Unity on Apple silicon and Big Sur: Known issues and workarounds

I have the same issue.

 

I just started to learn unity, and i m on a M1, I tried 2021.2.0a12 version, I found play scene is very slow.. but sure if it is only me.

 

You can disable Domain Reload to make it faster.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ConfigurableEnterPlayMode.html
Just un-tick Reload Domain. This will make it faster when you aren't changing scripts.

Otherwise, it looks like Unity is working hard on a native version of the editor. I'm also impatient but I can rest easy knowing that it is coming. In the meantime, I've switched back to my intel mac.

 

Command R to refresh assets (it waits to recompile on next run)

 

Since you're new, here are some simple things to try. Don't have the Scene tab and Game tab open at the same time. Close the scene tab or dock it in the same window as the play tab when you play the game. Having both open slows my game when I play it. Next, in the Hierarchy tab if you have something complicated selected it may slow play, so select an empty in the Hierarchy before (or after) you play the game in editor.

 

Any time-frame for the first alpha with native Apple Silicon Editor?

 

Had a system crash today (M1 Air, base model) while using 2020.3.f1. I was editing a very simple 2D scene with three animated sprites. My guess is something with the Animator Controller, as I've been using this version since March and never seen this. It suddenly locked up, and rebooted shortly after.

 

very good news!
many thx for the info...
maybe first alpha with the launch of new iMac's ;-)
and many thx and respect @ the team who doing all those hard porting work...
there are not just a few lines of code... Unity has become a very complex game engine...
M.

 

Sounds good, can't wait to test it out

 

So true! Many people underestimate the work for the Apple Silicon transition.
In cases like Unity it is not just a recompile like a lot of people think.

 

thank you to the whole team for the hard work on this! As others have said, you should know how much we appreciate your efforts and are looking forward to using the editor on Apple Silicon. Fingers crossed it goes smoothly, and let us know how we can help

Once it’s finally shipped I would love to read a blogpost about how you tackled this. I can imagine there are all kinds of hairy problems to solve.

 

That's great news. I can't wait to run the editor natively. Great job, guys!

 

Will the editor also be supported in 2020 LTS? Or will the native support only be available in 2021 versions?

 

Thanks to everyone involved with getting that HDRP crash fixed as of 2021.2 alpha 16.

 

As a fairly new (like, 2 weeks ago) mac user, this is great !

 

pictured:
me checking this thread every day for some news

 

I wish good luck and no road blocks to the whole Unity dev team!
Native Apple Silicon Unity will be a huge blast!
I'm also eagerly waiting for JetBrains to port Rider

 

You can already get the editor part of Rider in ARM native form! Need to copy over the JBR folder from another one of their programs, used PyCharm or GoLand in my case, and the editor is a lot more snappy now Of course, that's only 1/4th of the stack, broadly speaking - Mono, Unity Editor, Unity IL2CPP, etc aren't native still, but we're getting there.

 

Seems there's still a long time to publish the native editor?

 

That sound interesting, can you explain a bit more?

 

Sure thing, so the JBR folder is the runtime for the editor. Also on mac, xyz.app is just a folder with its own structure, and info on how to execute the folder.

Anyway, currently Rider ships with the old, x86 JBR, since some parts of the editor aren't ARM native. This is mostly Mono related I believe, so will be fixed towards the end of the year. However, I am impatient.

Also keep in mind all the following paths could change for you. I'm using Jetbrains Toolbox, so I'm going off those defaults.

Before doing anything, close down rider so you don't run into permissions issues and the likes.

I found the jbr folder at `~/Library/Application Support/JetBrains/Toolbox/apps/Goland/ch-1/211.7442.27/GoLand.app/Contents/jbr`. Goland is just an example, just need an ARM native editor, PyCharm and the likes would work just as well. Copy this folder.

Then you want to navigate to your Rider app's contents folder, which is `~/Library/Application Support/JetBrains/Toolbox/apps/Rider/ch-0/211.7442.29/Rider.app/Contents` in my case. Make a copy of the jbr folder, and paste the Apple native jbr in.

Once that's done, restart Rider, and it's `Kind` in the process monitor should show up as Apple

 

Tautvydas-Zilys, will assembly reload times be improved when the alpha of Apple Silicon support comes out in 2021.2? I’m not asking for benchmarks or anything, just whether that process (MonoJIT mostly I guess) will be native with the first alpha.

