Doubling Unreal Engine Performance on M1/M2 Mac

The Apple M1 (and later M2) chips were a big step forward in performance on MacOS. Here on GameFromScratch we have covered game development on an M1 powered Mac (Unity, Unreal, Blender and Godot) as well as covering some of the downsides of Mac Game Development as well. We also recently talked about Mac native silicon support on the recently released Unreal Engine 5.1. Today we are looking at one simple tip that can easily double the in editor framerate of Unreal Engine 5.x!

While the MacBook ships with one of the best looking displays available, you certainly pay a price for that. A retina display runs at a very high resolution, mine for example runs internally at 3024×1964.

In many applications, that’s no big deal, but when it comes to game engines, that’s a lot of pixels to push, antialias, apply effects to, etc. In fact, it’s over 5m pixels!

Truth is, in Unreal Engine, these additional pixels have a huge impact on performance, but when it comes to a 16″ or smaller display, most people will not notice the effect. To double your Unreal Editor performance, in Unreal, select Unreal Editor in the menu, then choose Preferences…

Setting Unreal Engine Preferences

In the search field, search for “DPI” then toggle the checkbox so that it is not checked.

This will force a restart before it is active. You should now see a doubling of FPS in the editor!

You can learn more about doubling the performance of Unreal Engine 5.x and see the results in action in the video below.

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