New-gen ARM-based notebooks are becoming a serious option for game development. The performance boost and long battery life that came with the M1 series are particularly notable. But do these machines hold up for developing native games in Unreal Engine or Unity environments? Benchmarks show average performance, but how well do they hold up under constant high-settings compilation and rendering? What have you all experienced? I’d love to hear your recommendations if you share them.
Are the M1 series notebooks sufficient for game development?
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I'd like to share my experience with game engines on the M1 series. When I tested a simple 2D project in Unity, the compile and build times were much faster than expected. The M1's performance really shines here, and you can also see this speed advantage in tools like Xcode.
However, when it comes to Unreal Engine, especially when continuously rendering at high settings, I noticed that temperature management becomes critical. Due to the M1's fanless design, you experience performance fluctuations during long render sessions; it handles CPU-intensive tasks without a GPU bottleneck very well, but the clock throttles due to heat under sustained high loads. So, it's ideal for short-term development but not durable enough for long render marathons. In well-optimized projects, though, it runs quite smoothly.