UE4 on mac in 2016?

[anonymous_user_48f2118e]

@Stellarbe;622436

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 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.

@DreReid;622517

…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.

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.

@Stellarbe;623247

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

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.

@Stellarbe;627741

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?

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.

@darthviper107;627830

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.

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.