To be fair there are a lot of UE games that do not have Mac ports (like FF7 Remake for example). Doesn't mean CDPR will bother making Witcher 4 MacOS...
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
OS X New witcher announced, migration to UE5, future of mac gaming
- Thread starter magikow
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Had to watch a comparison video on YouTube for this, as I don't have Fortnite installed anymore (I played a little back when it came out). Still not convinced there would be any advantage of Lumen for this except maybe (just maybe) for water. The massive benefit of Lumen should be with photorealistic scenes. Time will tell.
Same engine as Witcher 2, except some modifications to keep up with time. It was their choice not to bring it to the Mac. That being said, do we know if Witcher 4 will make it to Mac? Just because they're using UE5 doesn't automatically mean it will run and be released on Mac.
The choice for UE5 for this type of open world game makes sense. The engine can handle it and it's much cheaper than making a modern custom engine. Unity would have trouble with this, the only other alternative would be CryEngine unless they'd buy a custom engine from a competitor.
Which I stand by my assertion that the core issue is not compatibility nor lack of skill, considering many companies also release ios games as well on engines that support iOS (although separate titles), just a lack of desire to release titles on the Mac.
I feel like I should clarify my point:
I don’t know if, nor believe The Witcher 4 will have a Mac release. And frankly I don’t care.
My point is that it’s hardly a benchmark to determine the entire future of games on the Mac by a single release, during a processor transition, from a company that hasn’t really gave a **** about the Mac for almost a decade now.
Makes sense. The old TR engine is 10+ years old. Time for something new and UE5 matured enough to handle all these standard action adventure games like TR or Shooter/Battle Royal type games. It saves a ton of money using a off-the-shelf engine and if there's no special need for a custom engine, it's the right choice. Unity would probably struggle a lot for TR.
I wonder if Unity team is shopping their engine around to "big" dev/publishers in hope to score a conversion from a in house system. (Activision uses Unity for CoD:Mobile with no apparent plans on converting over to the IW Engine)
As far as shopping, yes big studios are well aware of it. I'm sure anyone will pick the right engine for the job, it's just that expensive titles are made to look photo realistic, where UE is the better choice over Unity. Or they have specific needs, then it's a in-house engine.
As for CoD:Mobile, they tested both UE and Unity. The UE graphics looked better, Unity has less detail and worse lighting effects. However, for a mobile game, that's probably not important. The difference was not massive, probably limited by mobile devices hardware. I guess it's much cheaper for them to use Unity though.
As for the IW engine, they had it reworked for version 8. It is a very customizable engine from what I know, so that might be the reason to keep it alive and going vs. using UE4/5. That's also the reason why some pick CryEngine over UE. That being said, that's on Epic. They don't make it exactly easy to customize UE and usability doesn't seem to be their primary interest either.
Unless Apple opens the wallet..sadly it's not going to happen. I'm somewhat hopeful that when the new Mac Pro launches (probably WWDC 22) Apple will have extended Metal to accept AMD GPUs which might feed a flicker of hope, but if I'm being 100% honest I suspect Apple will roll out an Apple discreet GPU that a hand full of companies will support.
Last edited:
??? Metal always worked on AMD GPUs, so what would change?
Also why would Apple role out a discreet GPU when their new paradigm is unified memory? Or are you saying they implement unified memory with external GPUs? How?
Nvidia too, but the bad blood between Apple and Nvidia makes it less likely. Ultimately internal adoption of MoltenVK and CUDA code access by whatever means should be priority #1.
There has to be a reason Apple is even holding on to the modular Mac Pro concept as a working blueprint for a product they continue to spend money in R&D on.
If they found a way to move the "UltraFusion" interconnect to a nearby "discreet" slot that would make sense and if they found a way to Rosetta-ize CUDA code to their GPUs I would be fine with that too. The point is that I don't see them making almost the same identical mistake they made with the Mac Pro (7,1)
Personally, I don't care how they ingest the CUDA code, Streamcore processor code and get Metal working with Vulkan it's just critical that they find a way to make it happen.
Since Nvidia doesn't work on modern Mac hardware anymore, there's no need to run Metal on Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia isn't coming back and neither is AMD to stay, they're the past for Apple.
