Using a 2021 M1 MacBook Pro For Game Development - (Unity, Unreal, Godot, Blender & More)

ladies and gentlemen it's mike here at game from scratch and today we are going to be looking at game development on the new macbook pros now this is the first macbook i've been interested in since like 2016 when apple really lost the plot and they've done a lot of things right here these are probably the best machines out there for video editing right now which is the primary reason i picked it up this is a game development channel i want to see how well this thing would do at common game development tasks so that's what we're going to be looking at today i'm going to look at a number of different engines and we're going to see what the performance is like and we're going to start with the one that probably the majority of mac based developers would work with and that is unity now what you see in front of you this is a unity standard pipeline project we're going to look at an hdrp pipeline project as well this scene consists of about a half a million triangles and as you can see navigation and everything else super smooth it definitely is a pleasant experience to work with uh no complaints at all relative to my other laptop the um it's a razer blade 2019 with a 2070 max q 32 gigs of ram and a 97 50 intel processor this is faster i would say it is about 30 faster when we look at raw benchmark speeds so for example if i go ahead and actually play this project uh we're going to see some of the stats up here we're looking uh 180 300 frames per second we're going to start getting some things on screen here and we're still staying in high 200s here i'm recording this at uh 1920p i'm sorry 1080p so 1920x1080 resolution i do have video recording software running in the background and i'm going to show you something really impressive look at that frame rate right now so we're looking 200 to yeah about 200 ish and what i'm going to do is reach over and unplug my power it's unplugged uh all that changed right now my internal display uh just faded a little bit but other than that you noticed something zero performance drop at all that is one of the things that probably impresses me the most about the macbook pros is quite simply they run exactly the same on battery as they do plugged in so now i'm going to plug this back in all right there we go also i got a number of hours so when i was playing around with this and playing around with unity examples installing my camera software and so on i got about five hours of battery life with the gpu just screaming away so that is quite impressive now i gotta admit right off the hop unity is better optimized for the m1 chips they actually have an m1 version out there so do keep that in mind now the other example we're going to look at this one is going to run a little bit slower but for obvious reasons this is an hdrp project and it's over 2 million polygons in total now what you'll notice is there is a little bit of a a lag as it starts up and once we navigate the scene it is definitely a little bit jerkier i can't disagree with that at all but when we go ahead and run this guy you're gonna see part of the reason why so first off this is using the hdrp pipeline uh second this asset isn't incredibly optimized this is a snap sci-fi scene so here we got it running you're gonna see look at the triangle count up here five million triangles in this scene we're running 34 33 frames per second so not bad at all now i do want to point one thing out before we get too much further if you're thinking about picking up uh a macbook pro m1 based for your uh primary machine and you want to do a lot of gaming don't this is not a gaming machine but game development creation tools run just fine they run again as good or better than my 2019 razer blade and i'm guessing they're probably about on par with a 30 60 gpu in performance um maybe slightly better than that but again quite good performance overall so that was unity again we've got two projects if you stick to the standard pipeline uh this oops i had it still running oh and you got to also keep that in mind i'm running two instances of unity at the same time and recording software in the background and this is the kind of performance we're getting so i have no complaints at all this guy runs uh unity as good as i could expect the only thing i have run into so far is the light mapper it forces you to use a specific version because it hasn't been optimized for metal yet that will obviously be fixed in time and if you know anything about unity light mapping is one of those areas that let's just say it's in flux quite often all right so that was unity now we're going to move on to unreal engine so i already created a project one thing you'll notice here i'm using uh early access version of unreal engine 5 mostly because once i've gone to unreal engine 5 going back was definitely a challenge uh for sure uh so we're gonna go ahead and open this particular project up now one thing i want to talk about is actually project loading and it has been sweet uh it actually loads projects uh quite a bit faster than on the pc equivalent when it came to the uni game engine it imported projects probably two to three times faster than what i'm used to and i'm running an ssd on both machines so the ssds in these machines these macbooks are fast i definitely have to give them credit there uh oh i have a i have a message off screen that's blocking me all right so why did you load up on that screen so let's let's move this over all right here we go now one thing you will notice is um it's not really optimized for the new macbooks yet that is um the uh unreal engine itself so you're gonna see some aspects of it that are you know a little weird so for example the content drawer uh uses the exact same hotkey as the um as this so spotlight and this are using the same thing little things like that not a big deal but here you see the whoa we're way too fast here is the default scene speed and performance are just fine obviously i'm not going to use this as an example instead let us open up a map so i pulled in uh the polar map i think this was from one of the giveaways i got no idea when i picked this guy up but uh let's go to polar oh actually no he'd put it somewhere else where did it put it put it in maps all right so i'm going to open up polar facility map right here get an idea how long it takes to load up maps now obviously i've done all