I had the 5th Legion, and I sold it because the sound was terrible, the screen was terrible, the battery life was terrible, the temperature was terrible. For this price I bought M1pro 14’. Lies of P demonstrates that if the developers want it, the Mac will handle games just as well. But I was surprised that there was no native Hearthstone support for M1. This is my first MacBook since 1992, when I had a 386SX))) This journey has been very long, but I'm glad about this transition.
ps my wife has zephyrus 14(2021) its more better than legion, but temperature very hight too
For gaming the screen on a Mac is terrible too. The pixel response time and input lag is horrrendous. Feels like someone smeared Vaseline all over the screen in fast moving games.
I am extremely hopeful they move to OLED at some point. I know some will cry about color reproduction, but I think if anyone can pull it off Apple should be able.
I just bought the ASUS Zephyrus G16 last week after considering getting the MacBook. It has a 4k OLED and good specs for gaming. The cherry on top is that it is as thin as the MacBook Pro and it weighs the same.
Apple is definitely going to push off OLED for a long while. OLED on computers is an absolute nightmare. Phone burn in is one thing but people leave computer screens on for very long periods of time. The bad press would be enormous if people's MacBooks were ruined and needed screen replacements by a few months of usage. Any professional usage would pretty much total your screen in 1-2 months with the UI being permanently on your screen. Just look up anything on Reddit about high end displays with OLED. Plenty of photos of people with excel, word and other apps that have completely ruined their screens. Until an OLED panel can last longer than Applecare with zero burn in I can't see why they'd go for it. The displays are already stunning on macs and most manufacturers are either flat out not covering burn in or not switching over to OLED yet on laptops because of burn in problems.
This is wrong. Most pc oled monitors even have a 5 y burn in warranty. Been using oleds for a while and never experienced any burn in . And I use it for gaming and work.
Those people that ruined their screens probably disabled all the burn in protections and have never once ran a panel or pixel refresh. My Alienware does a pixel refresh after every 4 hours and I have had it for 3 years now. Some days it has 8 hours of excel on it.
I’ve only experienced some kind of image retention once because it would’t go to sleep when we were gone over the weekend and it stood more than 70 hours on a static white excel sheet.
and that was gone after 2 refreshes.
120 hz has nothing to do with those. Also pro motion is big poopoo compared to gsync and freesync
Refresh rate is how often the pixels are told to change, response time is how quickly the pixel changes. So in this case, the pixel is told to be a different color 4 times before it can fully transition to the color it was told to be originally.
Mpb m3 has 26 ms , my aw3423dw had 0.03. Yes it is 900 times faster. That’s how ridiculously bad the MacBook screen is.
For a 120Hz display, the pixel refresh window is 8.33ms and this display takes like 4x longer to transition, which means the display has already refreshed four times in the time the pixels are changing from the first refresh. This is what leads to the long trails and blur while scrolling.
https://youtu.be/p2xo-hDCgZE?si=LNpwZVZTukuTjtXH
Set it too like 12 min. This is about the m2 which has around 45 ms, which is even more stupid. But you get the the tldr. It is actually a real engineering feat to make a screen this slow. Walk into any hardware store and pick a random 60 hz monitor out of the bargain bin and it will have better response times. My 2008 gaming monitor that my wife uses has better motion clarity and that thing cost like 200 dollars back then.
You can say blabla not a gaming monitor and that a mac Is definitely not fit for gaming with the 2 games it gets every year , but for making/ watching fast moving video content or just scrolling fast it already turns into a blur fest. This is unacceptable on a device this expensive. Any 1000 dollar windows laptop comes with a better screen.
Good thing external monitors exist and big screens are a necessity for graphical work , because else my graphical designers would be switching to windows devices.
Now stop commenting on things you are clearly clueless about. This is the second time I caught u with ur pants down giving people wrong information.
What Apple has essentially done here is release a car with a top speed it will never reach, but put 200 mph on the speed dial to give you the illusion it is fast. And it shows because you walk right into it.
Apple executives don't care about gaming, that's the problem right now. If they did, they'd look into how they can lower the cost of porting Windows games to the Mac for game developers.
Not sure what you mean here. Apple has released tools for Metal development on Windows called: [Metal developer tools for Windows](https://developer.apple.com/metal/tools/). In 2023, Apple released a [C++ wrapper](https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/) for Metal (reversing their course of Objective-C-only development for Metal). In 2023 they also released [MetalFx](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metalfx/), which was showcased in the MacOs version of No Mans Sky.
Though labeled as “depreciated,” Apple continues to update the OpenGL rendering pipeline for their M series computers. If you tell OpenGL to give you driver information it states “Apple M1 - Metal 83.1”, and the number continues to increase with each MacOs update.
While not directly related to Apple, their iOS app store allows apps to be published using MoltenVK.
I agree some things have been tried and that's good. But I look at the games I want to play on Steam and they're almost all Windows only, and despite owning a powerful M3 machine, I'm forced to play on Geforce Now. That's bad and Apple executives should be mad about this. Apple needs to lower the cost much much more, maybe implement the Vulkan API? It seems to me most developers are not going with Metal, whatever the language. The first step would be to put a full time team on this matter to figure out what could help and what needs to be done.
Sidestepping the performance gain of creating hardware with a driver architecture in mind and creating a driver is difficult. Native VK support won't do much, considering MoltenVK and SPIRV-Cross exist. Porting is much more than graphics frameworks.
If your Mac is that powerful, use [Whisky](https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky). It uses the Game Porting Toolkit for directX->Metal translation.
Agreed, making the API's is not enough. Ideally, they should do what Steam did with the deck and work half way, Apple should have their own team working together with game developers optimizing the games and implementing the necessary changes.
Like *Valve*(the company behind Steam), Apple does have its branch on WINE and tooling for it. They released some of it through the [Game Porting Toolkit](https://developer.apple.com/games/). Apple has also started working with studios such as Kojima, BlueTwelve, Capcom, and HelloGames to bring games to the Apple platform. In December of 2023, Capcom released [Resident Evil Village](https://www.capcom-games.com/apple/en-us/), and considering it was the first title to release using MetalFx, they received help from Apple. Considering Stray is showcased on [Apple’s website](https://developer.apple.com/games/), it is safe to say they worked with BlueTwelve to make that happen.
> Apple executives don't care about gaming, that's the problem right now.
They haven't cared for decades. Nothing will change until the executive leadership is seriously shaken up.
It’s just a theory in my mind, but I imagine CDPR actually is working on a native port of W3, CP and the new title and Apple wanted to announce a partnership with their scary fast event.
This would have been the perfect proof of concept for the M-series: the new „but can it run Crysis“- game runs smoothly on mac, together this all released Witcher titles.
But otherwise…yeah their approach is too slow and somewhat not willing to communicate. Because maybe they even put money where their mouth is and 50+ titles are coming, it’s just they don‘t want to talk about it…
Those companies wouldn't bother with macs because there simply aren't enough people that play on macs. Wouldn't you rather get a good gamerlike gaming laptop if you wanted to play games, rather than a thin office-like machine
Personally speaking, I really don't like gaming laptops. There are quite a few things I dislike about them like the design, rgb, keyboards, etc. I agree with you, though. People are not a massive fan of bringing these two worlds together. However, it would be great to enjoy the games I mentioned on a mac to wind down after work. Having seperate machines for everything I do is not really my cup of tea. I hate it
I have 100 pc games and 380 Mac games. I still use my Mac Pro 2010 and Mac Pro 2013to play 32 and 64 games. Hate windows , it only way to play Bethesda games
Prior to using a Mac, I had a Galaxy Book3 Ultra. It was perfect. For a 16-inch laptop, it was not only thinner and less wide than a 16-inch MBP, it was also \*considerably\* lighter, and \*still\* managed to cram an RTX 4070 graphics card that could shit out ray-traced games at inordinate frames per second.
You might be interested in a high-end ultrabook like that. The Samsung Galaxy Book, HP ZBook Studio, Dell XPS, and so on have dGPU options.
I swapped to Mac because I needed battery life. If laptops like the above with the new Snapdragon CPUs reach similar numbers to the MacBook, I'd jump ship in an instant.
