Apple Silicone / Metal Support

haffy

Hi, 
I am in a situation where I will start stying Game Development, I will test different areas (Environment, Concept Art, Tech and more). I have been offered to keep my current computer (M1 Max 64GB Ram Macbook Pro) at a low monthly rate. Does Unreal have full support for Apple Metal yet? Especially Nanite and Ray Tracing.

As of this article it does not look promesing for my M1 computer: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/tech-blog/unreal-engine-5-2-brings-native-support-for-apple-silicon-and-other-developments-for-macos

Thanks in advance for the help.

poopipe

I've no direct experience with unreal on mac but I would advise being extremely cautious about any claims epic make regarding compatibility(That goes double for new features because they barely function on PC yet)

It depends what you're planning to do - if this is for educational / learning purposes then you might as well try it on the mac, it won't cost you anything to find out. 

If you're planning to do something commercial before you next plan to update your hardware I'd chop the mac in for a (big) PC.
Ue5 is not production ready on windows at the moment - it's not going to be any better on macos 

(Ive shipped one title and am about to ship a second on ue5 so this isn't just an opinion formed from fannying around at home and getting cross when things don't work (I have a thread for that))

haffy

Thanks for you insight @poopipe, I plan to learn and do freelance work at the side. So I will go for a PC build.
Regarding what section I will put my focus is the thing I want to find out now during the study years, time to put down some real focus. I have been doing allot of visualisations the last couple of years..
Right now I am working remote from a MacBookPro to a PC built by WS Computer (master builder imho). Saidly I can't buy that and bring it with me.

Alex_J

poopipe said:

Ue5 is not production ready on windows at the moment - it's not going to be any better on macos 

can you say some more about that? is it logged anywhere public?

does not-production-ready mean that you face some blocking issues which require changing source code to solve, or extensive workarounds, etc? If so, is it platform specific things?

poopipe

haffy said:

Thanks for you insight @poopipe, I plan to learn and do freelance work at the side. So I will go for a PC build.
Regarding what section I will put my focus is the thing I want to find out now during the study years, time to put down some real focus. I have been doing allot of visualisations the last couple of years..
Right now I am working remote from a MacBookPro to a PC built by WS Computer (master builder imho). Saidly I can't buy that and bring it with me.

if you're working remote then it doesn't matter what machine you carry around with you does it? .. 

Alex_J said:

poopipe said:

Ue5 is not production ready on windows at the moment - it's not going to be any better on macos 

can you say some more about that? is it logged anywhere public?

does not-production-ready mean that you face some blocking issues which require changing source code to solve, or extensive workarounds, etc? If so, is it platform specific things?

It's not written anywhere official cos Epic aren't going to admit to it. 

but yes - thats basically the size of it.
You find yourself unable to do things (eg build HLODS, package world partition with nanite landscapes) because it is broken and the only solution is a fix to the engine code or just not doing it (in the case of static lighting in world partition). 
This was true to an extent with 4.x but it was generally a much more stable environment and you were making engine changes primarily to expose or change functionality - not patch over something that hadn't been finished properly.  
UE5 is just UE4 in a dress so the older features are generally where they were in 4.27 with the exception of the ones they've ripped out and replaced (see HLODs and a properly functioning outliner for world composition)  


It's still early days for 5, and the issue I have isn't really with whether the things work or not - it'll be fine in a year or two. 
My issue (rage) is about the claims Epic are making.
If they said "we're only on our 3rd minor point release, these new features are in beta"  then it would all be fine but they're not doing that - they're telling everyone they can fill a massive open world with megascans assets, light it with lumen and expect it to run on a series S (you can't do that btw). 

haffy

poopipe said:

haffy said:

Thanks for you insight @poopipe, I plan to learn and do freelance work at the side. So I will go for a PC build.
Regarding what section I will put my focus is the thing I want to find out now during the study years, time to put down some real focus. I have been doing allot of visualisations the last couple of years..
Right now I am working remote from a MacBookPro to a PC built by WS Computer (master builder imho). Saidly I can't buy that and bring it with me.

if you're working remote then it doesn't matter what machine you carry around with you does it? .. 

True, but I will not be able to access the PC anymore. I could have been clearer in my text, I see it now..

poopipe said:

It's still early days for 5, and the issue I have isn't really with whether the things work or not - it'll be fine in a year or two. 
My issue (rage) is about the claims Epic are making.
If they said "we're only on our 3rd minor point release, these new features are in beta"  then it would all be fine but they're not doing that - they're telling everyone they can fill a massive open world with megascans assets, light it with lumen and expect it to run on a series S (you can't do that btw). 

Why are they doing that? It´s not like the competitors is even close in the visuals.

And btw I am looking at at Ryzen 7900X, RTX 4080, 128 Ram build, is that fine or do I need to go up to 4090?

poopipe

My guess is that they make more money off the asset store than they do licensing the engine so if they can drive people to have a go at game dev, buy a load of assets and muck around at home they do very nicely off it. 

I dont want to put anyone off using unreal - it's the best option by far if you want to do something graphics focused.  you just need to be a bit careful not to believe everything the marketing material says in a way that you didn't a few years ago. 

hardware..
I'm working with a 10gb 3080 at home and a 16gb mobile 3080ti at work (which is a low powered 16gb 3070 in real terms) -   more gpu memory never hurts but I can't say I've ever really had a gpu memory problem that wasn't directly caused by a bug on the 3080. Unreal's streaming system is very good. 
Most of our team work on 3070s at the office, gpu isn't really the issue provided you have something fairly competent and make some vague efforts to not waste resources at every turn. 
I wouldn't overspend just for unreal's sake.