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Unreal Engine 4 Games on Macbook pro m1 8G (black screen)

Greetings, I would like to know is there any trick with games that use Unreal Engine 4. Because every game I install that uses UE4 has the same issue. I can install them, I can run them, I see the menu, I hear sounds, but when I'm already playing there is just a black screen, I can hear my player moving, I can see popping up speech bubbles, I can see minimap. I tried almost everything I can, installed every possible driver. I tried forcing them in window mode, forcing them to use d3d9, but nothing helps. In particular, I am interested in two games Octopath Traveler and Scarlet Nexus. I would love to know a secret if there is one 😀

Bump! Have the same problem as well on my M1 iMac 8gb. All PC games running Unreal Engine 4, and possibly other versions, have a black screen or otherwise missing visuals. Other engines appear to run without such issues. Tried different settings and OS bottles, but all get that blackness ...

Hi folks,

In the case of Octopath Traveler (and several other games), the black screen is due to a lack of geometry shader support. Metal (Apple's graphics API) does not support geometry shaders, which makes it nearly impossible for us to support in CrossOver Mac. Not all games that present with a black screen or otherwise missing graphics are due to missing geometry shaders, but it is the root cause for many games.

Best,
Meredith

1

Hi Merideth

Are geometry shaders to do with BSP? I publish a game which is primarily built in BSP, or meshes converted from BSP. It uses ue4/dx11 and is black in crossover.

The game is Glitch Arena which is free on Steam. Although I develop on windows I'm primarily Mac and would love for the game to run on mac. I am not the most technical of developers, in fact Glitch is a blueprints only project.

I'd love to know what I could do in the engine to get the game displaying properly, if you have any tips.

Cheers!

1

Hi Alistair,

I tried out Glitch Arena, and I was able to confirm by looking a log that the game is indeed using geometry shaders :/ That being said, I'm not sure what workaround there are on the game development side to be able to work around this issue.

Best,
Meredith

Thanks Medideth. I guess I can look into this and see if there's any low hanging fruit. If it means converting geometry to mesh it might not work out too well.

However, lots of other unreal games that are BSP based seem to work fine, like quake for instance.

I'll ask for some advice in the unreal forums and report.

Is this not something that can be hammered out using compute shaders? Similar to how Apple currently implements raytracing? Let me guess, even if it were possible, it would be prohibitively slow to do it that way.

Other UE games affected by missing textures, and one example that may simply be something completely different:

Quantum Conundrum - UE3 - Missing most textures on Linux unless the correct MSVC runtime is installed in the prefix or in Proton

Psychonauts 2 - UE4 - Missing most textures, probably also a geometry shader issue. Probably explains why it works but runs like crap under Parallels.

F.I.S.T. - Formed In Shadow Torch - demo - UE4 - Missing most textures and objects as early as the menu. Functional but horribly slow under Parallels, even as early as the menu background which is rendering only a single character in high detail and close up.

1

I just want to add Vampyr to the list of games with this issue. Hopefully this cam get solved due to how many games use this engine and would work just fine otherwise.

1

I have the same problem with Deep Rock Galactic. It runs fine, but only some assets are visible and the rest is black textures, which makes it unplayable unfortunately. Would be great to know which part actually causes this, is this and if its a harder or easier fix. Is this related to dxvk, so manually updating the release would help?

Hi Jan-Henrik,

Unfortunately, Deep Rock Galactic uses geometry shaders. Since those aren't supported by Metal (Apple's graphics API), that's not something we can fix on our end.

Best,
Meredith

1

Hi Meredith,
thanks for the explanation! Does that mean that Molten also cannot do anything about it, as it is just a layer on top of Metal and we would basically have to wait until Metal supports Geometry Shaders?

Jan-Henrik Damaschke wrote:

Hi Meredith,
thanks for the explanation! Does that mean that Molten also cannot
do anything about it, as it is just a layer on top of Metal and we
would basically have to wait until Metal supports Geometry Shaders?