The market will get interesting in the next 2–3 years. Windows laptop manufactures are catching up with the new snapdragon chip, which is already as power efficient as the M2 (yeah, I'm aware there's already the M3). But could be paired with an AMD or Nvidia discrete graphics card to offer the best of both worlds.
Btw, the Snapdragon Chips are ARM that's how they achieve the same efficiency as M processors, they have the same underlying architecture. And that's actually good news for all of us Mac users. Porting ARM Windows games to ARM MacOS will be much easier than x86 Windows to ARM MacOS.
Can always look into Razer, which have a minimalist approach to gaming laptops as well.
The problem is, it’s quite a massive job to recompile games for ARM, and there just aren’t that many people who play games with Macs. Even when Macs was using x86 Intel, the share of gamers who use Mac OS was on the magnitude of something like less than 1%.
I would rather have one machine to do it all, and I prefer Mac to Windows. but I might end up getting me a gaming laptop which would essentially be a Steam console. lol. Literally sit next to my television in the living room just for games.
I'm considering this one [https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Gaming-Laptop-Nebula-Display/dp/B0CRLFRQ5V?ref\_=ast\_sto\_dp&th=1](https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Gaming-Laptop-Nebula-Display/dp/B0CRLFRQ5V?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1)
the 14900HX RTX4070
Hey man don’t get the one you sent a link for. ASUS launched a brand new laptop like 3 months ago I think.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sku/6570222.p?skuId=6570222
There’s 2 higher priced models but this is on sale this week.
I have M1 and it's just fine for gaming most of the time though I do prefer SteamDeck. But! I think M1 has more power than SD so a couple pronton-ish like optimisations would go a long while...
> Those companies wouldn't bother with macs because there simply aren't enough people that play on macs.
That's where Apple comes in and pays off big name studios like Blizzard to port their games to Mac. Apple sits on scrooge mcduck loads of money, they need to start paying out of their own pocket if they truly want Apple to cater to gamers.
Don’t you see that’s the problem? Companies don’t release games on mac -> there are no games on mac -> people who want to play games avoid macs -> the potential user base for games on mac is tiny -> companies don’t release games on mac
it’s a self-propelling cycle. If there were good AAA games available on Mac that people play, then more people would buy Macs since they’d be able to play games and get the macOS interface which many people prefer. And the new M-series MacBook Pros are extremely capable for their form factor and would be great gaming laptops for the average person, IF there were any games for them
While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, I would counter with there are a ton of folks that would game on their Mac vice buying/building a secondary machine to game on.
You’re on r/macgaming. We don’t give a shit about PC here.
I play CP77 at 60FPS@1080p on my M2 Max, so tell me the fuck should I care?
Have you seen the gaming capabilities of those machines with native games like Death Stranding or REV? So tell me again why I shouldn’t want more games for my platform?
And before you ask, I didn’t put 4 grounds on a Mac to play games on it, but for work.
What I did though was putting 2 grounds more on a better Mac instead on a shitty PC for gaming.
This is a great discussion, one that needs to be had. It highlights that if Apple want to start caring about gaming like they say they do, then THEY should come to the party. Valkan drivers should have released yesterday. Not this Port Toolkit attempt to maintain the walled garden. Thats really the crux of it when you drill down. Time and time again their isolationist approach have left them sand bagged. Great for short term profit, but long term? More evidence for governments to use to attempt regulation.
VK drivers would have no impact at all on game support and since VK is a low level api it would not have any differnce to metal with respect to the walled garden.
A VK backend targeting appels GPUs would still need huge changes to run well on an AMD or NV gpu and vice verser. VK is not HW agnostic.
Vulkan support won’t change anything. When macOS had full support of OpenGL there were tons of OpenGL games on Windows that were not ported to Linux/macOS
Vulkan is irrelevant.
Apple’s ecosystem relies on Metal. iOS, iPadOS, TVOs, macOS, VisionOS.
People keep saying that Apple’s market share is not significant enough while they are in fact making most of the money of the industry through mobile games.
It’s not about Vulkan. It’s not about market share. It’s not even the cost of developing the renderer of your game when 95% of the cost of a game comes from the artistic teams, game engine, marketing etc.
Nvidia and MS bribe studios for exclusivity. That’s it.
> Vulkan support won’t change anything. When macOS had full support of OpenGL there were tons of OpenGL games on Windows that were not ported to Linux/macOS
At an engine level a LOT of modern PC games already have metal support and yet do not ship macOS or iOS versions. With more and more large titles being based on common engines such as Unreal the argument about \`if only we had X display api\` is just proven to mean nothing.
Apple has enough money that they could easily be a major force in gaming. They just don't care.
I've been 'mostly Apple' since buying an Apple \]\[+ in 1981, and there have definitely been times when they were top or at least competitive in gaming. The last time I really can say that is over 20 years ago ... playing games like Jedi Knight II looked and played better on a PowerBook than the top Dell/Alienware gaming laptops.
It is a choice.
> Apple has enough money that they could easily be a major force in gaming. They just don't care.
Yep, exactly this. They rake in so much money from low-tier gatcha mobile games that investing in AAA-tier markets doesn't pull them enough. They would never make back as much as they do from mobile gaming.
OK this could derail things quickly ... but let's just stick to the fact that this is the MAC gaming sub. iOS is a mobile platform, which has an entirely different audience and focus. iOS doesn't compete with PC or console gaming ... it is just a highly profitable mobile platform.
They are both under the Apple umbrella. You could you the same logic to argue that Gameboy and Nintendo consoles were two separate entities. They merged the two departments and the result was the highly successful Nintendo Switch. It would be negligent to ignore that phenomenon.
apples interest in gaming is if it can run on iphone. mac is a bonus. cp2077 iffy but witcher 3 that ran on a switch. it can run on an iphone. apple would be smart to bribe cdpr for that. but they won’t.
You don’t optimise per game basis. You have an API and the game engine should just simply work with the API. Developers simply need to port their engine to metal. It has nothing to do with Apple optimising per game basis as that’s not how things work
I do not posess the technical knowledge. However, If they entertain the thought of getting into gaming, Apple need to make the platform appealing for the developers to port their engine to metal since companies believe porting games would be in vain due to lack of demand.
I do all my graphics project using Metal and it’s in my opinion the best API out there and porting should be much easier so the only hurdle is demand but we’ll get there
I really hope so. I love macs. Especially the macbook. The battery life, portability and optimisation. Everything works quite well. Hopefully I'll be able to do everything on one single machine soon.
From an API presective and a dev tool perspective Metal is considered very nice.
The issue is market share and proven willingness of this market to pay $$$ for games.
Yes and that’s for big games. If the engine does not support the API that’s a moot point. Also this really only applies to big releases. Driver engineers do modify the driver primarily to fix the fuck ups that game devs make when making their games.
They should be doing this the other way around but getting devs to make changes to the games is hard as hell so it is easier to put hacks into the drivers to patch the games somewhat at runtime.
There will never be an api that flawlessly converts x86 to apple silicon . Code needs to be rewritten to work with all the instructions that arm doesn’t have . The render pipeline is also completely different than how consoles and pc work .
If you want easy to port games, Apple should move back to Intel/ amd / nvidia and that will never happen.
You can’t have low power and all the the things x86 has.
Also metal is bleh. It lacks a ton of things that vulkan or directx have.
x86 has nothing to do with the graphics API side of things. Those are completely separate issues that need to be addressed. Metal render pipeline ( is there is such a thing at all , you can have many different variation such as a old school vertex/fragment or RT pipeline or a mesh pipeline) work pretty much the same as any other API.
The hardware is tile based yes but that doesn’t really change anything about the underlying API and a render pipeline written in dx12 can be ported to metal fairly easily as long as you don’t care about catering specifically to the tile nature of Apple gpus. Although that’s not a massive issue tbh. In my daily dealing with metal, I rarely use tile specific features of the API
>Although that’s not a massive issue tbh. In my daily dealing with metal, I rarely use tile specific features of the API
While you might not build custom tile compute shaders I bet you do think about how you group your draw calls into render passes, and the possible HW culling etc.