the shader compilations already that part is normally quite brutal and here you can see it in action so this here is uh unreal engine 5 running a non-trivial environment again buttery smooth i'm actually quite impressed with how things work most of the things i've thrown at it the performance were just fine i decided to mix things up a bit by bringing a couple of character models into the scene so let's go on down and instantiate a character so go down here and let's grab our dragon so i pulled in a desert dragon you get an idea of what kind of performance we're talking about here so let's bring the desert dragon in so you can see instancing in a model this guy has a fair bit of detail to him and brought it in no problem now let's go ahead and say control d or shifty oops come on dragon ah screw it i'll just bring another one in this way all right so let's bring in another dragon see what our performance goes like and where's my mouse oh there it is all right bring in another dragon and another dragon and uh let's see one more dragon all right so there we brought five dragons into the scene no real degradation to the performance you know it's still pretty smooth pretty solid a nice working experience i will say unreal engine is equally slow uh doing shader compilations on the mac as it is on windows that's literally just an unreal engine thing you kind of get used to it in time so uh one of those things to be aware of plus i keep losing my mouse there it is all right so is there anything else worth showing here let's show the fps that we're dealing with in the editor so you see right now we're dealing it's probably a little bit hard to see 80 frames per second with all of these dragons instance instantiated in the world 70 80. let's go over here take a look in the uh environment itself so 60 uh 60 frames per second going on over here let's kind of loop around so you see it's never uh not usable in fact i would actually say unreal engine uh when we do the comparison between this and the hdrp unreal engine is actually running nicer now uh one thing you may be wondering about is heat and i actually found uh running this thing on my lap uh it didn't get uncomfortably hot unreal engine definitely spun the fans up a little bit more uh than unity did but even then it was really quite usable the only thing that i found is um because of the way that unreal engine full screens the notch is much more noticeable on unreal engine i don't mind the notch overall but definitely it's going to be one of those polarizing things so that here uh is unreal engine again this is the 24 core gpu version and i think most you would agree that this is uh more than sufficient for uh most people's work uh and um yeah and this is unreal engine five not optimized for and i think we're running through rosetta at this point which is their compatibility layer to make it work with intel uh instead of the m1 uh level silicon and performance is it's great i have no complaints at all i'm actually rather impressed with how well this performed and i would actually say this is also again outperforming my 2070 based intel machine uh by a fair margin to be honest so i'm definitely impressed with unreal engines performance although i think in time we're gonna see them you know make it a little bit more mac native so the experience is a little bit nicer and so hopefully it's not using the exact same hotkeys as things like you know spotlight so that one's a little unfortunate but anyways that is uh unreal engine 5 i think beta 2 running on max silicon runs just great in my opinion so now we are going to move onwards and upwards to [Music] oh i lost my editor all right there we go uh so now uh i'll do a good doe game engine next well honestly when it comes to godot i had fairly low expectations because i don't know that there are too many mac based lead developers on it i know it's primarily developed on linux and i think the lead platform for the most users is windows i did not have great expectations this is the godot third person shooter demo and there's a couple things i got to say first off it imported assets five to ten times faster than my windows machine i was actually really shocked by that let's go ahead and open up the level here so level tscn this guy right here and done all right so here is a demo game uh we're going to just kind of walk around scene you can see how the performance goes definitely playable by any definition of the word it looks good so you know artifacting the performance is quite solid i've never had any real issues with it at all when we get into the effects heavy core area which is okay i'm kind of stuck in the environment okay so go over here past this robot guy over here um there's a there's a little spot uh coming up all right over here let's see and in here there's quite a few effects going on here and this is the only area where you might see some slow down and even then i see almost none it got a little chuggier when it got near so i'm gonna chug out just a little bit here but still super smooth and i would actually say this runs again a little bit better than it does on my pc uh perfectly viable for working in the godoto game engine uh if that is what you want to do and again the part that really impressed me so let's bring up the free frames per second so we're looking 35 36 37 in the editor here um definitely doable this uh demonstration has never been incredibly optimized so um the performance is again it's not really stellar on any machines if we're honest about things but just give you an idea what it is like to work with godot uh it's a decent experience let's go ahead and run the scene i don't know if i can run the scene directly from here and here you see gameplay wise it's just fine but okay by the way that happens on pc2 that first instantiation of a of the shot does slow things down but this is again comparable to the performance i get on my razer machine if not possibly slightly faster again this this demo has never been really optimized for performance and i have no idea if you can hear me over that because another thing i have to acknowledge let me get out of there is the macbook hands down has the single best speakers on a laptop in existence as far as i've ever experienced they get loud and they sound good so actually that part's quite impressive so anyways that is the godot game engine definitely the strengths i saw everything seems to work just fine but what really