Unreal Engine 5.2 adds native support for Macs with Apple SoCs

Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 5.2. Among other things, this new version adds native support for Apple’s Silicon socs on Macs to the Unreal Editor, which should lead to improved performance.

Previously, users of a Mac with an Apple soc, the M1 or M2, had to emulate the Unreal Editor via Rosetta 2. This technique makes it possible to run applications intended for the Intel architecture on Arm Macs. The native support for Apple socs leads according to Epic Games to improved performance and stability. In 2020, Apple was still trying to close Epic’s developer accounts, which would prevent the latter from providing support for the Unreal Engine on Apple platforms at all. That was then stopped by a judge.

In addition to native support, the Unreal Engine update also comes with a number of new features. For example, it offers a Procedural Content Generation framework. This should make it possible to quickly fill large scenes with procedurally generated Unreal Engine assets, which would make building large worlds “faster and more efficient”. In addition, there is the Substrate function, which should allow ‘more control’ over the appearance of objects. Epic demonstrated this feature already a few months ago by showing that it can quickly change the material of a pick-up truck into a metal layer.