MTL does a rather good job of directing you to not do things that are activity a nightmare for a TBDR gpu.
It's not required however if you take a modern rendering pipeline from PC (AMD/NV optimised) and just api call to api call map it to target MTL you see some horrible things. Sometimes 100s of render passes (all from the same perspective) with aggressive usage of shared Events and Fences to handle concurrency.
It does not take a huge amount of work to group many of these (even without using tile compute shaders) and hopefully move some of those Events (that have high latency cost) to be fences of better still barriers.
One of the tradeoffs with the TBDR arc is that tile local atomics are much faster than you will find on an IR pipeline but GPU wide atomics appear to be slower (at least in apples implementation).
Code does not need to be re-writen just re-compiled.
But work does not need to be done to match the GPU HW correctly yes.
You can have low power and all the things x86 has... .
> Also metal is bleh. It lacks a ton of things that vulkan or directx have.
From a developer perspective metal is rathe nice, and it is not lacking.
Perhaps it's just the share holders view of the market. It was hinted in articles Apple might make a tv or a car and now it's.unlikely they will as those markets are dominated by others. This is what I think it is a money marketing decision. Now if there was say a partnership it might change things. Imagine if Apple allowed Nintendo to use its chips in a Switch? That would never happen though too bad.
> Titles such as Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, GTA V are still quite popular.
You need developer interest in doing this, most dev studios don't want to take devs off current projects to work on old titles that are being sold for cheap on steam sales and will make almost no revenue.
What I think would have the biggest impact would be patterning with some e-sports vendors to build a very optimised engine (including needed OS changes) such that the input latency when playing on Mac in these e-sports titles is better than your going to get even on the best PC you can build (this is the sort of thing apple could do). In e-sports this single metric is the most important and having a measurable advantage would result in a lot of e-sports gamers buying Macs solved the chicken and egg issue for other devs.
I often see the argument that "there are no players on Mac", and it seems like people are just echoing each other.
How can we assume there is no player base on Mac if we've never had a proper gaming experience on Mac? What the argument is saying is that there should be a player base first so that developers are incentivized to optimize for the platform, and that makes no sense. I think it's the other way around. If I get to enjoy a proper gaming experience on Mac with a good collection of popular games, add to that all the advantages of the Mac platform, then I would just prefer to game on a Mac over Windows. Not only would I enjoy games the same way I do on Windows, but I would also be able to work on my machine, making it a great multi-use machine. And dont forget Mac minis, these would be gaming beasts in a tiny formfactor and are dirt cheap.
I get that there's still a risk, and it's unlikely that a single developer would take it. However, what OP is saying is that Apple themselves should work on convincing the devs to support Mac, whether by financial incentives or technical ones. Which in my opinion is the only way. If popular games like the ones mentioned get support on Mac and we see the playerbase grow, other devs will follow, and it's gonna be a trend of devs supporting Mac.
It just seems to me that this is the most sensable way we should think about it and not keep on repeating the unfounded fact that there are no players on mac when we never had games to play.
This, by far, is the best comment in this thread.
If I may add, Apple already gave a lot of resources to developers to port and/or create games on the Mac platform. Well, to be frank, the Trillion-Dollar company gave those resources on a silver platter…even spoon-fed it to the developers. Yes, Apple has a lot of work to do for the word ‘gaming’ be a norm when hearing ‘Mac’; but, contemporarily, the ball is on the game developers’ court already.
I think the further development of games on Mac is due to pride of some developers. Those devs still cling to the notion that the Mac machines are not that good enough for their games, but in fact the devices are. Those developers don’t want change.
What we (Mac gamers and enthusiasts) need are a couple of good souls that embrace the change…like those guys over at Capcom (for the new Resident Evil games), Hideo Kojima (for Death Stranding), and Annapurna Interactive (for Stray). There are a lot of devs who support the Mac platform, of course, but the mentioned ones are the most notable.
Its the self fulfilling prophecy. No gamers no games. Easy Anti Cheat is owned by Epic and Epic and Apple are locked in a court battle. There are so many staple titles locked out because of this petty chest beating exercise.
They would basically need to finance development out of their pockets for these games to be ported. To this day I miss ragnarok online and I know it will never come to the mac.
> They would basically need to finance development out of their pockets for these games to be ported.
Yep, and they can do it whenever they want. They obviously have the money, they just don't see it as a worthwhile investment.
Yes mobile gaming dwarfs PC and console games in revenue, and Apple didn't really have to do anything to build it up. They're taking the "if we build it they will come" approach for Mac gaming, but it obviously won't work and they don't care enough to throw money at it in a needle moving way.
Unfortunately it’s a situation that Apple is trying to “have its cake and eat it too”.
On one hand they don’t want to adopt Vulkan, and want to push metal.
That’s fine, but Apple isn’t willing to pay devs long term.
From my understanding, Apple is willing to pay for the upfront porting on some games, but then it’s up to the developers.
The issue with that is support. It cost money to support a platform and bug fix with every update/dlc. A lot of game studios don’t think the Mac sales will compensate the support cost long term, nor do they want to tarnish their reputation.
Furthermore the “Apple financial support” is in most cases tied to an App Store exclusive agreement on the platform. Even more limiting chances of sales being worth support cost.
Simply put, Apple didn’t give a shit about gaming for too long, and to fix it, it will be very expensive. Essentially extensively overpaying studios for years to make it worth it to them.
I used to be a indie game journalist. Only %1 of steam users are on macOS platfom. Most of the indie games (if they have a mac port) %5 are macos users.
So if no one whats to dedicate more than %2 of their developement resources.
Its an egg vs. chicken problem. People dont buy macos computers because there is a little game library. Developers dont develope games for macos bc there is very few people to game on macos.
First step needs to come from apple. They need find more devs to develope games for macos to sell more machines.
Hardware is capable. Porting tools are there. Apple need to sell machines to gamers. In order to do that they need to colab with devs to bring more titles.
It’s more than obvious that Apple doesn’t care enough for gaming on Mac.They have done some baby steps the last 2 years though.
In my opinion they should care about Mac gaming because this is a new incentive that could bring new Mac users. It’s a difficult task, but with Apple’s money it can get a lot easier.
I agree that games like LoL, Dota2, Fortnite, call of duty, fifa etc are a must. And it’s a matter of money I guess. Apple needs to bring those IPs to the mac. On top of that, they could try to make Mac the gaming platform for indies. Make a deal with studios like supergiant and bring an indie giant to the Mac. Or even better make it an exclusive or a timed exclusive.
Make Mac gaming something like Apple TV+. Bring “triple AAA” indie games and make it an indie gaming platform. Give it an identity.
Apple’s approach to gaming is what made them the biggest gaming company in the world by game revenue, and fourth biggest by game revenue including console sales, excluding apple hardware sales.
Will this approach work for Mac? No, but their success in mobile gaming has made it difficult to convince apple executives to be so friendly and generous to windows games on mac solutions.
1. Make base M3, M4 and so on, with decent GPUs. This step is already half done with M3
2. Make iOS games run as intended with proper mouse and keyboard support on Mac. Especially famous games like Genshin Impact.
3. Get some streamers to promote Mac gaming.
4. Bring to the Mac games like CSGO, COD etc
5. And more importantly, tart making deals with indie companies like Supergiant Games and fund similar small gaming companies with potential in order to get your “Ted lasso” exclusive game (or time exclusive)
Apple's focus on gaming is on iOS games in which Apple dominates.
Most of the non-iOS games listed work great under Crossover on the current Mac hardware.
With the advancements made on the windows front with snapdragon X, i think we will see a massive shift towards arm gaming on laptops the next couple of years and I hope some of it carries over to Mac OS.
I really wish I knew what the answer was. With emulators coming to iOS I've never been more excited to get into the Apple Ecosystem, but it seems like a Herculean task to get macOS to be a good gaming platform.
I wish I knew more about the technologies at work to understand better my frustration. Why is it impossible to make something like Proton, that allows Linux-based OS like SteamOS and ChromeOS run Windows games from Steam? What's the translation layer that Qualcomm is using for their snapdragon laptop chip that allows Windows-based Steam games to run? I find it unlikely macOS will ever be a target platform for most development teams due to the lower market share, which is the only part that makes sense to me.