impressed me uh was the uh file import speeds it was just it brought in all the textures for the the third person example in like seconds it was pretty amazing that way so i was definitely impressed there so that is it for the game engine side of things now we're going to look at a couple of applications uh you know typical of what you might use in the world of game development we're going to start that off with blender okay so here we are in blender um i'm gonna do kind of a very simple stress test so you can see basically how well it pushes polygons uh this is the um native version so you can down and download an intel or an apple silicon version which is for the m1 chips that is what i'm using here and what i'm going to do is just switch this default cube the default cube is going to be the star of the show because of course it is and what i'm going to do is subdivide it so subdivide and done all right so let uh okay how do i turn that back on i always forget where this option is now what i want to do is show you the statistics so you can see what we are dealing with here so right now we have uh 48 triangles that's really not that impressive so let's uh let's jack that up so now we're dealing with seven hundred and sixty eight three thousand twelve thousand five so two hundred thousand seven hundred thousand all right so there we go we're at three million triangles on our default cube performance didn't lag at all let's see what it's like to select individual vertices so let's do come on oh we'll do a box select grab a few like so and we're fine so this is an area edit mesh for vertex handling has never been a great performer if we're honest so what we are going to do is sculpt so we're looking at three million polygons we are going into sculpt mode do keep in mind i do have video capture software going at the same time so if you want to sculpt something with three million polygons in it there is your performance just fine another area where it really shines you'll see in a lot of benchmarks people that don't actually use blender they just kind of use it as a benchmarking tool it seems to be performing uh on par or better than most high-end mobile gpus out there right now but as you can see three million polygons i'm sculpting away and we're all solid so uh definitely the performance degradation yet like wow so we drop down in number i wonder why it does that um no real big performance problems now the one way i can actually bring in the beach ball though is we go back to the edit mode and we select all of everything and we do one more layer of subdivision here so now we are going from three million triangles so there is the beach ball so do know uh i have a 32 gigabyte system here and on the m1 chips the gpu and the cpu share ram so if you're going to be doing sculpting of 12 million triangles do be aware you probably want to get a little bit more ram than i have but again we're pushing 12 million triangles right now let us go back over to sculpt mode and see how the experience goes so switching sculpt mode and we're in let's drop oops drop our radius down a little bit and let's sculpt there you go performance is just fine so you can sculpt uh 12 million try again it's dropping down by half when i'm coming into sculpting i don't know why that is if you know that let me know in the comments down below but all the same you're seeing our we're dealing with really high resolution screen scenes here and again don't keep don't forget i am video capturing this at the same time and again if i unplug no real drop in performance at all plus i am about uh three feet away from my laptop and i don't hear my fans at all uh i can tell you my uh 32 gig powered system with an 8 gigabyte internal gpu 2070 uh it would have choked at this point in time so uh just as it's a simple example nothing really too impressive to show you but you just see the raw polygon counts that these gpus can handle it's pretty good and if you're wondering in terms of which machine you should get should you get a pro should you get a max and so on well this is where your gpus are being taxed it's in the game engine i would honestly recommend anybody that's really in the game development side of things you're going to want to lean towards the more gpus and you're probably going to want to get a minimum of uh 32 gigs of ram because again the video ram and the system ram are shared they're also really fast and if you jump up to the uh max chip they're double speed so it's 400 gigabytes per second instead of 200. most of that's a theoretical thing it doesn't really mean too much but as you can see mac uh the um blender experience on um the m1 max you can push a lot of polygons and it don't slow down now we did see the first and only instance of the beach ball showing up so if i go back over here i can do one more subdivision just to make my computer really cry and this again or switching modes there is the beach ball so this is the area where you start choking your machine and this was just a stupid thing to do uh because i think we're going well beyond the capacity of uh what it should be able to handle so we're at 12 million right now we're waiting for the subdivision to finish again the beach ball showed up so we definitely have some lagging going on we're probably swapping out a little bit but again not bad at all let's see how long this actually takes again i may have bitten off more than i should have or can chew here but we shall find out in just a second so i'm going to give this say 15 more seconds to run if it doesn't finish then i think we found the theoretical limits of what we can handle here uh but uh yeah let's find out what happens so we're going to be 10 9 8 7 6 five four three two one all right may have pushed it a little too high again oh oh we stopped spinning i don't know if that's a bad thing or a good thing uh because i yeah i definitely may have found the upper limits of what a 32 gig system are capable of oh there we go 50 million we didn't crash we're fine 50 million polygons let's go over to sculpting uh this is going to be a little timely because uh you know there's 50 million polygons here uh but let's see if it is still workable when we get over to sculpt mode so again this is going to take a little bit of time for it to switch so obviously you're pushing the outer limits of of what's comfortable to work with uh but quite quite reasonable limits i would say that we're at and my pc