UE4 on mac in 2016?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

The only posts I can find on mac for ue4 date from pre-4.11. They all state that UE4 runs terrible on mac. However in 4.11 Metal for mac was released and I’m looking for people’s opinions on how smooth UE4 now runs on Macs.

Another question I have is if I want to buy an iMac, would I have to go for the 27inch one with AMD Radeon R9 M390 2GB VRAM or will the 21.5inch one with Intel Iris Pro Graphics 6200 be enough?

for the rest I’m going for 16GB Ram, that should be enough I guess.

What about 4k, 5k display? Will I have to manually change my resolution in the operating system to 2k? Or will ue4 run automatically at 2k? Since 4-5k is ridiculous and unnecessary for games and probably takes more CPU/graphics power.

Anyone developing on mac that can share his experience post-4.11?

I’m not interessted in windows pc’s btw, windows and microsoft is the shittiest thing to exist on earth. I bought a windows laptop with much higher specs and I’m going to sell it because it gave me nothing else but trouble right from the first day I had it. Right along with every windows pc I ever had, only trouble trouble trouble. I had a macbook pro in the past when my hobby wasn’t game development yet and it never gave me any problems, and I’ve had it for 6 years.

So I already have a windows laptop, and it’s not good, the question is, will I trade it for an iMac?

Thanks in advance!

2

With the risk of producing a litle anger in you(not intentional) I think you shoud think a litle more as im not seeing lots of logic here.First if you are serious about doing game design as a hobby>avoid intel gpus.There is a reason they are on the bottom of the food chain.(for me,doesnt even qualify as such).
A R9 M390 is a ¨¨all most¨¨ medium level entry laptop gpu.(will even perform 20-30% weak under osx than windows)(there is a reason bootcamp exist,because someone at apple isnt doing his job right with the optimization).

You see imacs with insane screen res,but the question is, can the provided gpus they have will work at good framerate at 4k?
The answer is no.Atleast ue4 wont.Games too.You will have to lower the res to 1080p and hope to get 40-50fps at best.

You are not telling us the specs of that windows laptop.

I woudnt call windows ****** as most of the software out there is developed for windows and not mac and since companyes use it, than is profitable.With time you will want to make money,than money and feel good doing it.

If you want to go pro,dedicate your time to this and finally make a living out of it,you will invest your cash carefully.If its just for fun/hobby,than go with the mac and a amd gpu.

3

God the amount of time i see people asking the same **** question, no mac computers are capable of being used to create ue4 games. None whatsoever, so if you have some massive fear of using a pc then please quit game development.

4

There are 2 reasons only you should use a Mac for Game development is if you are purely targeting OSx / IOS as your only platform, otherwise, you will need a Mac to build for that, but even a MacMini qualifies for that.

The second reason is if you allready have a Mac and can’t afford to get a pc just for development.

Otherwise, if you have a budget and are getting into Game Development, buy a PC with a Nvidea Graphics card.

5

If you absolutely want a Mac for development, the iMac with the dedicated GPU is the best option, the new Macbooks aren’t all that much more powerful than the old model and the Intel GPU is just not good enough.

If you want the best value for your money, you can get a good PC for half the cost.

6

k so it’s still pretty much a no go for mac for ue4 i guess. That’s a shame. I’m also doing photography and video editing a lot and for that the iMac would’ve been great, but game development is still the most important for me.

So i decided to keep my windows laptop and gonna have another try at getting it “repaired” for the 4th time in a year time. I guess i’ll have to try and not get angry with this windows ********, all the crashes, the shutdowns because of overheating, the virusses, the bad user experience etc

/sigh, so much trouble just to be able to do game development.

well, anyway if I wanted to sell my windows laptop i would have to explain why i’m selling it, the reason being “because i’m not happy with it”, i’m not gonna get much of my money returned anyway :frowning:

I wish for once I could be lucky and buy a windows machine that actually works. I hope if i get it repaired they won’t give me this ******** “well, if your laptop shuts itself down because of overheating, then don’t use so many applications at once”. That’s not why I bought a top-end machine, to have it overheat the moment I open UE4…

Anyway, thanks for the feedback guys. I know what i’m gonna do now

7

By PC, I think everyone was suggesting a Desktop, not a laptop, especially not an older laptop that needs repairs.

8

UE4 performance on mac has improved significantly…but still trails quite a bit behind windows.

I have 27" 5k imac and it works acceptably… but it is orders of magnitude slower than my windows pc with gtx 980 and windows laptop with gtx 970M.

Windows laptops can run ue great, but you have to be very careful about the gpu in them.

GTX 960M and above.

Ideally, GTX 1070.

