Animation on Mid-2012

I do my primary development on a Late 2013 and on a Six-Core Nehalem desktop machine running Windows 8. Both machines have powerful GPUs and CPUs, and UE4 works like a dream.

However, sometimes I like to work on my laptop. Early on, UE (4.1, 4.2) was basically unusable on my Mid-2012 MacBook Pro. The last couple of releases, especially running under Yosemite, Mac performance has improved tremendously and I’ve been able to do productive work on my laptop.

However, the current release (4.4.3), I’m having huge problems with animation when I run on my laptop. Sometimes characters will animate. Sometimes they’ll animate at a very very slow frame rate (like 1 frame every 3 or 4 seconds). Mostly, they’ll just move around in the idle position. Sometimes portions of the character will bulge upward, usually the back/torso area. Characters controlled by AI characters suffer the same fate, but also MoveTo often doesn’t work. Sometimes they will animate but not move, sometimes they’ll move but not animate, sometimes they’ll move a little ways and then get stuck.

I’ve turned off GPU switching so that it always uses the discrete GPU. Running in separate window or as standalone game doesn’t seem to help.

Any thoughts on settings I could change to reduce or eliminate this problem would be greatly appreciated.

This is a 10.10 OpenGL driver bug that only affects Nvidia GPUs and has been filed with Apple for them to investigate. It doesn’t occur on 10.9 which is still the latest officially released version of Mac OS X. We don’t recommend running UE4 on pre-release builds of OS X because we can’t guarantee that there won’t be these sorts of teething problems.

Ah, that’s unfortunate. I actually installed Yosemite on this laptop at the suggestion of an Epic engineer, and overall the performance has been much better. That being said, I know the risks of beta running a beta OS, and if it’s a driver bug, there’s not much to do but wait for Apple. I really appreciate you taking the time to let me know what’s happening, though.

We’ve found a performant workaround which should ship in a 4.5 QFE soon.

That is wonderful news. 4.5 shows some improvement already, so I look forward to the fix.

You can download the workaround from here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/unrealengine/qfe/QFE-FromCL-2326468-Shelve-2331902_Mac.zip (92 MB) Just unpack the zip file and run the patch installer. It will also be included in UE 4.5.1.

Thank you! I left my laptop at home today, but I’ll try this out when I get home tonight.