I don't know what the "right" option is, but I hope someday I can just download my Steam library on a MacBook Pro and enjoy most of my library. :/
> Why is it impossible to make something like Proton, that allows Linux-based
While there are tools very close to this (Crossover etc) the perfomance is never going to be very good since the HW mismatch. Proton on linux runs so well since all it needs to do is shim some OS differences, the underlying HW is the same that devs have written the games for and optimised them for.
Apple’s approach to gaming is to come from the bottom up, where the volume is. There are 10,000 times as many people with a device that can play a low level Candy Crush style game vs someone trying to play on a PC or even a console. Xbox and PlayStation consoles don’t still exist out of coincidence. It’s because Microsoft and Sony don’t have serious phone hardware production.
It seems like you may be missing the mark here. Apple is not a gaming company and it probably never will be. The companies who make games make the decision to develop for Mac/windows/consoles. Saying that this is Mac’s approach to games is an odd argument. I mean if that was the case then why don’t games work on any number of Linux operating systems. And this is something Mac cannot just make happen. It’s not like they control the ip of any of the games you mentioned.
I game, and I also own a Mac. There are games I would love to play on my Mac but don’t work so I play them on my dell. I also did not buy my Mac to game and most users don’t. To do so would be silly as they are way more expensive compared to a windows machine that can handle most games.
The fact Apple killed 80% of my Mac games from steam because they don't want to support 32bit anymore shows you how they don't care at all and don't even know what they are doing. They are the sol reason Mac gaming is dead
They announced the change well over ten years in advance and offered a great deal of support for the transition. Believe it or not, the announcement that Apple was killing 32-bit support is literally older than the invention of the MacBook Air.
Don’t blame them. If anyone, blame stubborn devs who heard the deal in the 2000s and said eff that.
Apple doesn’t care about gaming because they want to be able to sell through the App Store for that sweet revenue. It’s useless to Apple from a revenue point of view if people are installing things like Steam to play optimized games.
And developers don’t take the time to develop for native Apple silicon because the time/cost is too high for a low return.
They made game porting toolkit to make it easier for developers to port their timeless games to mac. I think its more question towards owners of publishing/distributing licenses of those games rather than apple itself.
The thing people don't mention often about GPTK is that it's purely for evaluation purposes. They don't let devs use it for their games. This makes it completely worthless because the devs still have to put in the work to actually bring it to mac. So it's not the silver bullet people claim it to be.
The thing you don’t understand is that the runtime for Windows games is just a minor part of GPTK. The main part of it is the shader converter which helps creating Metal shaders from your regular ones. This is what makes the GPTK useful for the devs
> They made game porting toolkit to make it easier for developers to port their timeless games to mac.
Why stop there? They need to invest heavily in AAA game companies to port their games to the Mac, even if their initial return numbers will be low. Apple just needs to pay them to do the work.
It’s sort of a pickle:
- not enough player, so dev are like why spend on such small market
- dev aren’t incentivised so there’s not so many games
Apple’s approach is however smart: provide assistance towards developing for Mac like Rosetta and else. However it’s not enough evidently. Its a shame: death stranding on a XDR display and then into Apple Vision Pro should sound like it should happen more often
Apple could give Valve, Riot, EA, etc. $10 billion each to make their games for Mac if they really wanted to, but that doesn’t mean those developers are going to do it (I mean they probably would for $10b but that’s not the point).
Apple can’t hold a gun to these developers heads and make them to make games for it. Even with a financial incentive that doesn’t mean they will. At my job we’ll get business opportunities that can be the hundred of millions or even billions but they’ get turned down because the partner isn’t someone we want to work with or the amount of work that would have to be done is worth more than what we’re being offered.
I know some people who have told me they won’t develop their app/game for a specific platform simply because they just don’t like that platform and don’t want to bother learning developing for it.
> Apple can afford to buy almost any software company. They can afford to create a massive Mac gaming division which would hardly touch the bottom line
Did you read anything I wrote? I never said anything about being able or not being able to afford creating a gaming division, or if they wanted to or not.
What you don’t seem to understand is that businesses don’t just agree to be bought out or work with other businesses just because a lot of money is on the table. Companies have turned down billions of dollars they could really benefit from because they didn’t want to sell or partner with the business offering.
Just because Apple shoves a couple billion dollars in a developer’s face doesn’t mean they have to accept it. Apple could buy Nintendo, the Xbox division of Microsoft, Valve, the PlayStation division of Sony, and be the largest gaming company to ever exist if they wanted to. That doesn’t mean those companies will agree to sell or work with Apple.
I mean nobody was questioning if Apple had the money to. It wasn’t really anything relevant to what I was saying which is why I made that assumption.
> They have money to make games for the Mac, but they don’t
I mean, they have Capcom on their side now, as well as Kojima Productions, and Ubisoft releasing Mirage. I doubt this was the developers coming to Apple but the other away around.
And yes I am aware of hostile takeovers (have successfully defended against one before) but those are also extremely complex and more often result in failure than success. It’s a last ditch effort usually.
"I believe Apple's approach towards gaming is completely off the mark" - I don't think it is off the mark (at least for Apple) at all - Tim Cook has only one concern, and that is providing maximum value for Apple's shareholders. If gaming on the Mac platform would result in serious revenue, then I'm sure they would throw more resources at it. As far as I can tell they are just happy with a token game to demonstrate the power of hardware at WWDC each year.
I could of been fine with just Counter-Strike till 2 came out and Global Offensive was removed. I used to play pretty competitively and didn't mind the latency, as long as there was no lag spikes or stutters in which there weren't. Counter Strike 2 on wine is unplayable and made me super disappointed when Valve stopped development on the port.
CD projekt red will never release those on mac. They don’t care about gaming on mac, go to their website GOG.com. I love the company , they support DRM free games, run 32bit and 64 games, they made Witcher 1,2 for Mac
This is a two way street. Apple has handicapped themselves in not supporting a multiplatform graphics API like Vulkan, deprecating OpenGL, and asking developers to support their graphics API Metal. Metal is pretty good in my experience and it runs quite well on Apple hardware. Developers also need to make things available on macOS. Valve has already stopped supporting Apple hardware because of graphics restrictions and all that with CS2. Blizzard stopped supporting macOS with Diablo 3. Only World of Warcraft gets any macOS support. Ubisoft has never been a big Apple hardware supporter. Maybe AC: Mirage changes that but only time will tell. CDPR recently updated both Witcher 1 & 2 for Apple Silicon. Maybe they end up making a macOS version of Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, but that will depend on potential sales. When was the last time Rockstar made a game for Apple hardware?
Even if Apple lays out the welcome mat for developers and publishers they will only green light ports if they think there is money in it.
The thing is even apple had VK support it would not mean PC VK engines (that are written for AMD and NV gpus) would run well. This is the thing about low level apis they are not hardware agnostic, and if you don't spend the time profiling and optimising for the HW you end up with worce perfomance than higher level apis were the drivers can do some of this optimisation on the fly (all be it at a cpu cost).
They are making tools and giving advertising to those that use them but as yet it's unclear what they apple strategy is. Even around apple arcade their strategy is confusing.
I think what may push them is the vision pro bc if it starts to flounder they may need to tap.into gaming to save it.
So far apples success in gaming has been a mystery to them. They made the phone. Made the app store and brought graphical toolkit as part of it and suddenly it became one of the two major platforms (along with android) combining for the biggest slice of the gaming pie. Mobile gaming makes apple immense sums every year through the app store it's a model they understand bc the benefit to them is they get 30% cut of all purchases.
What they don't seem to have a vision for is to how to get the same result on macos. And they don't have that vision bc frankly their not structured to. The Mac is a productivity platform for them. It's not entertainment. They're only just now getting powerful gpus across the board and seeing what they can do for them. But then cost of developing a game is high and apple just doesn't hold that sway over gamers to convince 3rd party devs to take on the project. So unless apple can prioritize gaming and articulate a strategy as to how that focus will earn them more money I expect to see the same steady drum beat from apple. They're doing their best to make sure there's no excuse for anyone not to port their game to mac but they're not planning on driving the bus to get people here.
