This is a brand-new installation via the Epic Games Launcher! The editor crashes immediately, I can’t even create a new project. Is anyone else having this?
From what I can gather, macOS 26.5 broke backwards compatibility with the existing versions of the Metal shader converter. You can rollback to 26.4 to resolve the issue or wait for Apple to issue a macOS hotfix/publish a new version of the tool that works with 26.5.
Or wait if Epic updates the engine code in the next preview update. Let’s hope there aren’t any dependencies on the older Metal shader converter and that the whole thing doesn’t end up in a back-and-forth between Epic Games and Apple.
I don’t want to speak too authoritatively on the topic but once Apple releases a new version of the Metal shader compiler that is compatible with 26.5, Epic should be able to release an update to UE that bundles the new version. Right now there isn’t a (publicly available) version of the tool that is compatible with 26.5 so the ball’s in Apple’s court.
Following up on this to say that disabling bindless rendering is a workaround I had success with (performance will be impacted, but it will unblock development on 26.5 with 5.8 for now)
In DefaultEngine.ini
[ShaderPlatformConfig METAL_SM5]
BindlessConfiguration=Disabled
[ShaderPlatformConfig METAL_SM6]
BindlessConfiguration=Disabled
Or launching with -BindlessOff worked for me. You might need to clear shader caches for the changes to take effect
Apparently this has been fixed with the 5.8 release of today (on macos Tahoe 26.5.1).