As another comment mentions, there is the iOS to MacOS pipeline, but given that a large proportion of these are already Unity-based, the fact that MacOS now shares an architecture with iOS may prove largely incidental.
This is the dream laptop. It's the one product that is 5 years ahead of everyone else, like the iPhone 4.
I believe their main concern is to bring iOS games to macOS rather than bring new games into the platform. Let's be realists here, iOS games bring in the cash. If they can run it in another form factor with potentially better graphics then even more money in the long run.
Hence, the easiest thing to do for most games is to just drop Mac support and not worry about it. IMO that's the biggest reason by far why people stopped bothering to port new games to Mac; between not updating OpenGL past 4.1 at best and Metal being so idiosyncratic, it's just not worth it, and since people have learned gaming on Macs sucks (largely because of the outdated and idiosyncratic APIs), most people who want to play games on a Mac have just been installing Windows anyway.
This is all not even to mention that Mac laptops tend to have far too high a resolution for the onboard GPU to perform well for any but the most rudimentary games; hopefully this has been addressed with the M1 batch having a much more powerful GPU. But the issues with Metal remain and will continue to remain until Apple either fixes Metal to make it a more Vulkan-like target, or adds really good Vulkan support.
I would expect they'll have an X version chip or future that are even more competitive with discrete laptop GPUs
In a more relevant benchmark, it looks like the M1 is about 30% better than the GTX 1050 Ti, which was released in Oct 2016. So it's maybe two to three years behind the state of the art in low-power discrete GPUs? I wouldn't be worried about my discrete GPU business if I were AMD or Nvidia, at least not yet.
That leaves two primary questions. Does the integrated graphics of the M1 beat integrated graphics of Intel and AMD? What does Apple plan to do to compete with discrete graphics in their higher end hardware and will that be a more powerful SOC, discrete graphics hardware from Apple, or something more traditional from AMD?
I understand that. I was responding to a comment that referenced a near future in which the Apple chips would compete with discrete graphics. Observing the distance they have to go is relevant to that speculation.
It's not a better indicator in any way, except in terms of being more relevant to the comment I was responding to at the top of the thread, which contemplated the possibility that Apple's chips would become competitive with discrete graphics cards in the foreseeable future.
Esports games are not intensive but the igpu appears to be better than intel Xe- so it's a straight upgrade in terms of YoY upgrades if they stuck with intel CPUs.
The only question mark is how they'll approach dGPU and eGPU performance levels.
But even if they didn't come to Mac they were always available through bootcamp or emulation. Is it simply not an option on this new hardware? That seems like an important step back.
Sufficient or not is a weird way to put it.
The OP commented games were "always available through bootcamp or emulation", which is true of a Windows-only game running on your Mac hardware via Bootbamp/Parallels... my point is, Macs provide a sub-par, no good, very little fun experience for anything but the simplest of games.
And before I sound like a typical PC bro, this line of thinking is coming from someone who has exclusively owned about a dozen Macs starting with the iBook Clamshell, and only recently built my first gaming PC during COVID. I'd never try to play a game on a Mac again lol
A PC with $4k worth of PCIe storage but no video output or networking would be very expensive but not very good at games.
A Mac with a reasonable video card (say, an RX580 or better) and a general i5-level CPU would run Windows and most games just fine. Won't be a 144Hz 4k party, but 1440/1080 for recent games on decent settings and at least 60FPS will work. But that's not a lot of difference to any other computer...
Difference would be what you start off with. If you buy any $1000 laptop that only has a CPU-integrated GPU but does have Thunderbolt 3, you can add an eGPU for that GPU power that you need and you'd be good to go.
If you buy a cheaper laptop that happens to have some sort of 1050 in it, it would be cheaper, but it probably won't have Thunderbolt 3 and then you'd be stuck with a GPU that will be a bottleneck faster than your CPU.
The biggest problem I'd see is that most Macs don't come with dedicate GPUs, and when they do it's a midrange AMD or workstation type GPU, neither of which are great for games (regardless of what computer you stick those in). The higher tier AMD GPUs did come to later Macs, but at that point (the 5000 series) it wasn't really all that good. Too bad with the 6000 series we don't know if Apple will even add any third party GPU anymore. Also too bad that they got in a fight with nvidia over their crap QA years ago and never got back together. Could have been great...
It is definitely the death of gaming as we know it on PCs.
Blizzard didn't bother porting Overwatch to macOS, their latest engine, and even that game was released in 2016. They ported to the PS4. It's just too small of a market.
Nintendo Switch level games should port fine, many are developed on cross platform engines like Unity that already support Metal on iOS. However Switch games sell for $50+, already higher than PC or macOS titles, so it's usually pretty bad economics - you'd rather the user buy on their Switch than their Mac.
If you call a Mac a PC, you'll only confuse your interlocutor. No-one ever refers to Macs as "PC", except to point out that "Macs are 'Personal Computers'".