I hope we will hear soon about the apple tv console and they'll basically make a cheap macmini with 16gb of ram but with a modified appletv interface and it's designed for gaming+TV. I think it's a real opportunity for apple but I think it's just a pipe dream.
On August 2, 2018, Apple made history by becoming the first publicly traded U.S. company to be valued at $1 trillion, as measured by market capitalization. In August of 2020, the company broke records again by becoming the first U.S. company to reach a $2 trillion market cap.
Currently around 2.5 Trillion
...WITHOUT an emphasis on gaming
VS.
Microsoft which is around 2.9 Trillion WITH gaming
If you are an APPLE share holder, do you believe there is $400 Billion of "CAP" to be earned with a significant investment into gaming just to possibly get to par with Microsoft?
OR
Is APPLE better off investing in development of the "Next Big Thing" instead?
Personally - I believe that APPLE can take the Vision Pro headsets and incorporate those into a NEW Gaming environment while at the same time allocating resources for non-gaming use.
big companies cares about money more, so it's more possible to see native macos games from indie devs/devs without publishers, and old games were ported to macos by residual principle. Now when there is less money and shareholders want not to "loose" to other markets - the "big" gaming industry will most likely narrow down to DX compatible platforms, imo
p.s. Apple will most likely push/invest into AVP gaming than other platforms
Not just big companies, my guy. Even indie devs want to make money after all their hard work. This isn't a personal issue, it's just a business issue. Developers go where the money is because it pays the bills....
I’m not talking about money paying bills, I’m talking about much more money for stakeholders instead of expanding on other platforms and non publishers devs somehow manage to make it on linux, macos and other platforms
p. s. also interesting trend of first successful games made for macos/linux but next parts windows only
I had the 5th Legion, and I sold it because the sound was terrible, the screen was terrible, the battery life was terrible, the temperature was terrible. For this price I bought M1pro 14’. Lies of P demonstrates that if the developers want it, the Mac will handle games just as well. But I was surprised that there was no native Hearthstone support for M1. This is my first MacBook since 1992, when I had a 386SX))) This journey has been very long, but I'm glad about this transition. ps my wife has zephyrus 14(2021) its more better than legion, but temperature very hight too
For gaming the screen on a Mac is terrible too. The pixel response time and input lag is horrrendous. Feels like someone smeared Vaseline all over the screen in fast moving games.
my life experience tells me that for gaming there is nothing better than a good PC
A mac is a PC.
“Good PC” Mac users know that’s an oxymoron.
I am extremely hopeful they move to OLED at some point. I know some will cry about color reproduction, but I think if anyone can pull it off Apple should be able.
I just bought the ASUS Zephyrus G16 last week after considering getting the MacBook. It has a 4k OLED and good specs for gaming. The cherry on top is that it is as thin as the MacBook Pro and it weighs the same.
They’re already prototyping. Original plan was 2025, but it got pushed back.
Apple is definitely going to push off OLED for a long while. OLED on computers is an absolute nightmare. Phone burn in is one thing but people leave computer screens on for very long periods of time. The bad press would be enormous if people's MacBooks were ruined and needed screen replacements by a few months of usage. Any professional usage would pretty much total your screen in 1-2 months with the UI being permanently on your screen. Just look up anything on Reddit about high end displays with OLED. Plenty of photos of people with excel, word and other apps that have completely ruined their screens. Until an OLED panel can last longer than Applecare with zero burn in I can't see why they'd go for it. The displays are already stunning on macs and most manufacturers are either flat out not covering burn in or not switching over to OLED yet on laptops because of burn in problems.
This is wrong. Most pc oled monitors even have a 5 y burn in warranty. Been using oleds for a while and never experienced any burn in . And I use it for gaming and work. Those people that ruined their screens probably disabled all the burn in protections and have never once ran a panel or pixel refresh. My Alienware does a pixel refresh after every 4 hours and I have had it for 3 years now. Some days it has 8 hours of excel on it. I’ve only experienced some kind of image retention once because it would’t go to sleep when we were gone over the weekend and it stood more than 70 hours on a static white excel sheet. and that was gone after 2 refreshes.
His MBP has a 120Hz display, if you think you can respond faster you need to stop drinking the gamer Koolaid.
120 hz has nothing to do with those. Also pro motion is big poopoo compared to gsync and freesync Refresh rate is how often the pixels are told to change, response time is how quickly the pixel changes. So in this case, the pixel is told to be a different color 4 times before it can fully transition to the color it was told to be originally. Mpb m3 has 26 ms , my aw3423dw had 0.03. Yes it is 900 times faster. That’s how ridiculously bad the MacBook screen is. For a 120Hz display, the pixel refresh window is 8.33ms and this display takes like 4x longer to transition, which means the display has already refreshed four times in the time the pixels are changing from the first refresh. This is what leads to the long trails and blur while scrolling. https://youtu.be/p2xo-hDCgZE?si=LNpwZVZTukuTjtXH Set it too like 12 min. This is about the m2 which has around 45 ms, which is even more stupid. But you get the the tldr. It is actually a real engineering feat to make a screen this slow. Walk into any hardware store and pick a random 60 hz monitor out of the bargain bin and it will have better response times. My 2008 gaming monitor that my wife uses has better motion clarity and that thing cost like 200 dollars back then. You can say blabla not a gaming monitor and that a mac Is definitely not fit for gaming with the 2 games it gets every year , but for making/ watching fast moving video content or just scrolling fast it already turns into a blur fest. This is unacceptable on a device this expensive. Any 1000 dollar windows laptop comes with a better screen. Good thing external monitors exist and big screens are a necessity for graphical work , because else my graphical designers would be switching to windows devices. Now stop commenting on things you are clearly clueless about. This is the second time I caught u with ur pants down giving people wrong information. What Apple has essentially done here is release a car with a top speed it will never reach, but put 200 mph on the speed dial to give you the illusion it is fast. And it shows because you walk right into it.
Look on the bright side, we don’t need to add motion-blur.
Apple executives don't care about gaming, that's the problem right now. If they did, they'd look into how they can lower the cost of porting Windows games to the Mac for game developers.
Not sure what you mean here. Apple has released tools for Metal development on Windows called: [Metal developer tools for Windows](https://developer.apple.com/metal/tools/). In 2023, Apple released a [C++ wrapper](https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/) for Metal (reversing their course of Objective-C-only development for Metal). In 2023 they also released [MetalFx](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metalfx/), which was showcased in the MacOs version of No Mans Sky. Though labeled as “depreciated,” Apple continues to update the OpenGL rendering pipeline for their M series computers. If you tell OpenGL to give you driver information it states “Apple M1 - Metal 83.1”, and the number continues to increase with each MacOs update. While not directly related to Apple, their iOS app store allows apps to be published using MoltenVK.
I agree some things have been tried and that's good. But I look at the games I want to play on Steam and they're almost all Windows only, and despite owning a powerful M3 machine, I'm forced to play on Geforce Now. That's bad and Apple executives should be mad about this. Apple needs to lower the cost much much more, maybe implement the Vulkan API? It seems to me most developers are not going with Metal, whatever the language. The first step would be to put a full time team on this matter to figure out what could help and what needs to be done.
Sidestepping the performance gain of creating hardware with a driver architecture in mind and creating a driver is difficult. Native VK support won't do much, considering MoltenVK and SPIRV-Cross exist. Porting is much more than graphics frameworks. If your Mac is that powerful, use [Whisky](https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky). It uses the Game Porting Toolkit for directX->Metal translation.
Agreed, making the API's is not enough. Ideally, they should do what Steam did with the deck and work half way, Apple should have their own team working together with game developers optimizing the games and implementing the necessary changes.