From what I understand, it seems the biggest day-to-day performance hit with running UnityEditor under Rosetta2.

 

Rider M1 support is available in preview releases now!

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/RIDER-54092#focus=Comments-27-4922392.0-0

 

This version seems not working with unity project, after launching rider I have all my C# scripts full of errors.

 

Is Busrt not supported on apple M1 chip?
I'm using Unity2019.3.9 with package
entities: preview.6-0.10.0
busrt: preview.9-1.3.0

On mac with m1 chip, right after I open the unity project, error log display

 

Anyone can check if there is any difference between 8gb m1 version and 16gb version? because 16 seconds to compile each time i modify my c# is excesive...

 

i have a 16gb m1 and it is taking 30 seconds each time, though i have a bigger project.

On my intel macbook it takes ~15 seconds.
Unity on M1 is pretty much unusable until this is fixed

 

Yep, i was tested on M1 with unity 2021 latest release and so many versions of 2020 and same problem, also with visual code editor for M1 latest update.

 

but which version is available on native m1? i have tested latest 2021 with same performance as 2020 and 15 seconds to precompile each time

 

None. A native apple silicon/m1 version of unity does not exist yet

 

I'm honestly more interested with native .NET / mono support. The editor experience is pretty OK by my standards, the real pain is compilation time.

 

I might be wrong, but I believe native .Net support for Apple silicon will be available with version 6, so before then unity cannot go native without using a prerelease version of .Net.

 

WWDC is coming up in a few hours, hoping to wake up to some good news either way - native .NET/mono, Unity, or just a laptop powerful enough to brute force the non-native programs haha.

Mostly want a worthwhile upgrade, since I made the mistake of grabbing an 8GB one. That + Rider is... Not great.

 

Mono is due to be phased out, so it's only a matter of time till .Net is the only implementation of C#. Not sure when Unity will love their stack iber to it though.

From what I can tell, 2021.2 or .3 will be moved over to a preview version of one or the other which does support ARM64 natively, and then the Editor version can have a production release alongside the Mono/.Net release.

 

its out!
https://forum.unity.com/threads/now-available-native-apple-silicon-editor-preview-builds.1122712/

 

I actually was browsing the thread as you posted that! I was expecting an announcement in this thread, but was searching the forums for "Apple Silicon" anyway, on the off-chance.

Downloading now, so keen to give it a go and see what the compile and reload times are! Using the native Rider preview with it of course, for the maximum native goodness

 

I did a test upgrade with our project, from 2019.4 to 2020.3.10, mainly to test the Apple Silicon/Universal build support. Testing on an M1 MBP, performance compared to an Intel build from 2019 LTS is much higher in our game (from 60fps to 100fps) -- except if Vegetation Studio Pro is enabled, which uses Burst, Jobs, and Mathematics -- then there's a 20% drop (from 58fps in the Intel build to 48fps in the Universal build. Is this a known issue? Anything I can do to get at least equal performance? I can't really do this upgrade if it's a downgrade in performance....

 

Hey, can you (or anyone else) confirm if Unity 2018/2019/2020 LTS runs stable on M1 over Rosetta?
I know this is the native support thread, but I couldn't find that information anywhere.

Considering a M1 macbook, but it's not obvious if Unity runs stable over Rosetta at all. I don't mind if it's not as fast as native, as long as I can get my work done without issues for now

 

It works and is pretty stable, but compiles and reloads take about 2x as long as normal. I would definitely get more than 8GB RAM though, if possible.

 

I haven't done much yet, just testing the Apple Silicon build, but it does seem slower in some aspects. (Though my experience is probably complicated by the Burst/Jobs/Mathematics issue I was reporting.)

 

So I guess this line in the 2021.1.0 Beta 2 notes means that Burst is not supported on Apple Silicon in 2020 LTS?

Burst: Apple silicon support.

I guess that would explain the bad performance I noted above....it sure would be nice if this was clarified officially.....

 

Oh, okay. Thanks much for the reply.

So....about the bad performance I get when using Burst, Jobs, and Mathematics (in Vegetation Studio Pro) -- any ideas? It's very clearly worse than in an Intel build. And gets worse and worse as I increase the grass distance, thus using those packages more intensively.

 

why unity 2021.2.0b2 still runs on Rosetta2 ?