New Apple M1 chip, How well does Unity and older games/ projects work on it?

News & General Discussion
1

I need a new laptop and I have no idea if I should go for the Macbook M1 chip or not. Detailed information about this is really lacking. But mostly, Is it a good choice for a small indie developer?

I’m sure many people have questions about this topic and I hope someone can help with making a decision to buy or not buy a new m1 chip laptop or not.

Personally i would love to know:
Does it run (old) games build with unity or similar software made on mac (and pc)?
Does it run unity 2018 and up?
Do android builds work (IL2CPP) (apk 22 and up)?
Can I build for Linux/ windows/ older macs?
Can the chip run the unity editor with heavy graphics?
Can it run a network test build with other mac’s without a m1 chip?

Thank you so much!

2

Unity announced that it had been added to alpha 21 of Unity 2020.2.

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2020/06/22/unity-coming-to-apple-silicon/

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3

Apple doesn’t exactly have a good track record with keeping support around for the 1st generation of any new product.

Original iPhone released 2007, support dropped 2010
Original iPad released 2010, support dropped 2012
Original MacBook Air released 2008, support dropped 2012
Original Apple Watch released 2015, support dropped 2018

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4

If you’re running an up-to-date version of an LTS version of Unity or the latest TECH release of Unity (e.g. latest version of 2018.4.x, 2019.4.x, or 2020.2+) then you should be able to run the Unity Editor on an Apple Silicon device but it will be running emulated x86, not native. Native Apple Silicon support for the Unity Editor itself hasn’t been added yet, and won’t be in until Unity 2021.1 or 2021.2 most likely.

If you want to build native Apple Silicon builds, then you need to use Unity 2020.2+.

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5

That emulation roundtrip must eat up the little performance lead M1 had over latest gen x86 like AMD zen 3.

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6

I got the new macbook air and most things work perfectly on it! BUT! The light weight render pipeline does not work with a unity 2018 project i moved to the new laptop (with using the same unity 2018 version).

Older and newer games from solo/ amateur devs from Itch.io work smoothly but not all of them. The reason why some work and others don’t i don’t know. My guess is that there made with something like game-studio. Since the games that did work where made with unity (i could see the logo).

I must say that the build time is slow with unity 2018 and 2019 (with emulation), everything else is a lot faster and works great!

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7

I’ve been using M1 Macs (Mac mini and a MBA) since December and apart from slightly longer project loading & build times (2019 LTS) I had completely forgotten I was running in translation mode. It really is that smooth.

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8

I may need one for work &… I think there should not be an issue long term since this is a chipset change which will stay. Apple need to make sure their backwards emulation (of intel/x86) is ok and Unity need to make sure things work on the new chipset (ARM M1)

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Latest leaks show there is a 12-core variant of the M1 coming to Macbook Pro most likely in Q2 or Q3.

https://www.techradar.com/news/apple-m1x-leak-suggests-macbooks-are-in-line-for-a-major-performance-boost

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10

hey,
do you know if the Beta or alpha of 2021 does have native support for the editor?

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Last I saw was that Unity had a few devs working full time on adding native support for the editor but it wasn’t ready to roll out yet.

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Here is the alpha editor compatible with m1, I’ll give it a go and come back!

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