Anyone tried Unity on the 5k iMac?

If you have, how does it look? The same / better / worse than on a retina MBP? And how's the performance?

I'm overdue an upgrade and retina iMac seems like an obvious choice, but since I spend most of my time in Unity (and it's not retina ready) it's not an easy decision to make!

Any observations would be ace.

 

We are all indie developers here who don't spend money on things like that overpriced monitor. Honestly, that iMac actually doesnt seem like the obvious choice. Just get a 1080p monitor and save your money for something actually useful.

 

Only one?

 

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

The single-threaded performance (quite relevant for Unity) is actually better on the new iMacs than on the Mac Pros.

Beyond that, whether you spend most of your time in non-retina-ready Unity or not, that screen is going to be beautiful either way, and unless hardware kinks rise up, hold its value quite well.

I haven't bought one yet but when my current iMac ceases to handle everything well enough, it's a brilliant choice for pretty much anything (imagine having a desktop screen that could actually contain a retina iPad!).

 

Wrong

Wrong

Wrong

Wrong

 

Calm Carrots, I suggest you go talk to your gardener about some shade: I think the Sun's gone to your head.

 

I actually don't think this first-gen 5k iMac will hold up well at all - mainly because 4k is still something that GPUs struggle with, so it'll take a bit more time before apple releases an iMac model that comfortably supports it.

 

This report seems to suggest that it does remarkably well. It's a fantastic price for such high resolution / display quality and you get a good machine with it. I have a weak spot for Apple's unique custom-hardware efforts.

I do imagine that Editor text in Unity would be pretty microscopic, though.

 

We have one eye on 4k gaming (because our customers will have), but so far have held off buying 4k hardware. The new iMac perked our interest but that GPU seems woefully underpowered, with reports of low frame rates for popular benchmark games. The new iMac may have appeal for mobile games developers, but as a standalone dev where we want to push hardware to the limits, I'm not convinced it would be a good investment (even though it has massive appeal). Instead, we're holding off until affordable 32" 4k monitors come to market to hook up to existing GTX 780 Ti's.

 

Cheers @flaminghairball - that's what I've read as well, that it bests the 4 core mac pro in single-threaded benchmarks. My main concern is really the blurriness of the editor, since Unity isn't retina ready. Doesn't look like I'm going to get any first hand experiences, so I think I'll take a trip to my local Apple store and see if I can install Unity quickly to check it out!

@Marble - OS X treats the screen (out of the box at least) as 'retina', so the effective resolution is 2560x1440, but each of those 'pixels' is actually 4 pixels. So text size is the same as a 2560x1440 screen, but very smooth in HiDPI enabled applications (of which Unity is not one).

@Games Foundry - I'm primarily a mobile dev, yep. Although as I understand it most systems would struggle to render 5k at playable framerates! You could always see it as a useful benchmarking / optimisation tool.

 

I would definitely not buy the 5K iMac for Unity development. Yes, a 27" screen is nice for working with Unity, but then I would go with the traditional, non-Retina 27" iMac. Unfortunately, Apple did not upgrade those when they introduced the 5K iMac, so now you are easily paying 3K$ for outdated hardware (even though it was a valid Windows 1440p gaming machine when introduced).

Another argument against the 5K iMac is Apple's choice of ATI hardware. Why the M290X and M295X? Kind of ironic that NVidia only weaks before the 5K iMac came out, introduced GPUs that fit Apple's "power per watt" philosophy far better (i.e., the 970 and 980). I assume those came out after Apple definded the hardware specs?

I am also not so sure if you want to use Unity on Mac OS X when you could use it under Windows. The growing pains that Unity 4 had under "Mavericks" show me that Unity is not testing the Mac version of Unity thoroughly enough anymore. When I use Unity on Mac OS X right now, increasing memory consumption and resulting crashes are still a problem. And who knows what problems "Yosemite" brings - the new Finder design propably not fitting the look of Unity might be a obvious one.

I consider switching to Windows for that reason. The only reason for me to stay on Mac OS X is Final Cut Pro X, which I use occasionally. Another argument against Mac OS X when it comes to gaming or game development is bad driver performance, which will always be worse on OS X.

Bottom line, for the money Apple asks for the 5K iMac you could easily build a high end PC, use it as a Hackintosh, use a single GTX 970, install both Windows and OS X on two SSDs - and buy a 1920x1200 display for Unity (plus a Ultra-HD display just for kicks). If I was you, I'd ditch the Ultra-HD/Retina aspect alltogether and use a 2560x1440 display + a 1920x1200 display in Pivot mode (as many coders do). I tried the current non-Retina Unity Editor on a 15" rMBP once and it looked awful.

