Questions on UE4 for Mac

[nafonso]

Has anybody made an attempt to develop on mac but using Visual Studio via vmware? I’m just wondering because besides performance on mac (which is improving), the biggest issue is the xcode isn’t a good c++ IDE (for example, you can’t refactor a method name in c++).

[darthviper107]

@marksatt-pitbull;224872

That’s really interesting, from our testing with UE4 I’d expect to see the new Mac Pros a bit further ahead of the Nvidia 775, so that’s a bit surprising. The spec. lineup with the W series cards is also illuminating.

It is a bit surprising that that 's aren’t faster in the linked article, but I never said it was the most cost-effective Mac around, just that it isn’t an especially poor performer either. Like the G4 Cube the 2013 is beautiful, but at a substantial cost. The could potentially run UE4 faster still if we were able to use the second GPU efficiently but that is extremely tricky and it isn’t a priority to optimise one small subset of Macs for the moment.

As Chris.B says in the Q&A at the end, AMD don’t optimise their Mac drivers just for CAD or just for games. His team have been fixing bugs on the D-series cards for us as we’ve reported them, just as they did for the 6000-series back when I was porting Batman Arkham City .

Yeah, it’s not that it’s not going to work, but it’s not an effective choice if you’re developing for video games. The iMac would be a better choice there, or if you can replace the GPU with a better gaming card which may also be an option. Though I don’t think any of today’s Macs have enough space to fit the graphics cards today, everything is designed for a specific size, iMac, Macbook, and even .

[anonymous_user_fb692cdc]

@marksatt-pitbull;224872

It is a bit surprising that that 's aren’t faster in the linked article, but I never said it was the most cost-effective Mac around, just that it isn’t an especially poor performer either. Like the G4 Cube the 2013 is beautiful, but at a substantial cost. The could potentially run UE4 faster still if we were able to use the second GPU efficiently but that is extremely tricky and it isn’t a priority to optimise one small subset of Macs for the moment.

This has been a trend since the early days of the new . The FirePros just don’t benchmark anywhere near Apple’s claims. The odd part is that the D700 is usually outperformed by the D500. That makes me the test a little suspect to me, honestly, but the real world performance has been… well, it’s a beast (but the lack of crossfire or CUDA and poor support of OpenCL temper that a bit). I got one of the first ones to roll off the assembly line and have been using it over a year as my primary machine.

That being said, I run a business that does a lot of native iOS & Mac in addition to game development and I prefer my main machine be a Mac. If I were buying a dedicated machine primarily for UE4 game dev, I’d custom-build a gaming PC from parts. The is just not a good value proposition for that use case unless you place a really high value on using a Mac. If you already have a , though, it’s a great machine for UE4 work, both under Mac OS as well as bootcamped into Windows.

[eagletree]

I wanted to close this thread as I so hate coming across a thread that doesn’t finalize with an answer. We installed a Sapphire HD7950 video card in the Mid-2012 machine and tested. It eliminated the freezing that is so common on the mac when using UE4. The vehicle demo, which was unusable works well, graphics are smooth and no freezes. The high cost of this card ($479) makes it questionable if it’s worth staying with the mac for the development system unless one has another reason to do so. We do, so it’s a good solution.