The launch of Unreal Engine 5.2 marks a significant advancement in MacOS development support. The most notable enhancement is the inclusion of Universal Binaries in Unreal Engine from the Epic Launcher, allowing for compatibility with both Intel and Apple M1/M2 silicon going forward.
Regarding Unreal Engine on MacOS, one frequently asked question concerns the compatibility of Nanite and Lumen. The blog post provides additional information on this topic:
Nanite relies on features such as image atomics and forward-progress guarantees, which may not be supported by Apple M1 devices. While experimental support for M2-based Macs is available, it is disabled by default and comes with certain limitations (see below for more information). Our goal is to fully enable Nanite for Apple Silicon devices in the future, but this is not currently possible.
If Quixel assets are set to use Nanite, they will instead default to non-Nanite versions. Otherwise, they will function as intended.
Unfortunately, macOS currently does not support hair/fur/groom strands, as Groom requires image atomic support. However, hair cards and meshes are supported.
Hardware-accelerated ray tracing is also not available on macOS. As a result, Lumen can only use the software ray tracer on Apple Silicon. This produces lower-quality results, such as less detailed reflections and dynamic meshes that are not visible.
The default anti-aliasing mode, Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), is currently experiencing software and hardware limitations on Apple Silicon, resulting in suboptimal runtime costs compared to other platforms. We are working to improve this in future releases. In the meantime, you can switch to an alternative anti-aliasing mode by searching for “Anti-aliasing” in your project settings.
In the video below, you can witness the performance difference between UE 5.0 and UE 5.2 running on an M1 MacBook Pro, and also gain more knowledge about Unreal Engine’s functioning on MacOS.、
