Unreal Engine is looking good enough on macOS that Epic is starting to brag about it. That’ll still depend on which Apple Silicon machine you’ve got, though – which brings us to why the M4 Mac mini is starting to look like a serious live visual machine.
Unreal on the Mac: once more, with feeling
Okay, Unreal Engine 5.5 dropped back in November, so it’s not exactly news – not at the pace Epic is moving. But people have been using it intensively since then, so there is more to say.
And Epic decided to check in recently to talk about the real goal: bringing macOS “up to feature parity with Windows.”
Make no mistake, it’s not there yet – Windows still delivers the most seamless experience, and it’s generally speaking the most affordable bang for your buck. (Linux is a distant third, with Engine support but no Editor.) But the Mac is getting there, especially if you have a more recent Apple Silicon chip and the latest OS. That’s relevant both for people who prefer the Mac platform and for people needing to target Apple devices.
You’ll definitely want Apple Silicon here on your dev machine, plus at least macOS 13 Ventura or later (ideally macOS 15 Sequoia or later). But then you get a ton of functionality that at some point was Windows-only:
- Shader Model 6
- Lumen software ray tracing (M1 + M2 + M3 – actually works on Intel + AMD GPU, too, though I’d recommend Apple Silicon)
- Lumen/Patch Tracer hardware ray tracing (M3+, in progress – not quite there yet; this is also MegaLights, for instance)
- Nanite rendering (M2+ required)
- Experimental support for Metal Shader Converter
- Experimental iOS Simulator support (requires you to build from source)
- Xcode privacy manifests
- Experimental Apple Vision Pro support
I think you’ll want an M3 or M4, but even an M2 starts to look reasonably competitive. (I’m on an M1 Pro Max, and Unreal Editor is usable on that, even if you do need to turn some settings down.) It’s worth reading through the whole post if you’re Mac-based (or Mac-curious); it includes tips like switching from Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) anti-aliasing to another mode to avoid a performance hit.
Bringing Unreal Engine on macOS up to feature parity with Windows—progress report [Tech Blog]
What you’ll notice isn’t here is any mention of MetaHumans; you can still load those on the Mac, but the MetaHuman for Unreal Engine plugin remains Windows-only. I’m guessing that ironing out these other wrinkles may help clear the way for a proper Mac plugin port, and I know it’s one a lot of people are looking for.
UEFN (Unreal Engine for Fortnite) is also still very much a Windows affair.
You may want to look at the development requirements for more technical details. Apple Silicon M3 is now the recommended processor; to me, it’s really about M4.
Folks have been giving this a try. There are some more details and niggles to go through; O. Song has a terrific video explaining that on the (ideal) M4. Mac users probably already guessed some of this: weird behavior with virtual shadow maps, Niagara issues, Virtual Texture issues, and… oh, it turns out that FBX import problem might not have just been me. (Doh.)
This is worth watching, as it gets straight to the issues you’d want to know about:
I don’t want to be discouraging, though. Unreal Editor is now really usable on the Mac, and there’s a ton of stuff you can do – impressive, given that for most users the entire engine is free. It’s also more than enough to play around with MetaSounds; more on that soon.
I wouldn’t recommend buying a Mac just to use Unreal; heavy users should absolutely look first at Windows machines. But watching the pace of progress and the price of a Mac mini, that’s something that could change.
PS, review: whirlwind tour of Unreal 5.5…
M4 for VJs
Here’s where the M4 Mac does start to look appealing – live visual/VJ applications. Now, typically, Apple’s play has been in the MacBook territory, and it still remains competitive there. But these machines get pricey to configure. The entry-level Mac mini could be a Mac you get between big, spendy laptop upgrade cycles. That starter model is lacking in drive space, but as it’s such a tiny box, you probably don’t care about a hefty flash drive sticking out one of the ports. And 16 GB RAM is pretty usable.
I don’t have one in front of me to test, though, so I took interest in this video – nice work by Zunayed Sabbir Ahmed:
Unreal gets interesting for VJing and live visuals, too, while we’re on the topic – vying with Resolume, VDMX, and Touch Designer for the most-used tool these days. And again, I doubt I’d think about the Mac first if I just wanted GPU performance, even with the Mac mini. But it it is now good enough to be in the running.
Thoughts? PC users, which hardware did you settle on; anything you love? Let us know.