9

You can get a good i7 Windows laptop with an Nvidia GPU for much cheaper than a Macbook

10

it’s a laptop of 1 year old.

it has 16gb ram
GTX 960M
intel i7 2.6Ghz quadcore

when i turned it in for repairs (3 times already, and i will keep trying) they tell me they couldn’t find anything that’s wrong with the laptop, and they tell me to just not open up too many cpu heavy apps. But the laptop just shuts itself down because of overheating when I open up ue4 (sometimes even when it’s still launching, and i didn’t do anything cpu heavy yet). Either there’s something wrong with the hardware, or the hardware hasn’t been tested properly, so it’s just a crappy laptop.

i don’t care if it runs slower than a desktop because it’s a laptop, but it does meet the minimum system requirements of UE4, so it’s supposed to run smoothly enough. it’s at least supposed to get past launching the engine…

Anyway, I’ve bought like 5-6 windows pcs/laptop’s in my life, and they all gave me similar troubles. I’ve only bought one mac in my life and it never gave me a single problem for 6 long years. You can’t blame me for asking if mac is an option for ue4/gamedev. I’m just asking for honest opinions.

But anyway, it seems i’m gonna have to stick with the windows laptop for a while and have another try at getting it repaired, but it’s good to know that iMacs run ue4 “acceptably” for the future if i’m up to buying a new computer again. i don’t care if it’s a bit slower than windows, as long as it’s acceptable, it’s in the end only a hobby.

Thanks for sharing your opinion OptimisticMonkey, good to hear it from someone who actually owns a mac :smiley:

11

As you said, sounds like you might have a hardware issue around cooling… :frowning:

Laptops are difficult to cool and quality varies.

I have an ASUS ROG laptop an have been quite happy with it - the newer ones have full-blown gtx 1070 which is basically a desktop chip (latest nvidia line does not have separate chips for mobile anymore because of the lower power requirements).

I have also heard good things about the new Razer with the 1060 in it.

Maybe try to sell your old one and get a new one?

12

yes but how do you sell a laptop with a cooling problem that the seller refuses to repair. Also when you’re selling the laptop the potential buyer knows you’re probably not happy with it, so they won’t be giving much money for it probably.

I will just try again to get it repaired. It has had periods where it didn’t overheat and UE4 actually ran pretty smooth for so long it lasted. If it didn’t have the overheating problems it would probably be a decent laptop.

but then again there’s the bad user experience, the virusses and the getting slow after 2 years problems etc. It would be such a relief to be able to do game development on a mac.

13

Poor ventilation and cooling just sounds like a problem with that specific model of laptop, if you can link us to it that would be great. Not to mention if you buy a laptop that has good specs, but are doing stuff that it was never intended to do (heavy gaming and game design) then overheating is just a problem you have to deal with as you made a not so good purchase for what you do in that case.

The other problems you are experiencing are really an issue of how you, yourself, are using the laptop. Viruses dont just magically appear on a computer, youve not been careful enough when downloading stuff to be aware of the viruses, torrents are notorious for stuff like that. Your best bet if you are running into speed issues with the laptop is changing the HDD to an SSD (all newer macbooks and Imacs have some form of SSD in them for the operating system so they function faster). Like I said before, these issues you are running into with the laptop seem to just stem from bad purchasing on your end.

14

I’ve been using UE4 on an MBP with 750m since 4.7. My experience is it’s getting worse, the performance. I don’t know why but that’s what happened to me. Lots of guys say that performance have improved drastically. Maybe it’s my mac; maybe I’ve installed too many; maybe it’s the new OSes in the years; maybe it’s the engine. It’s just the time of the performance drop matches the switching to Metal.

That said, I really don’t agree with all those posts encouraging you to give up on Mac. Granted, even the MacPro litter bin can’t compare to a windows PC with a mere 1070. But you know it as well as I do the difference in the OS. And above all, there is no super powerful Mac, but my 750m is bearable, doesn’t really slow me down, compared to the 67K+1080 windows pc I’m using in the office now(just to save some certain idiots breath, yes my monitors are plugged into the card)(and the problem is mainly with VS not the engine).

About the resolution, I’m no expert but I believe on my MBP, the screen resolution is 28801800 while the desktop resolution is actually 1440900. At least that’s every game I’ve played that has “window maximised” option tells me. It’s similar to windows 10(maybe the other way around, as retina macs came out way earlier), if you are using a 4K monitor/TV, it automatically sets the dpi scale to 300%(it did this for me) so nothing’s too small. Important thing is UE4 doesn’t support retina/high dpi UI yet, according to the Trello roadmap, which means the engine is rendered at 1440*900, if you maximise it that is. Sorry it seems chaotic but you should be able to get it: the engine is not rendered at native retina resolution/4k/5k.

I’ve been learning to create UE4 games with cpp for a while and what I have with Xcode is efficiency and frustration with VS. Xcode tells me what function I can call on the pointer/variable, when I type ./->; Xcode is crispy; Xcode, like most mac apps, responds to command+`, (I’d be grateful if someone can tell me the equivalent shortcut on windows…)etc. While with VS, nine times out of ten I see no tip on what function/variable I can call/get, most of these nine times I have to go check the header files myself for function calls. The one time that it works, it doesn’t pick the overload I’m using automatically… I then tried Resharper, which brings the performance down to a NES. VisualAssistX works okay and it costs a ton(for someone tries to use Xcode whenever he can) and my trial is expiring… The one good thing about VS is a plugin called PowerMode. (Xcode has its problems too. You can’t work with UE4 and Xcode 8.0 because it tries to index the project with over 50G of RAM… But in 8.1 it’s all good again.)