would have choked at this point in time for sure let's see if sculpt mode finishes loading give it a couple of seconds again 50 million triangles that's pretty pretty insane so here we are the viewport still orbits just as well we can zoom in zoom out no problem at all let's see how well sculpting work sculpting works fine wow that is that is impressive uh so yeah if you're looking at uh high polygon workflows uh if you got a little patience 32 gigs will get you if you're going to be doing this kind of stuff on a regular you probably want to move up to the 64. i would have gotten rid of that beach ball completely also keep in mind there is one level higher gpu than what i'm using so you can actually get a 32 core gpu uh which again would be if you're routinely working on 50 million polygon sculpts that might be the right way to go but actually now that i'm in here this this performance is just fine like it's it's it's solid alright so that is blender let us move on to just 2d applications and then we'll wind it down okay now we're going to look at a pair of programs that i use constantly and this one specifically the most this is affinity to designer this is a vector graphics application from serif software it's very similar to adobe illustrator i actually prefer it quite a bit myself and let's bring down one of these examples so this guy here six megabyte file sure let's bring that one in so we'll download that example and we'll open it up so you get an idea of what a fairly complicated vector graphics scene will be like in affinity and there we go so here we see it this is your performance by the way i did notice there is a brand new version i haven't upgraded to it as of yet uh so uh it's probably more optimized for the m1 uh but my performance has been just fine so let's see what zoom in so zooming in zooming out moving around grabbing things interacting it's it's flawless it's super smooth uh no issues at all definitely usable for sure uh so that is if you're doing like a vector graphic style workflow as you see moving in and out almost infinite levels of zoom no performance degradation at all things move around super smooth not much more you could ask for same deal we're gonna move over to affindi photo this is kind of um the photoshop equivalent let's go ahead and grab the corel knight here um it's a 75 megabyte project i'll just go ahead and let that one download and we'll see how it performs and again spoiler it performs just fine so uh mind you my internet seems to be struggling a bit but let's just let this come on down okay uh by the way if you have not as of yet do check out um affinity photo it is it's an amazing program and same with affinity designer especially if any designer actually i highly recommend both uh both are available on windows and mac and a really cool tip i just found out is my windows key actually activated my mac version which is quite sweet all right so here we see open up this document it's uh again 80 megabytes it's four six one eight by sixty eight ninety in size performance is rock solid so if you are working on pixel-ish art stuff let's go ahead and draw something here you see brushes are super smooth everything works great uh your performance zooming in zooming out is near to flawless almost infinite level zoom performance never drops so if you're doing pixel art ish type work uh definitely a good performer and then let's come up here and do a filter on it let's add um let's do a clarity filter on here so let's see what it's like is it not real-time preview i thought it was so i see filters basically immediate same thing with um what else can we do we do some layer adjustments so let's say we want to do um i don't know if i haven't yet supply a lot so there you see everything pretty much real time so uh the performance here for 2d work be it vector graphics for this kinesis or sorry this case pixel or raster graphics or vector graphics as we saw in affinity keep in mind they are again both running at the exact same time at full speed with video capture going in the background so if you're looking at 2d pixel artwork this and in all honesty this is overkill uh you probably get by with the entry level or maybe even the macbook air at that scenario but the m1 works really well especially with dfinity software i imagine photoshop and illustrator will at least get a patch eventually to make them perform just as well but i i gotta say like across the board everything i've thrown at this thing the performance is great and then when it finally comes to video editing i find it in codes and this is why i ultimately picked one up in the first place it encodes what i would say probably two to three times faster than normal so that is definitely a nice thing there too now i'm not saying that everyone should go out and buy a macbook pro especially if you are a gamer because gaming there's barely anything out there they probably have 1 50th or 1 100th of the games that you get in windows world and the performance is anywhere from okay to good you know if it's natively made but that there's only like dozens of natively made games a lot of things are running through rosetta which still you get you know really good frame rates from them but when you're starting to run window specific titles through emulation be it either through parallels or um the other one crossfire across trigger whatever the heck it's called your performance definitely suffers as this compatibility and so on so if you're looking primarily as a gaming machine i can get away with that because my my other machine again is a solid gaming pc but if it's your only machine and you want to do all of these things and gaming macbook pro probably isn't there for you because the gaming experience isn't amazing but the other stuff the content creation the using of game engines i haven't really run into a tool or a program on this platform that hasn't performed well for me so uh yeah that's my experiences not raw benchmarks or anything but you get to see real world what things perform like and i gotta say across the board i'm pretty impressed so i know some of you just straight out knee jerk hate apple i'm not a big fan of the company themselves i haven't liked a macbook pro since 2016 but these new ones people are hyping the hell out of them and frankly the hype is pretty deserved so let me know what you think comments down below talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 40,241

