Hello,
I’m also planning to make the change from PC to Mac.
But I hesitate my decision because I’ve heard some issue and unsupported features of UE on Mac.
I’ve watched apple’s event today and I’m curious about their new chip. Could it be better on UE?
It’s possible that Unreal Engine will perform better on the new M3 chipset. According to available information, the M3 chipset fully supports Nanite features, while the M2 supported Nanite experimentally. Additionally, the M2 chipset comes with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, but we can expect even better ray tracing capabilities in the M3. Both Apple and Unreal Engine developers are working diligently to enhance the game development experience on Apple silicon computers.
I previously used a PC, but now I have the M2 Max MacBook Pro, and I’m satisfied with my choice. As a beginner in game design and development, I may not utilize all of UE’s advanced features immediately. However, I’m currently learning advanced topics in UE, and I can count on support from both Apple and the UE team. I hope this explanation provides you with the information you were looking for.
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M2 processors support Ray Tracing, but do not have hardware Ray Tracing acceleration. I assume that the operating system will be in charge of mapping Metal instructions to use hardware acceleration and not software acceleration, which implies improvement in graphical performance not only in Unreal, but in any app that uses Metal (on M3 processors)
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Thanks for your explanation. I’m not sure to go M2 or M3 now. I would use it on UE for 3D things like character and environment. Those are quite different in price.
The M3 GPU may be “capable” of supporting Unreal features, but it’s certainly nowhere near the sheer throughput you get from an NVIDIA GPU.
Also, Unreal 5 is starting to get very good at using multiple cores, so having more cores, is frequently more important than having a few, slightly faster, cores. The obvious cases where this matters includes shader compilation (especially when importing/creating new content) and light and distance field baking (if that’s your approach.)
If you’re serious about AAA level game development, you need a Windows workstation with something like a Threadripper/EPYC/Xeon CPU. It might be able to also do it on Linux, assuming you or your IT/support people are good with Linux maintenance. The MacOS is a distant third, even with the current M3 level chips.
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In my opinion, MacOS itself is user hostile, and exceptionally hostile to the workflows one might use with Unreal.
Outside of that, the hardware is pretty brilliant. But I suspect a lot of that stuff won’t be supported when running in Windows, so…
Also the Mac Pro doesn’t seem to be getting the M3 refresh yet, and I don’t think I’d touch anything game related without a current Mac Pro, if I were a mac user. The Pros are really nice (albeit exceptionally expensive for their hardware), but the rest of the Mac lineup? I don’t know.
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M3 if you are interested in hardware Ray Tracing acceleration
Agreed. Just upgraded from an M1 MacBook Pro to an M3 MacBook Pro Max (with 64 GB memory, etc.) and it’s still pitifully slow running my UE5.3 project. I’ll have to stick with Windows/Nvidia for the next year at least…
I am very new to UE but i am very keen to learn. I come from a cinema background so Mac has tended to be my choice as an all rounder, I wish to create lighting plans in UE. (so importing 3D sets and using lighting tools to give a sense of what i am going for. I was just about to purchase the M3 Max 14CPU, 40 GPU 36GB RAM (unified). Do you guys think this is sufficient for the type of project i am looking to do or do you think i am wasting my money? thanks
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I can’t comment too much on the technical feasability of using Unreal in MacOS, as using MacOS itself is extremely distasteful to me (to put it mildly 
) but when running Windows on MacOS, on my Mac Pro 7,1 (Intel), the current Radeon driver available for Bootcamp (at least on the 580X, but I’d guess quite likely on the others as well) is not compatible with Unreal. Unreal at the very least throws a warning message that you need to update your driver, and then if you bypass that warning, it runs super slow.
I can’t realistically comment on any other situation, as I’ve never been a Mac user.