 

I've been down the hackintosh route before, for me it wasn't worth the time and effort.

I'm primarily an iOS dev, and I'm generally happy developing in OS X. I've got a gaming rig for actually playing games.

Seems fine so far!

Sounds about right. From the reviews I've read the M295X is perfectly capable...

So mostly you wouldn't go for it because of the retina screen?

At the end of the day I created this thread because there's no option out there that's ticking all of the boxes. The 5k screen does seem like overkill, I definitely don't need it and it will potentially make the application I use the most (Unity) look a bit crappy. I also have reservations about buying a non-mobile computer and getting a mobile GPU. BUT reviews of the 5k iMac are very good, and it looks like a very powerful machine (as mentioned above, beating the low end Mac Pro in some tasks).

But then the alternative (high end) Mac is the Mac Pro, which hasn't been updated in a while and is going to cost more. Maybe I'll just wait, haha.

 

@OP - why not go into an Apple store with the installer on a USB stick, explain the situation, and ask nicely if you can try it out? If you're in a position to buy there and then, they'd be stupid to turn down your request. I have no idea what their policy on this sort of thing is, but surely they'd be able to wipe the machine after if they are concerned about viruses.

 

On my windows PC with a high pixel density Unity is fine, only it's a tiny bit blurry... i think it's something they will fix soon, i haven't tried 5 yet so maybe it's already fixed.

 

From experience, monitors above 1080p are definitely "actually useful".

To be completely honest, I've never understood the attraction to either 1080p or 16:9 in general for computing tasks, except for the fact that 1080p screens for desktop PCs got so cheap so suddenly. Alas, the most effective way to get a monitor with more height these days is to buy a bigger widescreen... (not that the extra horizontal space will go to waste, mind you, it's just not always necessary).

 

@TylerPerry - it's not retina ready in 5 yet, not in the beta at least.

 

....trolling?

5K would be insanely useful. When testing for mobile (especially iPad), I'm constantly running into issues because it's not possible to display a 2048x1536 screen on a 1080p monitor.... never mind including profiling tools or the console. The only way for me to test the visuals on an iPad is to build it for the iPad. And that's very much against the Unity philosophy, ESPECIALLY in 4.6+ with the new GUI being more dependent on how many pixels there actually are. For development, 1080p is, frankly, pathetic.

Also, "overpriced monitor"? It's in the same price range as many monitors of the same size, resolution, and quality - but also includes a pretty powerful computer. The retina iMac has taken advantage of its being an all-in-one to make it possible to do things like have a tearing-free 5K display that simply don't have any equivalent elsewhere.

 

Yes, I noticed this when I went to get a new monitor. I really wanted a 1920x1200 monitor, but I ended up settling on 1080p because it was so ridiculously cheap at $130 for 23-inch.

 

In Apple's own official stores as well as in officially licensed stores you can't install your own software no matter what since the user account of demo machines doesn't have privileges to install things. That's at least my experience. Non-licensed stores might have a different policy. That's one of the reasons why I am glad that in Germany (where I live) Apple Stores aren't as ubiquitous yet as in the US.

@OP - I guess what you are looking for are those old-school "IT houses" that still exist (but often have trouble keeping afloat) that often adress media creation pros, where you can have hands-on time with hardware. Problem is those stores are last in chain for new hardware releases.

 

It seems apple kind of does this with hardware... upgrades to retina resolution, upgrades graphics performance 2x not 4x... then in the next update, graphics gets another 2x boost to where it should've been... seems that happened with ipads too.?

 

What do you want? Do you want them to hold back on graphics performance on last year's model and next year's model to compensate? Do you want the price to go up about $200 more (or likely $500 more for this iMac) to account for the more expensive graphics hardware? Should they have waited another year to release the retina iMac? I'd like to hear how you, if you ran Apple, would magically create a graphics card that's 4x the power at the same cost instead of merely 2x.

While we're at it, all indications are that the new iMac is plenty powerful to push all its pixels. All but the latest games run at full resolution (a higher resolution than, basically, exists anywhere else) at full details at 60fps, and even the latest games do so at playable framerates.