Keywords: M1, M1 Max, Macbook, MacBook Pro, MBP, 2021, Blender, Unity, Unity3D, Unreal, Unreal Engine, UE5, Game Engine, Engine, Godot Engine, Apple Silicon, Review, Performance, Benchmark, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo

Id: EBt54KYSCEY

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/WindowSurface]

Finally some tests which are actually relevant to me! Not just artificial benchmarks or video editing.

[u/chumponimys]

Ahh I was hoping to see Blender render time comparisons here, but it looks like he was just stress testing the editor.

[u/robomaxis]

MBP 13 M1 16/256 worked in UE building APKs for Oculus Quest = no problem at all
used Blender, Maya, Zbrush, Substance Painter, Marmoset and Affinity apps for my workday
only thing - after updating to Monterey MayaLT'16 - won't run. others run smoothly

sold MBP13 M1 = waiting for new MBP14 with M1 Max now ))

[u/JedJeb]

Realistically, could I get away with M1 Pro 16GB of ram if I also have a beast pc I’m working on? I mostly just want it as a companion device so I can work on the go.

[u/[deleted]]

I don’t do 3D but my M1 13 inch Pro completely TEARS through 2D Godot. I hardly touch my windows desktop anymore.

I have 16GB of ram but the pressure never goes over 40% with just Godot tasks unless I intentionally try to stress it. I would probably still recommend 16GB for anyone into this, however.

But yeah, if you’re a smaller project type of person, especially doing 2D, you probably don’t need the Pro/Max variants of the M1. Very impressive results from those however.

[u/Additional-Slide-555]

This is not a real test. People who is working with game engines will understand me. Initial fps means nothing.

[u/Alteego]

Is there a legal reason that can prevent Apple from acquiring any of these game engines? Like Unity?