It's why the games on apple products are fundamentally different. Apple may say it's about protecting the integrity of the user experience, but the best and the brightest would rather learn directly from users themselves and not use Apple as a go-between.
It took me years to understand that, you can picture a performance red line, and instead of approaching it from above (that is, optimising a lagguy game) we should approach it from below. I havent work for a single game developer which use that approach and yet Im now convinced its the right one. Approaching the line from above almost always gives you a bloated heavy erring-on-the-wrong-side software.
Of course mobile games are "bigger" than PC games. It's because today 18yos use mobile phones to "type" their homework. It's because they have never actually used or owned a computer/mac keyboard. It's because +80% of visitors of all web pages come from mobile.
It's because everyone has a mobile phone, and relatively fewer people use or own a classic computer. It says nothing about the scale of mobile gaming. It says everything about the scale of mobile.
Could be the sort of thing that could cause an avalanche of switchers.
You'd also pull over the entire games industry into the Apple space. Right now we code on PCs. As Apple silicon gets better, it's gonna be more and more painful to not be able to make use of that.
Apple could come with its magic to take the field, but it’s been a while we saw them succeed in a market where a serious competitor is already expanding (voice assistants or the apple TV comes to mind). I’d love to be proven wrong, but won’t be holding my breath)
Really?
Have you missed the insane markups on anything 'gaming' related for many years?
But the economics make total sense. It's like 15/euro a month. A RTX 3080 would cost me like 1200 euro to buy at the moment, without the rest of the PC to go with it. And I'd need to run windows, which I've not done since '98.
Outsourcing hardware it seems, does work for gaming, if you've got the 'net for it, :}
Not being allowed to play a game you legally bought on geforcenow is something I really don't understand.
I find it rather pretty, either way...
Had the benefit to purchase my self a beasty computer right before Cyberpunk launched.
I don't know how many times I just stopped what I was doing and just look at something shiny/bright.
Last time I felt this way must have been back with HL2
You mean if gaming supported Apple more, right? The industry's reliance on DirectX and the frameworks that build on it are largely what keep gaming so PC-centric.
If we saw AAA studios embrace macOS-compatible (or better yet Open Source) graphics architecture, the need to have separate gaming PCs (and the insanely expensive GPUs associated therewith) would evaporate.
> Apple deprecated OpenGL in iOS 12 and macOS 10.14 Mojave in favor of Metal, but it is still available as of macOS 11 Big Sur (including Apple silicon devices). The latest version supported for OpenGL is 4.1 from 2011.
OSX accounts for 2.62% of Steam users.
Implementing another graphics backend is prohibitively expensive for small studios whereas you could implement either OpenGL or Vulkan and get the other 97.38%. And that's without factoring in the required investment in single-use hardware, people, and skills.
DirectX is another safe choice but I try to stay away from anything proprietary or Microsoft-related.
Honestly the real issue is you probably wouldn't get many users or make a whole ton of money, really. Unless you target iOS or iPads, but that can add some significant constraints to the game. (But sometimes it's OK; Divinity Original Sin 2 basically works fine on an M1 Mac or an M1 iPad, as long as you have a Xbox controller to go with it.)
I think as programmers we desperately want to believe it's just a matter of programming and that we're in the critical path here, but it really isn't. Most of that stuff is a solved for a lot of cases. And if it was technological constraints, honestly, there's like a whole host of actual technological concerns, all of them really boring and crappy and not "cool" like rendering (like how do you CI and QA the damn thing, what kind of impacts might it have on your build system, do all the 3rd party things you have work here, etc.) Rendering is just "cool" to talk about but it's not actually as important as those; by the same token you never see giant threads on here about like OS-specific sound APIs or whatever...
There just aren't many Mac gamers and the hardware is kind of expensive to buy and test on for most purposes in that case.
I can tell you from long experience-- more than 20 years ago I produced a Mac games with Apple's financing and as recently as five years ago I produced a game that sold over $100m on an Apple device-- Apple has been extremely consistent in their attitude. They are much less supportive of gaming then Microsoft or Sony. Part of it is that they see games as a lesser use of their devices over other use cases. Another part is that they consistently promote the kind of experiences they wish their customers wanted over the experiences their customers choose.
Of course consumer level macs have never had GPUs that could run AAA games. I don't know what an M1 MacBook Air's perf is. If it's able to run AAA games and a reasonable framerate then maybe a market would build? But if you're limiting gamers to M1 Pro/M1 Max/M1 Ultra users only then it's probably a pretty small market?
It's a chicken and egg problem, although Apple Arcade is a good approach to try and bridge that gap.
Apple makes a huge part of its revenue from mobile gaming, while ferociously antagonizing the game makers and the main players of the industry (still remember their beef with Nvidia for instance) which makes it a bad bet to embrance Apple platform outside of the most dominant ones.
But go on, blame directx for being the one API actually moving things forwards. Not Apple's shitty behavior.
I can't find 'em for under $2000.
There aren't many Mac games that have been ported over to both Metal and ARM, but World of Warcraft is an example.
Blizzard games are or were probably the outlier. They supported Macs even back in the PowerPC days. As a kid with a PowerBook G4 Blizzard games were the only good games I was able to play (Warcraft 3, WoW, Diablo). I have no idea if this is still the case for their newer games though.
