I have late 2012 iMac with gtx660m graphic card and Unreal 4 is running extremely slow, about 6 frames per second.
In fact, whole computer slows down when Unreal is running.
Is my iMac below recommended specs?
cpu: 2.9GHz i5
gfx: gtx660m
ram: 16gb
The ue4 isnt running very well on laptop specs -> in your case a gtx660m (gpu especially for laptops). I have a laptop with the same gpu and I also just have around 10 fps
The GPU is the main problem. Mobile GPU’s are known with performance issues in the editor. You may have to upgrade it somehow or switch to a desktop if you want to work easily.
that is a real shame.
UDK works well under bootcamp.
I will try ue4 under bootcamp to check if it is any faster.
You wont get a big difference -> I had a pretty good fps rate in UDK on my laptop, but the fps rate in the UE4… 
I dont have any experience with the iMac, but when you are running windows on it, make sure that your power setting is on “high performance” and that the pc is using the better gpu (of course just when you have 2 gpu in your pc) -> Nvidia Control Panel
I can run simple demos like and the templates at decent framerate on my 2013 Macbook Air 11".
Which project / level are you seeing the poor performance with?
Even very simple default scene (only fog, light source, sky sphere and floor) have 6 frames per second.
Temple_MobileRendering scene is under 5fps.
I have a 1st GEN, every time I went to play/simulate it crashed on the animation level. Then I realized I’m still on 10.8.5. I’ll probably upgrade tonight and see what fps I’m getting and post back.
btw I am on OS X 10.9.2
After looking into it being in a similar situation on my iMac’s 680MX, I found this is unique to OS X. Under Windows on the same machine, performance is much better. Under OS X, performance is terrible. Could be driver related (Apple’s not particularly known for good graphics drivers), could be that UE4’s OpenGL pipeline hasn’t received the same level of polish. Whatever the case, it’s pretty clear that under OS X at least performance suffers pretty hard.
BTW, as it says on the signup page:
I’m hoping Apple gets their **** together, because having native Mac support in one of the most popular game engines on earth is gonna be big for mac gaming… if they don’t flub it. 
(not holding my breath)
Well, with UE3 based games on the Mac (Including the Batman: Arkham series and Bioshock Infinite to name a couple) performance is actually pretty good with the only features lacking being tessellation. That doesn’t mean it’s not a driver problem however, as UE4 may have just hit a performance impacting landmine in Apple’s drivers which can be the case often times. I just hope that whatever its, Epic can track it down.
Problem is in iMac screen resolution (2560 x 1440). After changing resolution to 1080p in bootcamp UE4 works significantly faster. Unfortunately under OSX it is still very slow, even if resolution is downscaled.
I posted this in an the answer hub:
I’m on a MBP first Gen. At first I opened the animation content map and was only getting 10fps , I read that turning down the Engine Scalability Settings down to Medium and Material quality to Low would help and it did by 5fps. I then closed out the Unreal launcher and got another 5fps. I then installed the patch on this page and got 10 more fps. I then set my Display to Best instead of More Space and got another 10-15fps. I am now running at around 40-45fps on that map. Will keep testing and post back.
Hope this helps.
akino
Sorry, but what patch…?
They may have been referring to the 4.3 engine update where we included a ton of performance improvements for laptops in general as well as some OSX specific fixes.
I can confirm that the Mac graphics are very slow for UE4 editor compared to Windows. I have a topend MBA with Intel HD 4000 graphics and the editor chokes on basically anything 3d. I tested the editor on my wife’s Samsung Ultrabook with similar specs and same Intel graphics and it was incredibly faster.
My main Windows notebook has discreet ATI Radeon 7850m with 2 gb dedicated video memory and 8GB system memory (which should be similar hardware to the iMac you are trying to use). This notebook runs the editor perfectly with MS Visual Studio and Modo or Maya LT running at the same time. I haven’t choked it yet.
Intel HD 4000 isn’t going to run much well in terms of gaming, and there shouldn’t be that much of a difference between Mac and Windows on that
You might be surprised how well the HD 4000 graphics chip does on mid range 3d games. The game I was trying to work on is a mobile game with low poly count and low res textures, and still the editor on Mac had a lot of trouble.
Anyway, the point is, on Mac the editor could barely run with the game loaded. On the Windows machine with very similar specs and the exact same graphics chip the editor works fine… maybe 10 times faster than the Mac version.
On OS X we have to use a workaround on Intel GPUs (and only Intel GPUs, other vendors are unaffected) that reduces performance in order to ensure that the scene is rendered properly. Once that GPU driver bug has been fixed we can take the workaround out and you’ll substantially improved performance on Intel GPUs in a many scenes on OS X. Obviously there’s no ETA on that since it is in the hands of Apple & Intel.
Apple’s GL has historically had higher overhead than Windows, though this is very vendor/driver dependent so small performance deficits versus Windows OpenGL are unfortunately common. Typically though you will be comparing to Windows Direct3D 11 which has many features that Apple’s OpenGL 4.1 lacks and thus the stock Windows version of UE4 will generally outperform the Mac. Only when Apple provide a graphics API with equivalent features and performance will we be able to get exactly the same end result in UE4.
At present we are working hard on getting the 4.5 release together, so performance isn’t our primary focus, however I am still looking for ways to improve the Mac version. Any improvements from here are likely to be small and we are in contact with GPU vendors to see if they can spot anything that can be done too. On the right setups we know we can drive the GPU to 100% utilisation, so it is just a process of trying to increase the range of hardware on which that is possible. Sadly, there’ll only be so much we can do and performance impeding driver workarounds definitely don’t help.