Keeping the Mac Pro up and alive isn't that expensive anymore. There's no research and development for it anymore, only maintenance. The reason is simple, it's by far the most powerful machine Apple has right now. They don't have a M-series chip that can keep up with it in every task, only in selected benchmarks for marketing.
Too expensive and physically too difficult to do to become feasible. Sure it could be done, but not in this "low cost" price segment. More thinking about full blown Nvidia DGX. So, maybe $200k for such a Mac Pro?
That's not going to happen. CUDA is proprietary and only works on Nvidia hardware by definition. CUDA is not open source, so not anyone can use it, you need to buy an Nvidia card to do it. Nvidia isn't going to license it to Apple either, they want to sell hardware.
There have been a number projects trying to run CUDA code on non Nvidia hardware. They all failed, because it's a translation layer or emulation which comes with a massive performance hit. And neither is Vulkan going to happen, Apple moved away from CUDA, from OpenGL and Vulkan/MoltenVK. Technically we still have MoltenVK, but it's 3rd party and Apple is not going to utilize it. They have their own API which is tailored to their own hardware. The rest is just wishful thinking.
And for the record, I too would massively benefit from Nvidia cards in Macs, which would make porting my stuff so much easier. But it's just not going to happen, which is the reason I'm running Mac Pro class Dell machines now and the Mac Pros are collecting dust.
I know some people that would be very happy with MacOs based Nvidia DGX server room.
Apple does have the tendency of engineering things many companies can't. I don't even care if Apple wants to become an Nvidia OEM and reorganize the card, add CUDA cores to the Mx mix or a whole new line of SOCs, which is going to have to happen anyway. Whatever...they just need to get working CUDA cores ASAP.
The Matrix Awakens UE5 Demo Runs at 30-50 FPS@1440P on 12900K+3090 Rig
The newly released The Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 demo runs at 30-50FPS@1440P on a high-end PC (12900K CPU, 3090 GPU).
wccftech.com
So no one has been able to compile the demo on MacOS? These results above are kind of brutal for the hardware involved.
So we're putting this in the "wishful thinking but never going to happen" box then?
Have not tried this one at all yet, might give it a try when time allows.
The Matrix Awakens UE5 Demo Runs at 30-50 FPS@1440P on 12900K+3090 Rig
The newly released The Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 demo runs at 30-50FPS@1440P on a high-end PC (12900K CPU, 3090 GPU).
So no one has been able to compile the demo on MacOS? These results above are kind of brutal for the hardware involved.
The demo is only for Windows.
The Matrix Awakens UE5 Demo Runs at 30-50 FPS@1440P on 12900K+3090 Rig
The newly released The Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 demo runs at 30-50FPS@1440P on a high-end PC (12900K CPU, 3090 GPU).
So no one has been able to compile the demo on MacOS? These results above are kind of brutal for the hardware involved.
It wouldn’t be the first time that a new launch title arrived grossly unoptimized.
From what I’ve learned, UE5 still isn’t running natively on Apple Silicon yet, so it’s still being limited by Rosetta 2.
As in it doesn’t show up as a download on MacOS?
From a GPU perspective, how much does Rosetta 2 limit GPU API calls (as in if the output is Metal how much does Rosetta affect things?)
This video seems to imply that Rosetta doesn’t matter much when you are GPU limited.
In practice, probably not much. But regardless, UE5 not running natively just shows the complete lack of effort. Can't say I am surprised given the relationship between the two companies at the moment.
That's not what it means. It's listed as Windows only in the store. What that means is that it's guaranteed to work on Windows. It could work in Linux/macOS, but it's just not been tested. Or it means it doesn't work on Linux/macOS at all. Impossible to say.
Not much unless you do fancy stuff, then things can get ugly.
As said above it's only listed for Windows. Maybe it will work in some way on Mac but just because a game is done in UE for Windows and UE works on Mac it doesn't mean the game itself is compatible with Mac. There are lots of Windows games done in UE that aren't available for Mac. The demo should be considered as a game. Like when you choose in Xcode which CPU you want to port to, Intel or Apple Silicon.
Maybe I'm wrong but if it could run on Mac we would have seen someone share a video of it already. There are none.