Nothing more pleasing, than running a game with the best possible visual look and a straight A performance while travelling the virtual worlds.

For running the Unreal Tournament 4 Pre-Alpha with high FPS and excellent graphics on macOS, the following graphics performance settings are recommended:

Special remarks

Enabling the FPS counter in UT4

  1. Open the UT Console in-game by pressing the ~, t or z key.
  2. Type the following command in the console: /stat fps
  3. Confirm using the return-key – the FPS counter should instantly be visible

Deactivating Tutorial Videos in UT4 for macOS

Currently – as of April 2018 – the tutorial videos for the different match types of UT4 won’t show in the macOS version of the game; there’s just a black screen and only the audio is noticeable. You can just sit through until the video is finished and eventually the map will start loading.

However, there is a very easy way to fix this, so you will also not need to waste any time waiting for a new match:

  1. Quit the game & open the UnrealTournament folder in the macOS Finder
  2. Navigate down to /UnrealTournament/Content/Movies/
  3. Delete – or otherwise remove – the TutorialVideos-folder from the /Movies/-directory

Tuning UT4’s System Settings

General Settings
General

Setting Value
Resolution 2560 x 1440 (16:9)
Display Mode Fullscreen
Enable VSync On
Frame Rate Cap 120
Smooth Framerate On

Graphics Settings (Advanced Options)

Make sure to turn “Show Advanced Options” to On in order to fine tune all available graphics options.

Graphics Settings (1/2)
Graphics Settings (2/2)
Setting Value
Screen Percentage 100%
Texture Details Epic
View Distance Quality Epic
Lighting and Shadow Quality Epic
  • Light Functions
 On
  • Shadow Precision
 1: low
  • Shadow Texture Resolution
 1: low
  • Distance Field Shadows
 Off
  • Distance Field Ambient Occlusion
 Off
  • Simple Forward Shading
 Off
Effects Quality Epic
  • Refraction Quality
 3: high
  • Reflection Environment Mapping
 On
  • Translucency Volume Blur
 On
  • High Detail Shaders
 On
  • Foliage Draw Distance
 100%
Post Process Quality Epic
  • Depth of Field Quality
 4: extreme
  • Lens Flare Quality
 3: very good
  • Scene Color Fringe Quality
 On
  • Bloom Quality
 3: good
  • Screen Dirt Effect
 On
  • Fast Blur Threshold
 7 pixel radius
Tonemapper Quality 0: low
Light Shaft Quality On
Separate Translucency Pass On
Anti Aliasing Mode * FXAA
Decal Lifetime 30 seconds
Skip GPU buffering Off

* About UT4’s Anti Aliasing Mode

For the very best performance, change “Anti Aliasing” to None.

Changing it to Temporal might give you better performance over FXAA – there are different opinions on that discussed on Epic’s UT4 forum.

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4 thoughts on “Boosting Unreal Tournament 4 Pre-Alpha to run beautifully above 45 FPS on an iMac 5k with macOS”

  1. I dont have an unreal tournament folder and only have the epic games launcher
    Even did a search for the folder
    I get the black screen and want to remove the tutorials, but without the unreal folder and only the epic games launcher, how can I?

    Reply

    1. Hi AI,
      I misspelled this reference, actually meant all „Epic“ graphic quality settings, as it is offered in UT – and my presumption that iMac Pro should be able to handle that highest possible game configuration.

      Thanks for pointing it out.

      Reply

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