Apple Silicon Macs now natively support Unreal Engine 5 | Hacker News Reader

Apple Silicon Macs now natively support Unreal Engine 5

engadget.com

41 pointsPeterCorless26 comments

Epic's Unreal Editor 5.2 now supports MacOS on Apple silicon & Intel chips without requiring Rosetta. Games will run faster.

Release notes here:

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-5-2-is...

> Games will run faster.

If developers do the work. It's worth noting that platforms like Linux are also "supported" by Unreal, but developers rarely end up building for it.

With the rise of steamOS gaming I would be surprised if things don’t change in the future.

Eh, things didn't change when Valve ported their games and client to Linux and native SDL2. The Steam Machines didn't really encourage anyone to write Linux-native titles, and the Steam Deck runs Windows games like-native.

Developers are not going to want to develop, debug, playtest and support a whole other operating system unless they have to. Unless you're already dealing with an ARM native port of your game (like Factorio or No Man's Sky), porting to Apple Silicon isn't immediately attractive.

Do they have stats on how much of that rise is running through Proton? I've even had games run better with it than their native Linux builds.

On the other hand, steamOS proves that you don’t need to target Linux to have a good experience.

So why would developers bother?

Could previous versions of Unreal build for ARM Macs? Or was it only Intel that could then run on ARM Macs via Rosetta? Because if it’s the later then in imagine being able to build a game natively for ARM Macs should mean the game runs faster at least a little bit. I imagine that is what that comment was about.

They're talking about existing games already built with Unreal, for AS, being faster than before. You're changing the subject to complain about a separate topic

is it only me, or wording is kind of weird

> Apple Silicon Macs now natively supports Unreal Engine 5

while technically correct, it sounds to me like this is an achievement of apple silicone like apple managed somehow to now support UE5 and not the other way around

IMO title should be Unreal Engine 5 now natively supports Apple silicone macs

I only mean this in a friendly, helpful way, but you mean silicon rather than silicone

Of course :) as always autocorrect twist my words :)

Is the headline some sort of a Jab against Apple? It should be Unreal 5 now natively support Apple Silicon, not the other way round.

I don't do app development, is targeting Apple Silicon difficult? Don't know what the build process is, but so many apps don't support it I imagine its not a simple case of running a different compiler.

> I don't do app development, is targeting Apple Silicon difficult?

For GPU accelerated applications, like Unreal Engine, you need to reimplement all the rendering logic in Apple's Metal graphics API. That's no small feat for a big engine like Unreal.

Or stick with OpenGL 2. That’s the route I went with for NoH.

Not an option for Unreal for obvious reasons, but it’s an option when you don’t need compute shaders. And believe it or not, the latest techniques won’t get you much further than GL 2 in terms of visual fidelity.

That was already the case with x86 Macs.

In this case I believe the delay was due to the strained relationship between Epic and Apple due to disagreements over the App Store.

From a technical perspective Unreal already supports iOS on 64-bit ARM processors, so it should have been a fairly straightforward port.

I’m an iOS developer and I somehow didn’t consider that supporting iOS for these kinds of graphics intensive projects pretty much automatically makes M1/2/3 support easier.

Will performance to development using M1, 16MB be okay?

Wanting to start out using Unreal but hesitant to install on above machine. I am just starting out so nice if someone could point out what would work well, and when to start looking into a stronger gpu/machine.

Hmm.. 16MB of RAM might not be enough. The Unreal Engine website says that 8GB is the minimum recommended

Does it also support all those game engine feature that were introduced in v5?

No Nanite (as metal lacks image atomics) or hardware accelerated ray tracing for Lumen.

There’s early Nanite support in one of the branches since the M2 macs do have hardware support for atomics.

Tried to download it on my M2, the installer was taking so long and I never saw any windows saying the install was working. Am I doing something wrong?

Tim Sweeney cries about Apple's garbage walled-garden but he sure loves to make it grow. So much for a free ecosystem...

The Mac isn’t a walled garden.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com