O_o

This is my machine:

    iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015)
    3.2 GHz Intel Core i5
    32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
    AMD Radeon R9 M380 2048 MB

All I can say is the engine runs like rubbish on it, so I'm flat out astonished to hear it runs 'very well' on your 2012 macbook.

This is the compile time for running a 'hello world' project with a few tests:

    [2016.03.20-09.44.43:606][  0]Log file open, 03/20/16 17:44:43
    [2016.03.20-09.44.53:841][261]Display: Running Automation: 'NppTests' (Class Name: 'FNppTests')
    [2016.03.20-09.44.53:875][263]...Automation Test Succeeded (NppTests)
    [2016.03.20-09.44.55:055][264]Log file closed, 03/20/16 17:44:55

    real	6m47.566s
    user	3m58.869s
    sys	0m41.303s

That's not a full rebuild, just running:

    ./Engine/Build/BatchFiles/Mac/Build.sh TestProjectEditor Mac Development TestProject.uproject

    UnrealEngine/Engine/Binaries/Mac/UE4Editor.app/Contents/MacOS/UE4Editor TestProject.uproject -Game -ExecCmds="Automation RunTests TestProject" -unattended -nopause -testexit="Automation Test Queue Empty" -log="TestResults.txt"

ie. It's only compiling the local project files and relinking the engine files. That takes 7 minutes.

With the quality settings dialed back completely, games are... kind of playable.

This doesn't match your experience?

I'm deeply deeply interested to know what you're doing, because it doesn't run like you describe on any apple device I've ever used.

What engine version?

Did you build it yourself? Which branch are you running? Did you change any of the build settings?

What quality settings are you using?

Seriously, I'm not trolling. If there's a magic 'make this actually work' setting some where I'm missing, I want to know about it, because the engine is monstrously slow in my experience, unless you're running it on a windows machine.

My recommendation for people using UE is 'dont use a mac'; I've never once varied from that position in the last year, I'm really interested if you have a different experience.

My experience mirrors yours. I have a high-end Mac laptop, 16 gigs of memory, 1 TB SSD drive. Unreal Engine runs like total garbage on it. Moving around in a simple scene is incredibly slow and painful. Their keyboard controls are also pretty confusing and awful. I'd really like them to support something like the 3Dconnexion mouse[1], which would at least make moving around intuitive and easy, but it doesn't.[2]

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/3Dconnexion-3DX-700028-SpaceNavigator-...

[2] - https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/14140/why-isnt-3d...

Perhaps very well was an overstatment, it runs well enough to use on OSX, I always build from source and I've just done a fresh build of 4.11 on El-Capitan. Build took about an hour. Initial build of the FPS template takes about 90 seconds and runs at an average FPS of 30-35. The Blueprints template runs at about 15fps at Epic setting and about 20-25fps on high. For scenes like this, I set the engine scalability to high or medium and material quality to medium. I often work from within Windows where it all runs better.

I have a MacBook Pro mid-2015 2.5 i7 16GB Ram 1tb ssd AMD Radeon R9 M370x. Here are my compile times for a non trivial game set to maximum settings. Literally straight up standard download from Epic version 4.10.4.

Building the game itself: Total build time: 20.36 seconds

Not quite a exact same test as yours but I've honestly never used the engine in the way you are compiling it there. I understand it's a basic compile and execute tests but I usually run my tests via xcode and build/launch the game from either xcode or the unreal editor both are very fast.

Does that include relaunching the editor?

(tests obviously are not supported for hot reload)

That's the compile time for the game only launching the game editor takes an additional Full Startup: 12.02 seconds (BP compile: 0.17 seconds) according to the unreal engine logs. It feels a little longer than that but not much.

I'm always honestly a little surprised but that Java webapps we have at my day job take a lot longer to compile and launch than Unreal does in my experience.

I will say to be fair in Windows 10 on the same hardware (bootcamp dual boot) Unreal is at least twice as fast. It's kinda crazy and bums me out a bit.

Interesting.

Out of curiosity, what proportion of your game code is blueprint vs. C++?

Mine would be probably 80/20 in favour of C++; I wonder if using C++ heavily has a disproportional effect on the editor speed somehow.

Certainly sounds like you're having a much better time of it than I am...

Mostly C++, probably a 80/20 split or so also. Two other things, I've noticed that performance has improved greatly over the last couple of releases and my older MacBook pro (2012 model, 1gb nvidia gpu) wasn't nearly as good. I wonder if it's a case of Epic really only testing on certain Mac Laptops? Not sure I'd still use the engine if I was getting your level of performance on my machine.

Would I be wrong to say Apple doesn't prioritize GPU performance. Ergo, for game development it's undoubtedly safer to buy non-apple brand machines?

yes you would be wrong I have the same model and the hello world example runs WAY faster. I'm not sure how to explain the difference but I do not believe it's an issue with apple.

The last time i tried running the engine it would constantly put load on the GPU (even if the game view is paused) resulting in high temps and noisy fans. I also barely got 10fps in the gameview on a 13" Macbook Pro with Iris 5000 graphics. Did they fix this for OSX ?

It's definitely true that the editor itself is not super lightweight. I believe this has to do with how they are drawing the actual UI. It's a bit unfortunate because the knock-on effect is that running your game in-editor leaves the GPU with even less to work with in terms of resources.

    Did they fix this for OSX ?

No.