Hey Moo,
Our recommended specs, found in our FAQ (Häufig gestellte Fragen - Unreal Engine), will run UE4 well.
Desktop PC or Mac
Windows 7 64-bit or Mac OS X 10.9.2 or later
Quad-core Intel or AMD processor, 2.5 GHz or faster
NVIDIA GeForce 470 GTX or AMD Radeon 6870 HD series card or higher
8 GB RAM
Hope that helps!
I really want to use Unreal, but it runs like a pig on my iMac, which is great for everything else (Photoshop, Unity, Blender, XCode…) but I am now forced to admit might be considered “old”.
It’s a "Mid 2011 with Radeon 6770 card and 12Gb RAM. I totally admit to being so eager to try Unreal Engine that I didn’t consider that Mac I bought 2 years ago would so totally fail to run it.
So there’s no way at all I can use Unreal Engine right now, and I’m dubious that any updates will fix that. Even a blank project sends my entire machine into a crawl. Not sure whether to cancel my sub and chalk it up to experience, or to let this drive me into buying more hardware.
So what is minimum spec Mac you suggest for running Unreal at a sensible frame rate? Mac Pros seem rather overpriced, and even iMacs get expensive if you up GFX card.
Which leads me to conclusion that even though Unreal now supports Mac, Mac doesn’t really support Unreal? And best option is to spend £1000 on a Gaming PC instead? Except that in all other respects I’d much rather be developing in OSX and not Windows. And especially as iOS development requires Mac anyway, so moving files from one machine to another every build is going to become annoying. (I suppose dual booting OSX on a PC and then running Unreal in OSX might be an option).
Hi Moo, we took a look at our workaround for an OpenGL driver bug and made some changes that should really improve performance on AMD GPUs. A patch is currently being tested by our QA to verify there isn’t any fallout. Once we get a thumbs up, we’ll reply here with a download link.
Thanks for your quick response. Can you (or anyone) confirm whether latest base model iMac is fast enough for Unreal Engine, or whether it would be a better / cheaper option to run it on a PC? I am rather out of touch with PC tech having been comfortably using Macs for a while, so please forgive my ignorance.
If you have option of dual booting your iMac into Windows I would give that a try before giving up or just wait 6 months or so to give it another go on OSX. reason I say that is because on a different thread someone is reporting better frame rates on Windows 8.1 than on Mavericks.
Try following patch. We’re aiming to bundle this into a public fix early next week, but want to make sure it fixes your problem first.
http://cdn.unrealengine.com/qfe/QFE-FromCL-2027741-Shelve-2030638.
Also, try hiding Unreal Engine Launcher. We’ve had reports that on some Macs it helps with performance. I’ve been able to reproduce this, actually, so we will be working on a fix soon.
And don’t give up on your iMac just yet. Until we fix performance to your liking, you may play with Quick Settings->Engine Scalability Settings a bit.
Trying out patch now and it seems to be improved on Mac Pro with FirePro D700. Interaction speed in editor with reflections demo is very good. Doesn’t feel sluggish like before. Based on what I know about other Macs and OpenGL (I review Macs: January | 2014 | Ars Technica ), I’d say you’d be fine with an iMac with Geforce 680 MX or greater since Nvidia’s cards tend to be a bit faster in OS X.
@MichaelT yes, on my Mac (2014 13" retina MBP) Unreal Engine Launcher eats 12%-15% all time, for no good reason. Closing it definitely frees up some CPU cycles. See also my report here: High CPU usage on Mac OSX - Debugging, Optimization, & Profiling - Epic Developer Community Forums
Well it has certainly improved things. A blank project with a single primitive seems quite responsive. But sample scene with two chairs was running at about 1 fps. My iMac has a Radeon HD 6770M, which seems not much earlier than recommended (ie. good performance?) Radeon 6870 HD?
I’m happy to admit I jumped in eagerly before reading rec spec, and that my iMac is technically “Mid 2011” so is getting on. I’m speccing up a Gaming PC with a GTX 770 which I hope will give me excellent performance. I’d buy a new Mac but I’m now concerned that GT750M 1Gb in iMac won’t be up to it. And a Mac Pro is rather outside my budget.
I bought a used Mac Pro and threw in a 7950 before prices got inflated. 5 year old xeons, all 8 cores perform about as much as a 3770k. 7950 performs like a 7950. Total I paid less than a grand. You can probably easily pick up a 2009 Mac Pro cheap now.
ibayibay1 - a newer iMac would be faster because they have PCIe 3.0 and faster CPUs than a 2009 Mac Pro.
today this patched build stopped running.
Much as I love OSX - purely to run Unreal (everything else runs fine on my 2011 iMac) it makes more sense to me to spend £1000 on a Gaming PC with a GTX770 in it that will definitely (?) work at a decent frame rate, than to spend £1600 on a new iMac that might work, or indeed £2500 on a Mac Pro that might work. I can even justify it in immediate saving (forgetting potential 5%) on a £2000 Unity licence. And perhaps I might grow to like Windows again. It’s depressing that Mac doesn’t have power needed though.
If you are doing unreal, then I do not recommend a mac if you have choice. However If you need a mac for whatever reason, My solution works well for me. Downsides of having an older computer is that it has SATA2, and DDR2 Ram.
Thanks. I’m starting to see wisdom in getting a PC. My Mac has been great for iOS dev, but I’m moving towards desktop games and Rift, so it seems like I need another PC in my life.
Thats just way gaming industry is. Check back in a few years and see If valves linux dream becomes reality.
Our QA tests found no problem when testing this patch on our Mac Pros, so I’m a bit surprised. Is launcher crashing or editor? Much appreciated if you could attach your logs so we can assist.
Launcher logs: C:\Users\User.Name\AppData\Local\UnrealEngineLauncher\Saved\Logs
Engine logs: C:\ProgramData\Epic\Engine\Saved\Logs
Did you, by any chance, use Verify Install option in Launcher? It would remove patch and restore your installed engine to 4.0.1. That’s nature of quick fixes we have, I’m afraid. We will release 4.0.2 which will contain all fixes we’ve made in past few days early next week. Sorry for inconvenience.