 

I really hope that Unity will be Retina ready once I have to make that choice. I find it acceptable on the MacBook Pro Retina, though ... it's just really unfortunate that it's not properly supported but still I wouldn't trade the Retina MacBook Pro for a non-retina version. "Luckily" I just got a new iMac earlier this year - so it's still some time until I'll have to make that choice and I *really* hope that it's properly supported by Unity by then ;-)

 

If the reviews are good I'm planning on getting the new Dell 5K screen coming out later this year.

It didn't even occur to me that Unity might not work well at that resolution. Here's hoping they address this in an upcoming beta.

 

I'm mainly a PC guy these days but I've used and owned Macs since the late 80s.

This is exactly how Apple operates.

Regardless of their marketing, they never max out the potential specs on any given generation/model of Mac.

It's not a matter of Apple not wanting to wait for the next tech cycle to be available. It's about maximizing their profit on each generation. I'm not using the "p" word pejoratively, I'm just stating a fact.

They always have the next few upgrades planned and in the pipeline.

 

@Aurore - awesome, thanks very much for letting me know.

 

We have a 4K display here is a screen shot of unity 4.5.5. Ive asked them about 4K display support over a year ago. Hear it should be coming - when not sure.

 

I hope a feature release ONLY for resolution changes is planned, because there's more than Macs which will be using gigantic resolutions now. I sometimes feel some text is too small even on a 1080p 27" monitor, so a bit more scaling of text is desirable. Preferably individual settings for different sections.

 

MS word look great now on a 4K display , and 10.10 holy moly wow!! Apple did great!! For any apps that are supported in 4K = incredible experience! Can't wait till unity is ready for 4K -it will be a good day!

Cheers!!

 

It would be very lovely to have this for Unity 5.1 because currently, working on high density UI systems using Unity UI (or Unity in general - the same applies to other GUI systems) is much more inconvenient than it could be when you have a Retina display (Unity should allow you to use the full resolution at least in the Game View, with different scaling options).

In other words: Now that we have the new Unity UI, lack of proper high density display support for work in the editor is almost a bug ;-) ... and ... it turned out I was wrong: I got my iMac almost two years ago, so my 5k iMac is almost on its way (but that also means I'll be happy to alpha-test this once it becomes available and will stop complaining once it hits alpha ;-) ).

 

Thumbs up!

 

I had an old Mac so I decided to purchase a 5k .. Here's a screen grab, disappointed with Unity but everything else, all I can say is ..

 

any updates about this with unity5?

 

I just picked up the new Dell 24" 4K monitor for $481 on Amazon, works great on Win 8.1 (and my MacBook Pro). It's an amazing screen and finally in an affordable price range to consider (for me). Unity Editor of course looks pretty bad on it scaled to 200%. I just wanted to add my 2 cents that it's time to get on High DPI support and make it a priority.

 

No change in Unity 5.

 

FYI, I have read elsewhere that Unity has people actually dedicated to this task now. Very happy to hear that.

 

I have Unity 5 but it "feels" old and clunky on the mac with everything non-retina blurry.

 

Certainly good news as it would allow to display iPad Retina apps in something that is closer to native size/resolution on screen..And also anybody who is fiddling with 4k stuff...you still have room for a full 4k image plus some interface bits around it

 

I recently bought one of those Asus 28" 4K screens I and really like the added screen real estate.

I'm thinking of getting one of the new LG Cinema 4K LCD screens later this year for even more pixels. Or maybe I'll wait a little more and get a 5K screen.

I'm running Windows 8.1 with an nVidia GTX 960 video card connected via the DisplayPort cable that came with the monitor.

Maybe it's just an OSX issue or maybe I'm missing something but nothing looks blurry to me.

My only problem with this monitor was that out of the box the default color and image settings were terrible. There's a review on Tom's Hardware with recommended settings and the difference is astounding. I've worked with dozens of monitors over the years and I've never before experienced one with such bad default settings.

With the settings adjusted, everything looks great to me on this monitor. Unity 4 and Unity 5 both look just fine.

Is there some limitation in Unity 5 with this monitor I'm not noticing?

 

OS X specific issue. Needs Unity to adjust their app to support "Retina display". Its a thing on OS X, basically scales up the UI on higher pixel-density displays (most macs now) so they're not too small to see. Apps without it look "pixelly/blurry".

 

Thanks for the clarification.

 

Seems like an 8K iMac is coming out later this year...

Having an 8K screen for Unity would be amazing. I wonder what kind of GPU you'd need to drive it.

 

Yea and the iMac already had the best mobile one out, maybe they will put two in or something? Or maybe LG got confused and they meant a new 8k monitor for Mac Pros or something.