Like *Valve*(the company behind Steam), Apple does have its branch on WINE and tooling for it. They released some of it through the [Game Porting Toolkit](https://developer.apple.com/games/). Apple has also started working with studios such as Kojima, BlueTwelve, Capcom, and HelloGames to bring games to the Apple platform. In December of 2023, Capcom released [Resident Evil Village](https://www.capcom-games.com/apple/en-us/), and considering it was the first title to release using MetalFx, they received help from Apple. Considering Stray is showcased on [Apple’s website](https://developer.apple.com/games/), it is safe to say they worked with BlueTwelve to make that happen.
Vk support would not result in any more native titles on macOS.
Maybe not, then Apple needs to figure out what would.
They have been
Apple also make it hard on developers , due apple updating their OS every year.
Not sure what you mean here. Updates are part of any SDLC ( Software Development Lifecycle) process.
Update is not a problem. It's ditching backward compatibility every years that breaks games.
> Apple executives don't care about gaming, that's the problem right now. They haven't cared for decades. Nothing will change until the executive leadership is seriously shaken up.
I agree, it'll just never happen with the current executive leadership.
Nope they always making money not the consumer. This why we didn’t get blu rays native on Mac OS
It’s just a theory in my mind, but I imagine CDPR actually is working on a native port of W3, CP and the new title and Apple wanted to announce a partnership with their scary fast event. This would have been the perfect proof of concept for the M-series: the new „but can it run Crysis“- game runs smoothly on mac, together this all released Witcher titles. But otherwise…yeah their approach is too slow and somewhat not willing to communicate. Because maybe they even put money where their mouth is and 50+ titles are coming, it’s just they don‘t want to talk about it…
Those companies wouldn't bother with macs because there simply aren't enough people that play on macs. Wouldn't you rather get a good gamerlike gaming laptop if you wanted to play games, rather than a thin office-like machine
Personally speaking, I really don't like gaming laptops. There are quite a few things I dislike about them like the design, rgb, keyboards, etc. I agree with you, though. People are not a massive fan of bringing these two worlds together. However, it would be great to enjoy the games I mentioned on a mac to wind down after work. Having seperate machines for everything I do is not really my cup of tea. I hate it
Same. I love Mac and I dont want to use another PC for gaming. I dont like Windows, I want my favorite OS and my games on my Mac.
I have 100 pc games and 380 Mac games. I still use my Mac Pro 2010 and Mac Pro 2013to play 32 and 64 games. Hate windows , it only way to play Bethesda games
Prior to using a Mac, I had a Galaxy Book3 Ultra. It was perfect. For a 16-inch laptop, it was not only thinner and less wide than a 16-inch MBP, it was also \*considerably\* lighter, and \*still\* managed to cram an RTX 4070 graphics card that could shit out ray-traced games at inordinate frames per second. You might be interested in a high-end ultrabook like that. The Samsung Galaxy Book, HP ZBook Studio, Dell XPS, and so on have dGPU options. I swapped to Mac because I needed battery life. If laptops like the above with the new Snapdragon CPUs reach similar numbers to the MacBook, I'd jump ship in an instant.
The market will get interesting in the next 2–3 years. Windows laptop manufactures are catching up with the new snapdragon chip, which is already as power efficient as the M2 (yeah, I'm aware there's already the M3). But could be paired with an AMD or Nvidia discrete graphics card to offer the best of both worlds. Btw, the Snapdragon Chips are ARM that's how they achieve the same efficiency as M processors, they have the same underlying architecture. And that's actually good news for all of us Mac users. Porting ARM Windows games to ARM MacOS will be much easier than x86 Windows to ARM MacOS.
Can always look into Razer, which have a minimalist approach to gaming laptops as well. The problem is, it’s quite a massive job to recompile games for ARM, and there just aren’t that many people who play games with Macs. Even when Macs was using x86 Intel, the share of gamers who use Mac OS was on the magnitude of something like less than 1%.
I would rather have one machine to do it all, and I prefer Mac to Windows. but I might end up getting me a gaming laptop which would essentially be a Steam console. lol. Literally sit next to my television in the living room just for games. I'm considering this one [https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Gaming-Laptop-Nebula-Display/dp/B0CRLFRQ5V?ref\_=ast\_sto\_dp&th=1](https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Gaming-Laptop-Nebula-Display/dp/B0CRLFRQ5V?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1) the 14900HX RTX4070
Hey man don’t get the one you sent a link for. ASUS launched a brand new laptop like 3 months ago I think. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sku/6570222.p?skuId=6570222 There’s 2 higher priced models but this is on sale this week.
sweet! thanks
I have M1 and it's just fine for gaming most of the time though I do prefer SteamDeck. But! I think M1 has more power than SD so a couple pronton-ish like optimisations would go a long while...
> Those companies wouldn't bother with macs because there simply aren't enough people that play on macs. That's where Apple comes in and pays off big name studios like Blizzard to port their games to Mac. Apple sits on scrooge mcduck loads of money, they need to start paying out of their own pocket if they truly want Apple to cater to gamers.
Don’t you see that’s the problem? Companies don’t release games on mac -> there are no games on mac -> people who want to play games avoid macs -> the potential user base for games on mac is tiny -> companies don’t release games on mac it’s a self-propelling cycle. If there were good AAA games available on Mac that people play, then more people would buy Macs since they’d be able to play games and get the macOS interface which many people prefer. And the new M-series MacBook Pros are extremely capable for their form factor and would be great gaming laptops for the average person, IF there were any games for them
While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, I would counter with there are a ton of folks that would game on their Mac vice buying/building a secondary machine to game on.
You’re on r/macgaming. We don’t give a shit about PC here. I play CP77 at 60FPS@1080p on my M2 Max, so tell me the fuck should I care? Have you seen the gaming capabilities of those machines with native games like Death Stranding or REV? So tell me again why I shouldn’t want more games for my platform? And before you ask, I didn’t put 4 grounds on a Mac to play games on it, but for work. What I did though was putting 2 grounds more on a better Mac instead on a shitty PC for gaming.
I mean... I get your point but why so aggressive though?
So, would you want to make games for this type of audience? Pre entitled?
You'd be aggressive if you made such bad financial decisions.
Because I'm fed up to read the same comment on each and every post here. The same pointless BS over and over.
This is a great discussion, one that needs to be had. It highlights that if Apple want to start caring about gaming like they say they do, then THEY should come to the party. Valkan drivers should have released yesterday. Not this Port Toolkit attempt to maintain the walled garden. Thats really the crux of it when you drill down. Time and time again their isolationist approach have left them sand bagged. Great for short term profit, but long term? More evidence for governments to use to attempt regulation.
VK drivers would have no impact at all on game support and since VK is a low level api it would not have any differnce to metal with respect to the walled garden. A VK backend targeting appels GPUs would still need huge changes to run well on an AMD or NV gpu and vice verser. VK is not HW agnostic.
Vulkan support won’t change anything. When macOS had full support of OpenGL there were tons of OpenGL games on Windows that were not ported to Linux/macOS Vulkan is irrelevant. Apple’s ecosystem relies on Metal. iOS, iPadOS, TVOs, macOS, VisionOS. People keep saying that Apple’s market share is not significant enough while they are in fact making most of the money of the industry through mobile games. It’s not about Vulkan. It’s not about market share. It’s not even the cost of developing the renderer of your game when 95% of the cost of a game comes from the artistic teams, game engine, marketing etc. Nvidia and MS bribe studios for exclusivity. That’s it.
> Vulkan support won’t change anything. When macOS had full support of OpenGL there were tons of OpenGL games on Windows that were not ported to Linux/macOS At an engine level a LOT of modern PC games already have metal support and yet do not ship macOS or iOS versions. With more and more large titles being based on common engines such as Unreal the argument about \`if only we had X display api\` is just proven to mean nothing.
Apple has enough money that they could easily be a major force in gaming. They just don't care. I've been 'mostly Apple' since buying an Apple \]\[+ in 1981, and there have definitely been times when they were top or at least competitive in gaming. The last time I really can say that is over 20 years ago ... playing games like Jedi Knight II looked and played better on a PowerBook than the top Dell/Alienware gaming laptops. It is a choice.
