What is the status of Unreal Engine’s support for Apple Silicon in 5.2?

Unreal Engine 5.0+ supported universal binaries for Macs, but only when packaging standalone builds of UE projects. In UE 5.1, we introduced Beta support to run source builds of UE with native arm64 binaries, but still relied on Rosetta for editor builds of UE. In UE 5.2, we’re officially releasing prebuilt universal binaries for Unreal Engine when downloading it through the Epic Games launcher.
 

How does this impact working with Unreal Engine on macOS in the future?

Users building the Unreal Editor from source will need to perform a few extra steps to build universal binaries, which are detailed below. Users running the Unreal Editor should experience minimal changes to their workflow. However, there are some new requirements for releasing projects or plugins.First, users running Unreal Engine 5.2 on macOS must meet the following development requirements:

  • Minimum macOS version: 12.5 Monterey or newer
  • Recommended macOS version: Latest macOS Ventura
  • Minimum Xcode version: 14.1

These reflect the new minimum requirements for the App Store.

Second, in Unreal Engine 5.2 and later, sellers publishing Code Plugins on the Unreal Engine Marketplace will need to include universal binaries to be considered compatible with macOS. This will mainly impact code plugins that use third-party libraries, like Amazon’s Web Services library (lib.AWS), for example libaws-checksums.dylib.
 

What does this mean for the availability of Unreal Engine Marketplace Assets for macOS?

With these changes and the added requirements for Marketplace assets, macOS users running Unreal Engine 5.2 will now have access to more assets on the UE Marketplace. This includes Epic Games’ free assets, such as the Paragon asset packs.

Source: Unreal Engine Blog