Mac or Windows for Game Development?

The M1 MacBook Pros have been out for about half a year now and they took a huge step forward in many ways... the question is, are they any good for game development? More so... if you can only afford one laptop for game development, should you get a new M1 powered MacBook Pro, or would you be better off getting a Windows laptop? We answer that question and more in this video.

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M1 MacBook Game Development, The Bad Bits:

[gamefromscratch]

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M1 MacBook Game Development, The Bad Bits:

[mooseh]

I work in a company that makes games and I laugh when people say Mac is good for game dev. It’s good enough but for triple a games you need windows

[justmars]

For using an external mouse on a mac I recommend installing SteelSeries ExactMouse tool. It disables the awful acceleration that is on by default and makes moving the cursor precise.

You can disable the acceleration with Terminal commands also, but it resets everytime you restart. That’s why I recommend ExactMouse tool. I have no idea why there still isn’t a native GUI toggle for disabling mouse acceleration, hopefully they add it someday.

[DanMcLaughlin]

"On the Mac the bits that work, work great" pretty much sums it up. Choosing Mac has and will always involve limitations, if you happen to fit within those then bully, but few or no studios are running on Macs.

[HalkerVeil]

I won't buy one based on repair rights alone.

[TADevelopment]

Honestly, I love using my Magic Mouse while working with blender and Unity/Unreal.
The fact that half of the mouse acts as a track pad, while acting as the ‘middle mouse button’ just feels so fluid(tho, remember to turn on left&right mouse click functionality in your mouse settings for blender. In order to be able to right click in the program)

[romulino]

It's just a bad idea to develop in a platform >90% of your user base don't use. That's asking for trouble.

[Xankillr]

I think another factor is the lack of any expandability. Are there Windows machines out there that cannot be expanded? Of course. But the vast majority of them offer RAM and SSD upgrades. That sort of future proofing is great for game development given that a lot of the toolchains are super memory intensive. For example I upgraded my 8 GB Inspiron 15 7559 to 16 GB and it made a big impact. Plus in my case the laptop had an additional M.2 (SATA only) port which allowed me to add an SSD after the fact.

[alec_almartson]

You missed an interesting case:

😎Linux.🤯

I use Linux (Xubuntu 20.04.01) for programming video games in Unity, and after some tweaks it works like a charm. The good side of using Linux is that you get to make your own scripts to tune in the default behavior of almost everything in the O.S. which is your Dev environment... but you need previous Linux and Python/C++/Bash knowledge.

Why Linux, you ask?

* Windows steals your data, via Telemetry, and helps Bill Gates get richer. 🤑🚫

* Mac is unnecessarily expensive, and is based on the same core: Unix 🤔😯

* Linux Distros are customizable, and Unity3D, Unreal Engine, Blender, Visual Studio Code and Rider, are available already. For other Windows-specific software you could use Wine, or a Virtual Machine, as a workaround (but yeah, there are cases in which you must use Windows or Mac to create Art, because the original software is not available in Linux 🤔🙄... time will tell...)

[lucasmontec]

Working on a track pad is death for most people

[DirkTeucher]

Unreal engine Lumen and Nanite is not supported on Apple. And path tracing is also rubbish on Apple at the moment. It also took over a year for Blender support to be added to the M1 and the Apple engineers are still working on that. I am unable to test it to say where it falls flat on the M1 but I assume that there are missing blender features on Apple. Apple mac is good for video editing and software might run on it. But i'm sure I saw a review where a windows razer blade with a RTX 3080 that was cheaper and would out perform the mac even in video editing and rendering with davinci resolve. I guess if all you do is edit video it's a great buy but I would not go near it for game dev or 3d dev in general.

[wayfarergamedev]

Rider fixes Visual Studio and Xcode issues with Unreal on Mac. It works great with Unity also but so does visual studio code. Rider is just better on both platforms, faster, syntax highlighting much better, refactoring is faster and intellasense actually works.

[nick]

9 times out of 10 I'd say Windows. Really nothing special that a Mac brings to the table, plus Windows has a way bigger user-base. The only reason I'd recommend getting a mac for game dev is for the software. If you really like Apple's ecosystem of software, then by all means, but I'd never recommend anyone buy a mac solely for game development, Windows is always better for that. The biggest thing Apple has right now is laptops, MacBooks with M1 chips are great, but most people do game dev on a desktop, so that's kind of a null point anyway. When it comes to 3D games especially, Windows is the far better option, and at a far better price.

[beardninja]

There is zero reason to use Mac unless you are targeting their platform.

[Audiojack_]

I recommend a cheap little application called CursorSense to improve external mouse support on the Mac. You can disable or change the mouse acceleration curves with it.

[WildWestDesigns]

No Linux love. Depending on what one's workflow is, Linux is a very viable platform. Second would be Windows, the last would be Mac, because unless you are targeting for Mac and have to compile specifically for that platform, I don't see much use in it. Their walled hardware garden is limiting and I can build a far better rig and most of the time cheaper unless I just go crazy with the parts. I will say this, I don't do things on laptops. I actually don't have a laptop (although my sis loves her S76, so if they get way from Gnome, I may go that route). If I have to do work on the go, it's the sketch pad and come up with assets the old fashioned way and digitize them when I get back. I just prefer my 27QHD too much to settle for the laptop way of doing things.

[wayfarergamedev]

So I tried Unreal Engine 5 Preview 1 on Mac mini M1 and modeling tools are working for me without problem.
I am also pretty sure Lumen works as well cause I get different results depending on "None", "Lumen" and "Screenspace" for Global Illumination with Lumen looks much better.

[bluzenkk]

yup.... those are the same road blocks that I had...
whats worse is that by the time i got my first m1 macbook pro, the m1 max came out...
so for those ppl who get m1max right now, chances are there will be m2 around the corner...

[RarebitFiends]

I am a MBP guy because I am a web developer by day. I have a 2019 Intel MBP though, dual-booting Windows is a breeze for the few times I need to do Windows exclusive things. My understanding is the only way to run Windows on M1 is via Parallels; I have no idea how the performance of that is.

[VEOdev]

I mean if you are a game developer you will need both. at some point you will make games for IOS and Mac for that you will need Iphone and Max for testing and exporting