m surprised that your seeing such a discrepancy Bajee, open a thread on AnswerHub so we can investigate your performance further. It makes me wonder if your machine isn’t dropping down to the Intel HD 4000 for some reason as that would run so much slower.
I’ve noticed that changing the “Engine Scalability” to Low from Epic actually makes the CPU usage go up (in some cases rather dramatically: Low=123%, Epic 73%).
This is because when your frame-rate is limited by the GPU the CPU has to go to sleep each frame and wait for the GPU to finish. Under OS X anytime an application thread goes to sleep that time slice is given over to another application and so your apparent CPU usage falls. This is referred to as being GPU-bound.
By lowering the settings you should see an increased frame-rate, but the CPU will now spend much-less and possibly no time sleeping as it never has to wait for the GPU to finish. Hence the CPU usage will be higher.