Unreal Engine 5.2 is now available for developers, Epic Games has announced in a blog post. The headlining feature of the update is native support for Apple Silicon. This is a big deal, as it will allow for significantly improved game performance when running on a modern Mac.
When Apple switched its Mac lineup over to its own ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) processors, it also created a compatibility layer called Rosetta 2 for existing apps that don’t support the ARM architecture.
Over time, software developers have been recompiling their apps to run natively on Apple’s new SoCs. Now, Epic Games has joined in with native support for its popular game engine.
“Unreal Engine 5.2 further expands UE5’s groundbreaking toolset with some innovative new functionality—including a Procedural Content Generation framework and Substrate material authoring—alongside feature refinements and stability improvements,” according to Epic Games.
Without the burden of compatibility layers and emulation, games that are crafted using the Unreal Engine will be better able to harness the compute power of Apple’s latest Mac chips.
The development is an interesting one, as the two companies are currently embroiled in an ongoing legal dispute over the App Store and alleged antitrust violations.
Image credit: Apple
Source: Epic Games
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