Diablo 2 Remastered doesn't run on a Mac :-(
All the iOS games do both today.
Blackthorne ran on 68040 as well. I think WarCraft came out first though...
I know there is Crossover, Wine technically works on Mac from what I can tell also. So not sure if there is a technical reason Proton couldn't work on Mac other than just not building it.
Apple does talk a lot about gaming now on the iPhone and iPad, I would love to see them talk about it more on Mac (especially with how powerful these are) and maybe work with Proton like Steam is for the Steam Deck.
Meanwhile, newer versions of macOS (and the M1 that runs the ARM builds in particular) don't use Vulkan at all, opting for Metal instead.
So even if it "only" reaches 3060 levels of performance in games, I think many people would be okay with that. Reality will likely place it somewhere between a 3060 and the 3090.
Running a farm of these things? Maybe perf per watt makes sense to save some money. Mobile device running on battery? I totally get it.
But surely, the difference in cost for one person running it in their house, or a few hundred people in an office... like who cares? The cost savings won't even be noticeable on the power bill.
A lot more probably find a best-bang-for-the-buck midrange card and hang on to it for ~3 years, before upgrading to another midrange card.
It's definitely a great machine, but if you're a gamer - stay away.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3...
Valheim - not in database
ARK: Survival Evolved - "game won't launch"
Conan: Exiles - not in database
Grounded - not in database
Civ V and Civ VI - each shows one record and seems it ran for that person (30-60 fps - for comparison, both run 144 fps on my $1000 Lenovo laptop.)
It Takes Two - not in database
That's all anecdotal, i.e. the games this one person likes to play are not supported, or don't play very well, and some of them are 5+ years old.
Overall the point being, it's hard to shell out all that money for a device that won't play your games. (If this sort of gaming is part of your computer use case). So to that original comment's point "I wish Mac worked seriously well for gaming."
You’re right, though, that M1 has pretty decent parity with Intel Macs for games now.
Game companies and their parent companies tend to install some shady spyware on your machine in the name of "anti-cheat software" (ie, installed in the ring0/kernel space). I am kind of relieved that I have 2 separate machines.
Although if they develop virtualized environments to sandbox games from the host machine (similar to QEMU) then I suppose that might work.
Yes. The vast majority of people that I'm aware of don't buy multiple desktops. If I spend $1000+ for a gaming machine, I don't want to spend hundreds more to have multiple machines to jump between and to manage connections to and to take up space in my office.
Make games for Linux, and let Apple figure out a compatability layer to make it work on their products. That's the way it should be.
And the most performant MacOS APIs for graphics rendering aren't on Linux AFAIK. Besides, game developers generally eschew compatibility layers because they harm performance.
It sounds like a good idea if it leads to higher profits. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all charge game developers similar fees.
Desktop Macs with GPUs even remotely capable of gaming are not that plentiful.
But for the price to use it, ok not rarely since I game a lot... but considering I also have consoles. I would say I use my Mac more.
I just wonder if this is ever going to be a realistic alternative or am I just always going to have 2 personal computers.
Additionally all the creators, musicians, artists, etc that are making assets for and working with the game industry are having to use PCs to interface with the game.
Increasingly rare to find an artist that only works in photoshop and isn't working in the engine, directly putting their work into the game.
Accordingly even the art side is using PCs.
Not very surprising though; Mac native games don't really work that well either. If it relies on 32-bit libraries, it won't launch. If it uses outdated OpenGL, you can expect a plethora of errors to accompany you to an instantaneous crash. Apple has their work cut out for them, I just doubt they'll have the "courage" to bring back the features they so courageously threw away.
the last 32bit only Mac system shipped a decade prior to Catalina. 32bit was dropped a decade after support for the last 32bit only Macs. Apple Silicon in both iOS and Mac is 64bit only, on iOS it has been for years.
Despite that, macOS supports everything required for proton - the mechanisms that allow wine to run 32bit x86 apps on both intel and under rosetta exist pretty much purely for the purpose of things like wine (and so proton).
So I'm not sure where you get "apple cut off the proton devs" from that work
It was quite odd because the original herald of Steam Play had macOS front and center, even with exclusive cosmetics if you launched the game on macOS.
I do remember a large kerfuffle over the very poor state of OpenGL on macOS, which if I remember correctly was stuck on 3.2 for a long while, before being completely deprecated.
Why do you hate it? I also have this setup and I just play games, watch movies occasionally and play music on it unattended and I don't mind it's running Windows as I have no other use for it.
I guess Apple will never play the console game, with having their own game developer studios and buying exclusives.
But I wish they would put a M1 in an Apple TV, releasing their own controller and just do something!
- [x] Decent wired network in-home
- [x] Connect via Moonlight from Mac Mini M1 to Gaming PC
- [x] Best of both worlds
It's wonderful. I only wish my Mac Mini had a 120hz display attached.
I hate that I have my gaming PC and then my Mac for everything else.
I have to wonder though what their plan is for the M2. Are they laying the groundwork for when the M2 comes out all of these variants will be ready at the same time? Or a gradual upgrade but the same series (Normal, Pro, Max, and then Ultra) for each.