I finally made the leap from my fully-cooked, RGB-lit Intel PC to a Space Grey MacBook Pro for game development. With the release of native Apple Silicon support in Unreal Engine 5.2, could Apple finally be gaining momentum in the game development (and dare I say gaming) community?
Moving My Game from PC to Mac
Because I was building on top of the Lyra sample game, migrating my work from my PC to my MacBook Pro was relatively simple.
My game is a Plugin (like “ShooterCore” seen in the image above), so all I really had to track in Git was my Game Feature (Plugins/GameFeatures/<MyGamePlugin>) and some project settings (entire Config directory). Then, I just downloaded Unreal Engine on my Mac, created a new Lyra project, and cloned the GameFeature and project settings to my new project. This worked like a charm.
Performance
I originally started on a 13" M1 MacBook Pro that was lying dormant on my desk, but have since upgrade to a 14" M2 Pro MacBook Pro. Because of this, I had a unique chance to compare performance.
Here is a breakdown of the two laptops I compared:
While the Unreal Engine Editor ran decently well on the M1 model, the performance while running the game and the screen real-estate were detrimental enough to consider upgrading my laptop.
For this comparison, I ran a fresh install of the Lyra project on both laptops. It’s a relatively simple map, but we’re focusing solely on the performance difference between the M1 and M2 Pro chipsets so for all intents and purposes, it’s fine.
(P.S. if you would like to see a comparison of my Intel i5-10600K PC (w/RTX 2060 6GB) against the M2 Pro, let me know in the comments)
The M2 Pro runs this map just fine, maintaining between 30 and 45 FPS. The M1 struggles a bit more, with a choppy 10–20 FPS. Its a pretty noticable difference while playing. When a lot is happening on the screen, the M1 can grind to a halt while the M2 Pro will see minimal stutter.
After taking the screenshots above, I ran Apple’s activity monitor (this will drastically reduce performance).
Truthfully, I don’t know how much information this really provides; however, at a minimum we can see both instances using over 7GB of memory (which is approaching our limit on our M1 MacBook Pro). Also, the M2 Pro is clearly allocating more CPU and GPU resources to the process.
Summary
Hopefully this was helpful in some meaningful way. I was on the fence about upgrading and wished I had this information sooner. But now I’m happy I did. Not only am I noticing significant performance boosts, but I can finally see the icons in my content browser without pulling out my magnifying glass.