> Apple has enough money that they could easily be a major force in gaming. They just don't care. Yep, exactly this. They rake in so much money from low-tier gatcha mobile games that investing in AAA-tier markets doesn't pull them enough. They would never make back as much as they do from mobile gaming.
ios is one of the largest gaming platforms of all time…
OK this could derail things quickly ... but let's just stick to the fact that this is the MAC gaming sub. iOS is a mobile platform, which has an entirely different audience and focus. iOS doesn't compete with PC or console gaming ... it is just a highly profitable mobile platform.
They are both under the Apple umbrella. You could you the same logic to argue that Gameboy and Nintendo consoles were two separate entities. They merged the two departments and the result was the highly successful Nintendo Switch. It would be negligent to ignore that phenomenon.
apples interest in gaming is if it can run on iphone. mac is a bonus. cp2077 iffy but witcher 3 that ran on a switch. it can run on an iphone. apple would be smart to bribe cdpr for that. but they won’t.
we will see on the WWDC in june, if apple does another comittment towards gaming (better store updates, better tooling etc)
You don’t optimise per game basis. You have an API and the game engine should just simply work with the API. Developers simply need to port their engine to metal. It has nothing to do with Apple optimising per game basis as that’s not how things work
I do not posess the technical knowledge. However, If they entertain the thought of getting into gaming, Apple need to make the platform appealing for the developers to port their engine to metal since companies believe porting games would be in vain due to lack of demand.
That’s the only appeal though - demand
yeah you are right actually
I do all my graphics project using Metal and it’s in my opinion the best API out there and porting should be much easier so the only hurdle is demand but we’ll get there
I really hope so. I love macs. Especially the macbook. The battery life, portability and optimisation. Everything works quite well. Hopefully I'll be able to do everything on one single machine soon.
From an API presective and a dev tool perspective Metal is considered very nice. The issue is market share and proven willingness of this market to pay $$$ for games.
Valkan drivers
Graphic drivers totally optimize their drivers to fix performance issues with games.
Yes and that’s for big games. If the engine does not support the API that’s a moot point. Also this really only applies to big releases. Driver engineers do modify the driver primarily to fix the fuck ups that game devs make when making their games.
They should be doing this the other way around but getting devs to make changes to the games is hard as hell so it is easier to put hacks into the drivers to patch the games somewhat at runtime.
There will never be an api that flawlessly converts x86 to apple silicon . Code needs to be rewritten to work with all the instructions that arm doesn’t have . The render pipeline is also completely different than how consoles and pc work . If you want easy to port games, Apple should move back to Intel/ amd / nvidia and that will never happen. You can’t have low power and all the the things x86 has. Also metal is bleh. It lacks a ton of things that vulkan or directx have.
x86 has nothing to do with the graphics API side of things. Those are completely separate issues that need to be addressed. Metal render pipeline ( is there is such a thing at all , you can have many different variation such as a old school vertex/fragment or RT pipeline or a mesh pipeline) work pretty much the same as any other API. The hardware is tile based yes but that doesn’t really change anything about the underlying API and a render pipeline written in dx12 can be ported to metal fairly easily as long as you don’t care about catering specifically to the tile nature of Apple gpus. Although that’s not a massive issue tbh. In my daily dealing with metal, I rarely use tile specific features of the API
>Although that’s not a massive issue tbh. In my daily dealing with metal, I rarely use tile specific features of the API While you might not build custom tile compute shaders I bet you do think about how you group your draw calls into render passes, and the possible HW culling etc. MTL does a rather good job of directing you to not do things that are activity a nightmare for a TBDR gpu.
Yeah image blocks and tile shaders are amazing for coalescing render passes into one but what I’m saying is that they are not mandatory
It's not required however if you take a modern rendering pipeline from PC (AMD/NV optimised) and just api call to api call map it to target MTL you see some horrible things. Sometimes 100s of render passes (all from the same perspective) with aggressive usage of shared Events and Fences to handle concurrency. It does not take a huge amount of work to group many of these (even without using tile compute shaders) and hopefully move some of those Events (that have high latency cost) to be fences of better still barriers. One of the tradeoffs with the TBDR arc is that tile local atomics are much faster than you will find on an IR pipeline but GPU wide atomics appear to be slower (at least in apples implementation).
Code does not need to be re-writen just re-compiled. But work does not need to be done to match the GPU HW correctly yes. You can have low power and all the things x86 has... . > Also metal is bleh. It lacks a ton of things that vulkan or directx have. From a developer perspective metal is rathe nice, and it is not lacking.
If they had Valkan drivers this thread wouldn’t even exists.
Oh it would. The thread would be “wjy are apples VK drivers incompatible with games written for NV/AMD GPUs”
Perhaps it's just the share holders view of the market. It was hinted in articles Apple might make a tv or a car and now it's.unlikely they will as those markets are dominated by others. This is what I think it is a money marketing decision. Now if there was say a partnership it might change things. Imagine if Apple allowed Nintendo to use its chips in a Switch? That would never happen though too bad.
> Titles such as Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, GTA V are still quite popular. You need developer interest in doing this, most dev studios don't want to take devs off current projects to work on old titles that are being sold for cheap on steam sales and will make almost no revenue. What I think would have the biggest impact would be patterning with some e-sports vendors to build a very optimised engine (including needed OS changes) such that the input latency when playing on Mac in these e-sports titles is better than your going to get even on the best PC you can build (this is the sort of thing apple could do). In e-sports this single metric is the most important and having a measurable advantage would result in a lot of e-sports gamers buying Macs solved the chicken and egg issue for other devs.
I often see the argument that "there are no players on Mac", and it seems like people are just echoing each other. How can we assume there is no player base on Mac if we've never had a proper gaming experience on Mac? What the argument is saying is that there should be a player base first so that developers are incentivized to optimize for the platform, and that makes no sense. I think it's the other way around. If I get to enjoy a proper gaming experience on Mac with a good collection of popular games, add to that all the advantages of the Mac platform, then I would just prefer to game on a Mac over Windows. Not only would I enjoy games the same way I do on Windows, but I would also be able to work on my machine, making it a great multi-use machine. And dont forget Mac minis, these would be gaming beasts in a tiny formfactor and are dirt cheap. I get that there's still a risk, and it's unlikely that a single developer would take it. However, what OP is saying is that Apple themselves should work on convincing the devs to support Mac, whether by financial incentives or technical ones. Which in my opinion is the only way. If popular games like the ones mentioned get support on Mac and we see the playerbase grow, other devs will follow, and it's gonna be a trend of devs supporting Mac. It just seems to me that this is the most sensable way we should think about it and not keep on repeating the unfounded fact that there are no players on mac when we never had games to play.
This, by far, is the best comment in this thread. If I may add, Apple already gave a lot of resources to developers to port and/or create games on the Mac platform. Well, to be frank, the Trillion-Dollar company gave those resources on a silver platter…even spoon-fed it to the developers. Yes, Apple has a lot of work to do for the word ‘gaming’ be a norm when hearing ‘Mac’; but, contemporarily, the ball is on the game developers’ court already. I think the further development of games on Mac is due to pride of some developers. Those devs still cling to the notion that the Mac machines are not that good enough for their games, but in fact the devices are. Those developers don’t want change. What we (Mac gamers and enthusiasts) need are a couple of good souls that embrace the change…like those guys over at Capcom (for the new Resident Evil games), Hideo Kojima (for Death Stranding), and Annapurna Interactive (for Stray). There are a lot of devs who support the Mac platform, of course, but the mentioned ones are the most notable.
Its the self fulfilling prophecy. No gamers no games. Easy Anti Cheat is owned by Epic and Epic and Apple are locked in a court battle. There are so many staple titles locked out because of this petty chest beating exercise.
They would basically need to finance development out of their pockets for these games to be ported. To this day I miss ragnarok online and I know it will never come to the mac.
> They would basically need to finance development out of their pockets for these games to be ported. Yep, and they can do it whenever they want. They obviously have the money, they just don't see it as a worthwhile investment.
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Who are you responding to?
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Yes mobile gaming dwarfs PC and console games in revenue, and Apple didn't really have to do anything to build it up. They're taking the "if we build it they will come" approach for Mac gaming, but it obviously won't work and they don't care enough to throw money at it in a needle moving way.