Hi again,

You're exactly right; MoltenVK changes also wouldn't be sufficient and the change would need to be to Metal.

Best,
Meredith

Hi Meredith,

One game that has this issue too is Prey (2017). The game will launch just fine but has all black textures. If the game is launched under a windows VM in Parallels, the textures are all visible. Since Parallels also has to convert DirectX to Metal, do we know how it's accomplishing this?

1

Alexander and Meredith,

I’ve wondered this myself. For example, The Outer Worlds and Control will both render textures normally under Parallels (though are admittedly very buggy otherwise). Both of those games suffer from this black texture problem in Crossover 21. And I believe that Outer Worlds is also an UE4 game.

Eric Volker wrote:

Alexander and Meredith,

I’ve wondered this myself. For example, The Outer Worlds and
Control will both render textures normally under Parallels (though
are admittedly very buggy otherwise). Both of those games suffer
from this black texture problem in Crossover 21. And I believe that
Outer Worlds is also an UE4 game.

Parallels is most lightly just emulating the missing features and passing supported features to the native GPU.

Dean Greer wrote:

Eric Volker wrote:

Alexander and Meredith,

I’ve wondered this myself. For example, The Outer Worlds and
Control will both render textures normally under Parallels
(though
are admittedly very buggy otherwise). Both of those games suffer
from this black texture problem in Crossover 21. And I believe
that
Outer Worlds is also an UE4 game.

Parallels is most lightly just emulating the missing features and
passing supported features to the native GPU.

…point being there must be a way to get Metal to render geometry shaders, whether through emulation or another method. I’m not sure how labor intensive writing such code is, or how much performance penalty there would be, but clearly it can be done.

Parallels and Crossover must both rely on Metal to render graphics, so it seems like there is some way to get it working.

Eric Volker wrote:

Dean Greer wrote:

Eric Volker wrote:

Alexander and Meredith,

I’ve wondered this myself. For example, The Outer Worlds and
Control will both render textures normally under Parallels
(though
are admittedly very buggy otherwise). Both of those games suffer
from this black texture problem in Crossover 21. And I believe
that
Outer Worlds is also an UE4 game.

Parallels is most lightly just emulating the missing features and
passing supported features to the native GPU.

…point being there must be a way to get Metal to render geometry
shaders, whether through emulation or another method. I’m not sure
how labor intensive writing such code is, or how much performance
penalty there would be, but clearly it can be done.

Parallels and Crossover must both rely on Metal to render graphics,
so it seems like there is some way to get it working.

The major problem is transform feedback not geometry shaders.

Does the upcoming Metal 3 change anything to this situation?

Manuel Glenk wrote:

Does the upcoming Metal 3 change anything to this situation?

Metal 3 provides mesh shaders that can be used for geometry shader however we’d still need VK_EXT_transform_feedback see https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/1588

So no Metal 3 alone won’t help.

Some fascinating developments. Few days ago nastys on his GitHub fork of MoltenVK (not going to link it here in case that'll violate any forum rules) has released a patched version of MoltenVK specifically to demonstrate Unreal Engine 4 games working.

I've tried with AMID EVIL that was producing black screen - it works. Tried with King's Bounty II - it works as well.

Things are looking quite bright - both for future of Unreal Engine 4 games on macOS, but also with this patch everything literally looks very bright :-)

Either way - just wanted to post here ICYMI.

1

Wow this sounds great! Is there a possibility that this finds its way into CrossOver? :)

Bogdan Brinza wrote:

Some fascinating developments. Few days ago nastys on his GitHub fork of MoltenVK (not going to link it here in case that'll violate any forum rules) has released a patched version of MoltenVK specifically to demonstrate Unreal Engine 4 games working.

I've tried with AMID EVIL that was producing black screen - it works. Tried with King's Bounty II - it works as well.

Things are looking quite bright - both for future of Unreal Engine 4 games on macOS, but also with this patch everything literally looks very bright :-)

Either way - just wanted to post here ICYMI.

Can someone tell me how to install MoltenVK? Thanks

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