Downside of Mac+UE4: UE4 is designed for windows development. Lots of F-hotkeys, which could be painful on a mac. Can’t get the best graphics.

More about performance: in my experience, even though the framerate may drop below 30 if you are a little too aggressive on your level, everything still responds as crispy as ever, so long as you are not operating the viewport(which is really bound by the framerate). Maybe you’ll have to lower some settings to get your efficiency up if you want to design a super complicated level with some sophisticated graphics tech. But overall, it’s enough to work with, especially if you are indie, since you most likely can’t afford the assets needed for great graphics.
Do note that when you are developing with a Mac, you can’t pack your game for Windows without copying your project to a windows pc/bootcamp. So with a Mac, for a Mac(or iOS, Android, tvOS). This means you should design your level for a Mac(or the other less powerful platforms), less translucent objects, less movable lights, less complicated shader, these kinds of thing. After all, you can always cripple a 4xTitanX Pascal system if you are want to(Just take a look at AC Unity…).

15

Thanks for your insights vito!

I mainly only program in blueprints and might give cpp another go sooner or later. I don’t do extensive level editing. Just programming, so i guess a mac should be good enough for that.

Just one more question. If I develop on a mac, can I make packages to sell on the marketplace that works on windows machines? or will I only be able to sell to other mac users?

16

Everything in a project works on either platform. Unless you get deep into code which I would imagine works a bit differently for the Mac platform. But assets and Blueprints function the same.

17

For me it’s working good at the moment (I’m a very beginner and just learning UE4 for now).

The only thing is – UE4 can’t do dedicated server on mac/linux since it’s requiring build on windows (WTF…) At least I didn’t found any information about building server without windows.

18

For Blueprints and C++ my Macbook Pro 2015 works perfectly, Don’t have high hopes when it comes to creating environments though. I usually use my Desktop PC for that instead.

19

I am a longtime Mac user. I use UE4 on both my MacBook Pro and on my Mac Pro (the small black tower). Epic Games has been working with Unreal Engine (of one version or another) on Windows since 1998. UE4 has been available on Mac since 2014 (I don’t know when they actually started working on Mac support). It is helpful to remember the difference in time that the Engine has been running on each platform when you evaluate them on each platform. Linux is still not available through the launcher, so it is some years behind the Mac in support.

I find that UE4 runs somewhat slower on Mac than on equivalent Windows hardware, and with slightly more bugs. I have also noticed that each major release noticeably brings the performance and behavior closer to that of Windows. A year and a half ago I kept thinking “maybe I should switch to windows…”. Now I rarely notice a difference except in raw performance. Almost all the bugs that I deal with now affect all platforms.

In my experience, you want the biggest, nicest display you can afford for development, but you should pick a lower resolution to run your game in most of the time. Just like in Windows, you can choose what resolution you play your packaged game at, and with what type of fullscreen mode. Most of the time you will just test your game in a small window when you play from the editor.

I feel that comment is childish and hostile. Please keep your comments respectful and accurate. There are many people, including myself, that use UE4 on the Mac every day. If you don’t have any experience with a Mac, then I would encourage you to get some. People can and will succeed with many different tools, even if you don’t use them or don’t like them.

It sounds like you got some bad hardware that can’t handle its own heat. I sympathize. I have had many PC setups that had weird hardware problems that no one else had or could explain. Macs tend to be much more consistent quality with their hardware, though even with Macs you can occasionally get a lemon. Having worked in large organizations with many Macs and many PC’s, I’ve seen the difference in the percentages of hardware that goes bad.

Yes, you can make Marketplace content on a Mac just as you would on Windows. If you do end up getting a Mac, I would encourage you to still test on as many platforms as you can. I bought a copy of VMware Fusion and run Windows 10 in a VM so I can make sure my projects work on Windows (and so I can package them on Windows). That really goes for all platforms you want to target. If you can afford it, get actual hardware for each platform you want to deploy to. You end up owning lots of phones, tablets, computers, consoles, and other devices if you make lots of cross-platform stuff. :wink:

The engine handles all the cross-platform functionality it possibly can. Under normal circumstances, the C++ code you write for your game will work the same everywhere as long as you follow Epic’s coding guidelines. The IDE (code editor) you use will be different (Visual Studio on Windows, Xcode on Mac), but the code itself should be the same.

20

I have a 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 macbook and I use it for comfort couch work. I have a pc as well, but the editor (crashes aside) runs fine as far as platform goes. Working from couch is just far easier than the desk setup.