I wanted to buy a M3 Pro Macbook Pro 18GB of RAM with 512GB of storage for Unreal Engine 5. I mean I will be using my Mac only for Unreal Engine 5. I’m an Apple fan and I usually travel around my country. I knew that the Macbooks are much more efficient than PCs but I have some concerns about the Mac that may not be able to provide me a better experience than PC. I have heard some people have issues with the engine. For example crashing issues, rendering issues, nanite and lumen issues, unsupporting marketplace for Mac and etc. Are Mac users still experiencing these issues or are they solved till this day with Unreal Engine 5.4 version?
If these Mac users are still experiencing these issues then what solutions did they find or which apps are they using to solve those issues?
I have also wondered, should I upgrade my RAM to 36 GB by also upgrading my chip to M3 Max or is it fine?
Please write me some answers immediately with detailed explanations.
Sadly, most of the issues that you have mentioned still exist. I have an M3 max with 40 core GPU and a PC with a 6850M XT GPU. On paper, my Macbook is more performant but when I compare the real-life performance, I get ~30 fps on Mac and ~50 fps on PC for the exact same scene with the same scalability settings. Plus, render quality is far superior on PC (more accurate virtual shadows, lumen GI and better TSR implementation) and nanite tessellation is currently very buggy on Mac. Additionally, lots of marketplace plugins are designed for Windows and not being able to use them is a big con
Please don’t get me wrong, I love my MacBook for every other stuff I do. It is the best laptop I have ever used. But I cannot recommend buying one solely for unreal engine. Despite Epic has put a lot of effort so far to make it run better on MacOS., we are not there yet.
A search query about URE 5 performance on apple hardware brought me here July 2025. Leaving my comment for anyone that it may benefit.
I would not recommend using apple hardware for development using URE at this time. I have URE installed on a MBP (M3 Max, 36gb 14cores + 30gpu cores.) At the time of purchase (last year) I saw a number of posts boosting the apple hardware, specifically talking about the vast performance increases for URE. If this is an improvement, it was un-usable in the past. Doing anything in URE on the MBP is frustrating as hell. It does not have the performance at all. I am doing all my day to day development on an old desktop with an AMD CPU and a 4060, and they are not even in the same universe performance wise. My 3 year old gaming laptop even out performs the MBP. We’re talking a desktop built out of leftover parts for 2k, or a gaming laptop worth about 2k when I bought it 3 years ago. They both run circles around a $4k+ Mac book pro.
Save your money and blood pressure, and just buy a windows machine. This coming from a guy that really dislikes Windows.