I’ve had an M1 MacBook Pro since Day 0, and have had nothing but good experiences. Most of the apps I use on a daily basis are M1 optimized, and it really shows.
One of the few exceptions is Roblox Studio. Even on my custom built Windows PC Studio can be slow at times. From constant crashes to unexplained “Unable to open place” popups, Studio isn’t the best experience. The Mac edition of Roblox Studio has been traditionally more stable for me, but didn’t perform as well as the Windows edition.
Studio through Rosetta has been a generally good experience, but frequently crashes. I am requesting that Roblox Studio be compiled for ARM processors. This would benefit us developers who use M1 powered MacBooks.
I can’t make this post without pointing out what seems to be most inefficient / worst performant features on the MacOs edition of Roblox Studio: the script editor and the dock widgets. Resizing and moving a dock widget is the laggiest experience in the world. It honestly feels like I’m on a Windows XP potato. Dock widgets flicker when resizing. The script editor is borderline unusable. Typing is incredibly delayed taking upwards of 15 seconds to finish writing what you typed. Scrolling is slow and feels like Internet Explorer. (This is why we use VSCode) I’ve got the MacBook Pro M1 with 16gb of unified memory. Studio should be a walk in the park.
This is actually incredibly surprising when Studio has always performed smooth as butter for me on a 7700k and GTX 1060.
For this to happen you’d need Studio itself and ALL of its libraries to have a compiler that compatible with the M1 and you’d need to sort out lower level driver/OS access.
I wouldn’t expect this in the near-future. Its not a trivial task.
Seems to me like companies such as Adobe are able to compile their massive applications to M1 relatively quickly. I’m sure Roblox can do it in a month or two.
Companies like Adobe have a HUGE amount of employees. Roblox employees as is are already tied between multiple different projects a lot of the time. So even if they could theoretically do it in a month or two, the amount of manpower plus pushing it through their pipeline would extend it much longer.
And again, the difficulty to port to ARM depends on a number of factors. It really all depends how much Roblox has been built around portability honestly.
Since Apple already has a macOs vision of studio, they would simply need to recompile for ARM processors. That might create a few problems, but nothing that would take months.
Have you seen how long it takes Roblox to push out updates?
And just because MacOS runs on ARM doesn’t mean there wasn’t any changes in the OS API.
Even Apple’s guide for porting to ARM specifies to look out for:
Interacts with third-party libraries you don’t own.
Interacts with the kernel or hardware.
Relies on specific GPU behaviors.
Contains assembly instructions.
Manages threads or optimizes your app’s multithreaded behavior.
Contains hardware-specific assumptions or performance optimizations.
There’s more than that to look out for, you can check Apple’s porting guide for more info.
So again its 1. highly dependent on how portable Studio is designed. and 2. Dependent on how much staff can be allocated for this project and time spent along with pushing it out of the pipeline. Roblox is notorious for having long times pushing things out of their pipeline.
Is there any news on this, the M1 chip has been out for almost a year now and I am planning to upgrade to a M1 Mac mini in a few weeks, however given the main application I use is Roblox studio im interested in if this issue is resolved / is in the process of being resolved?
I’ve got an RTX 3080 and a Ryzen 5 5600x with 32 GB of RAM, I get 30 FPS in studio because of a bug and get 3 FPS on studio text editor because of another bug. If I go afk for 5 minutes while play testing, studio crashes. I couldn’t open studio for 50 minutes today because of a “Studio failed to fetch configuration settings.” error that popped up every time.
So, instead of optimizing the studio for M1 chips, for what? Maybe 10 developers that use? It should first fix the prominent bugs that it already has.
I’d honestly say if this is the case then the script editor in general should be looked into since this is where I encounter 99% of my issues using studio, with me too having huge input delay and painful scrolling.
I don’t see why on earth a glorified text editor should be using 33% of my CPU and running so poorly, especially given the window when undocked and the same resolution runs perfectly fine.
This is an issue that has been plaguing developers, mainly Mac developers, since like 2017-2018 and I find it absurd that it is still not resolved. It is nice having new features but I would appreciate some engineering effort towards actually make studio itself useable
Roblox needs to figure this out quickly. ARM adoption in a few years won’t only be applicable to Apple’s Macs, as Windows hardware makers will begin trying to catch up to the higher speed and efficiencies of Apple’s M-series chips. A fully native and optimized version of Roblox Studio (eventually the player, too) is essential for developers like myself. I am stunned by the performance of the M1 chip, but I cannot fathom how terribly Roblox Studio runs on it because of how un-optimized the program is. I don’t think this is an emulation issue either since Rosetta 2 emulates other programs incredibly fast and smooth; Roblox Studio has always been buggy and a frustration to use on the Mac, even with Intel x86 chips prior to Apple switching to their own chips.
I’m really hoping Roblox gets their act together and starts working on supporting arm architecture for the client and studio. If I was in charge, this would be top priority.
Optimizing for arm is inevitable, it really is the architecture of the future. Now that MacOS has been on Apple Silicon for years and Windows is following, it really should be a priority to convert studio to work with Apple Silicon now, rather then later. This also opens up the opportunity to also port studio to devices such as ipad or maybe even arm based Chromebooks.
Overall I find the lack of communication/ a roadmap extremely disappointing.
I wouldn’t really say that arm processors are the future considering that arm processors in general are low powered and weak compared to 64 bit processors but only time will tell.
Edit: Got my response mixed with the title and thought Apple Silicon had arm processors.
Not sure what you mean as Apple Silicon is 64 bit.
Apple Silicon is extremely powerful while also being power efficient. My M2 Macbook Air can run unity, Roblox studio, Roblox client (with max graphics), chrome, all at once with each preforming extremely well. It consistently beats the high end intel laptops I’ve used both in terms of performance and battery life. Of course there are high end PC x86 chips that can beat Apple Silicon, but at the result of extremely higher power usage.
This would be an amazing addition to Roblox Studio and a huge quality of life update for M1 Mac users.