 

8k.. now that put's things in a whole new perspective if true... on 5k i was more concerned about readability and GUI artefacts ...but 8k...that's quite a few pixels to draw each frame... it will be interesting to see if this holds true... it could also be that mythical apple tv

 

I grabbed an Acer XB280HK 28" 4K G-sync monitor today to make sure we're 4K ready on Folk Tale (and to capture video footage at 4K). This post is my personal opinion and I'll update it once I've had more time with it.

Running on Windows 8.1 at normal (100%) resolution, a 28" monitor is way too small; even a 32" may be too small. That's with my face about 60cm from the screen. OS scaling is going to be a necessity. I need to scale up to at least 150% to be comfortable on a 28" monitor, and text becomes soft/blurry (in Unity, the OS, and other apps). While it's usable, my recommendation for anyone considering 4K on Windows is to wait for Windows 10.

While I'll use 4K for video and screenshots, for day to day development I'll resort back to 3x1080p monitors for now.

 

totally agree, if I turn off the retina thing and scale everything down on my iMac its too hard to see. "retina-support" is a OS X specific feature, I'm guessing MS is doing something similar in windows 10 to scale up the UI on hi rez monitors?

 

For me the obvious choice now that my 2008 MacMini is no longer supported and my PC is getting long in the tooth too is wait for and hope there are new MacMinis this fall and get the mid-range model of that. If not then buy the current mid range model MacMini with Intel Iris. Then install BootCamp and run Windows & Mac on the same machine. In need desk space too so that is good. Don't like 2 mice, 2 keyboards, and so on.

If I had a lot of Money I would be the biggest MacBook Air Pro Retina or whatever it is called. The external monitor I like to buy separate. I have had the same 27" HD monitor since 2006. It only has a slight warping of picture in the bottom right hand corner were I let magnets get too close once.

 

Interesting how the OP was asking "have you tried it and how does it look" and most of the responses are from people with strong opinions that aren't really experienced or interested in answering the actual question. I just think it's funny. Anyway, I'll give it a go:

I recently just swapped out my top of the line iMac with a near top of the line 5k iMac. Unity looks exactly the same on the new iMac as it did on the old one. I have my Display Preferences set to "default" for Resolution. This means that all the app detail, the text, the size of the window borders, etc, are all the same as if the monitor wasn't retina. That opposed to everything being "tiny" as someone suggested it would be. You can switch your Resolution setting to "more space" and then everything does become tiny but I didn't do that. My eyes are too old for that.

As for the GPU. I got the 2 Gig GPU instead of the 4 Gig GPU and I already regret it. In my opinion Apple didn't beef up the GPU enough for the 5k. My GPU on my older iMac, I believe, was beefier. But it didn't have Thunderbolt 2.0 and couldn't support 4k. Otherwise I would have gone with a 4k external monitor and kept my main screen non-retina.

I haven't had any performance problems inside of Unity though. The problems I had were inside of Substance Painter. There when painting on a 2k texture the system got very laggy. Unusably slow actually. So the moment Apple comes out with a better GPU on the 5k iMac I'll probably be upgrading again.

One of the reasons I wanted to go 4k was because many of the devices that I develop for (iPad, iPhone 6+) are too large to emulate in the game window. The 750x1334 of the iPhone 6 is the largest I can go. And in the default display resolution setting this is unchanged. The Game window isn't recognizing the 2.0 scale factor of the display and is probably rendering at a non-retina 1.0 scale factor. Which would mean that it's rendering 750x1334 and displaying it in a window with double the width and height of that. Double that should support up to 1500x2668 - so hopefully Unity will eventually support the 2.0 retina thing and give you a scale option. IMHO they need to do that to help justify the extra $75 a month for iOS people.

To get to a full iPhone 6+ in the tall orientation you need to get to 1920 tall. Unfortunately even when you set the render to more space the biggest you can go is 1735 tall. So it doesn't solve the iPhone 6+ preview problem. Testing for that resolution will have to remain on actual devices for now. 1920x1080 in the Wide orientation does work though.

 

4K gaming won't be a thing for 10 years in mainstream due to consoles and normal tvs not really being replaced every few years by people in general. 4K is nice for the pc master race, but the pc master race is a minority.

So no rush on the whole 4K WRT gaming.

 

@badweasel I have the same 5k iMac and it still looks blurry compared to safari etc. There's been some tweets from unity folks working on retina-support lately, so perhaps it isn't too far off...