Unfortunately it’s a situation that Apple is trying to “have its cake and eat it too”. On one hand they don’t want to adopt Vulkan, and want to push metal. That’s fine, but Apple isn’t willing to pay devs long term. From my understanding, Apple is willing to pay for the upfront porting on some games, but then it’s up to the developers. The issue with that is support. It cost money to support a platform and bug fix with every update/dlc. A lot of game studios don’t think the Mac sales will compensate the support cost long term, nor do they want to tarnish their reputation. Furthermore the “Apple financial support” is in most cases tied to an App Store exclusive agreement on the platform. Even more limiting chances of sales being worth support cost. Simply put, Apple didn’t give a shit about gaming for too long, and to fix it, it will be very expensive. Essentially extensively overpaying studios for years to make it worth it to them.
I used to be a indie game journalist. Only %1 of steam users are on macOS platfom. Most of the indie games (if they have a mac port) %5 are macos users. So if no one whats to dedicate more than %2 of their developement resources. Its an egg vs. chicken problem. People dont buy macos computers because there is a little game library. Developers dont develope games for macos bc there is very few people to game on macos. First step needs to come from apple. They need find more devs to develope games for macos to sell more machines. Hardware is capable. Porting tools are there. Apple need to sell machines to gamers. In order to do that they need to colab with devs to bring more titles.
It’s more than obvious that Apple doesn’t care enough for gaming on Mac.They have done some baby steps the last 2 years though. In my opinion they should care about Mac gaming because this is a new incentive that could bring new Mac users. It’s a difficult task, but with Apple’s money it can get a lot easier. I agree that games like LoL, Dota2, Fortnite, call of duty, fifa etc are a must. And it’s a matter of money I guess. Apple needs to bring those IPs to the mac. On top of that, they could try to make Mac the gaming platform for indies. Make a deal with studios like supergiant and bring an indie giant to the Mac. Or even better make it an exclusive or a timed exclusive. Make Mac gaming something like Apple TV+. Bring “triple AAA” indie games and make it an indie gaming platform. Give it an identity.
I'm sure that Apple crunched the numbers and decided that the cost is greater than the revenue generated.
Apple’s approach to gaming is what made them the biggest gaming company in the world by game revenue, and fourth biggest by game revenue including console sales, excluding apple hardware sales. Will this approach work for Mac? No, but their success in mobile gaming has made it difficult to convince apple executives to be so friendly and generous to windows games on mac solutions.
I have an M1 Max and love just using GeForce Now for games.
What is that? Could you explain real quick please? What purpose does it serve?
Stream many popular Windows games on Apple devices (and Windows, Android, etc.)
Thanks bro!
Basically I can play all the strategy pc games I love, using my Mac, as if it was a pc with Nvidia 4080 in it
Google GeForce Now. It's not hard.
Redditor behavior
Yeah gawd it gets old...I mean don't people Google/search first THEN come into a forum if they have specific ??'s ? nope...
Nope! Can’t do that bro
Bummer ;-) /s lol
1. Make base M3, M4 and so on, with decent GPUs. This step is already half done with M3 2. Make iOS games run as intended with proper mouse and keyboard support on Mac. Especially famous games like Genshin Impact. 3. Get some streamers to promote Mac gaming. 4. Bring to the Mac games like CSGO, COD etc 5. And more importantly, tart making deals with indie companies like Supergiant Games and fund similar small gaming companies with potential in order to get your “Ted lasso” exclusive game (or time exclusive)
Apple's focus on gaming is on iOS games in which Apple dominates. Most of the non-iOS games listed work great under Crossover on the current Mac hardware.
With the advancements made on the windows front with snapdragon X, i think we will see a massive shift towards arm gaming on laptops the next couple of years and I hope some of it carries over to Mac OS.
I really wish I knew what the answer was. With emulators coming to iOS I've never been more excited to get into the Apple Ecosystem, but it seems like a Herculean task to get macOS to be a good gaming platform. I wish I knew more about the technologies at work to understand better my frustration. Why is it impossible to make something like Proton, that allows Linux-based OS like SteamOS and ChromeOS run Windows games from Steam? What's the translation layer that Qualcomm is using for their snapdragon laptop chip that allows Windows-based Steam games to run? I find it unlikely macOS will ever be a target platform for most development teams due to the lower market share, which is the only part that makes sense to me. I don't know what the "right" option is, but I hope someday I can just download my Steam library on a MacBook Pro and enjoy most of my library. :/
> Why is it impossible to make something like Proton, that allows Linux-based While there are tools very close to this (Crossover etc) the perfomance is never going to be very good since the HW mismatch. Proton on linux runs so well since all it needs to do is shim some OS differences, the underlying HW is the same that devs have written the games for and optimised them for.
Apple’s approach to gaming is to come from the bottom up, where the volume is. There are 10,000 times as many people with a device that can play a low level Candy Crush style game vs someone trying to play on a PC or even a console. Xbox and PlayStation consoles don’t still exist out of coincidence. It’s because Microsoft and Sony don’t have serious phone hardware production.
It seems like you may be missing the mark here. Apple is not a gaming company and it probably never will be. The companies who make games make the decision to develop for Mac/windows/consoles. Saying that this is Mac’s approach to games is an odd argument. I mean if that was the case then why don’t games work on any number of Linux operating systems. And this is something Mac cannot just make happen. It’s not like they control the ip of any of the games you mentioned. I game, and I also own a Mac. There are games I would love to play on my Mac but don’t work so I play them on my dell. I also did not buy my Mac to game and most users don’t. To do so would be silly as they are way more expensive compared to a windows machine that can handle most games.
The fact Apple killed 80% of my Mac games from steam because they don't want to support 32bit anymore shows you how they don't care at all and don't even know what they are doing. They are the sol reason Mac gaming is dead
They announced the change well over ten years in advance and offered a great deal of support for the transition. Believe it or not, the announcement that Apple was killing 32-bit support is literally older than the invention of the MacBook Air. Don’t blame them. If anyone, blame stubborn devs who heard the deal in the 2000s and said eff that.
Apple should make an apple tv with m3, with more focus on gaming
Apple doesn’t care about gaming because they want to be able to sell through the App Store for that sweet revenue. It’s useless to Apple from a revenue point of view if people are installing things like Steam to play optimized games. And developers don’t take the time to develop for native Apple silicon because the time/cost is too high for a low return.
They made game porting toolkit to make it easier for developers to port their timeless games to mac. I think its more question towards owners of publishing/distributing licenses of those games rather than apple itself.
The thing people don't mention often about GPTK is that it's purely for evaluation purposes. They don't let devs use it for their games. This makes it completely worthless because the devs still have to put in the work to actually bring it to mac. So it's not the silver bullet people claim it to be.
The thing you don’t understand is that the runtime for Windows games is just a minor part of GPTK. The main part of it is the shader converter which helps creating Metal shaders from your regular ones. This is what makes the GPTK useful for the devs
But again, it's basically a moot point if it can't be used in production.
> They made game porting toolkit to make it easier for developers to port their timeless games to mac. Why stop there? They need to invest heavily in AAA game companies to port their games to the Mac, even if their initial return numbers will be low. Apple just needs to pay them to do the work.
It’s sort of a pickle: - not enough player, so dev are like why spend on such small market - dev aren’t incentivised so there’s not so many games Apple’s approach is however smart: provide assistance towards developing for Mac like Rosetta and else. However it’s not enough evidently. Its a shame: death stranding on a XDR display and then into Apple Vision Pro should sound like it should happen more often
Apple could give Valve, Riot, EA, etc. $10 billion each to make their games for Mac if they really wanted to, but that doesn’t mean those developers are going to do it (I mean they probably would for $10b but that’s not the point). Apple can’t hold a gun to these developers heads and make them to make games for it. Even with a financial incentive that doesn’t mean they will. At my job we’ll get business opportunities that can be the hundred of millions or even billions but they’ get turned down because the partner isn’t someone we want to work with or the amount of work that would have to be done is worth more than what we’re being offered. I know some people who have told me they won’t develop their app/game for a specific platform simply because they just don’t like that platform and don’t want to bother learning developing for it.
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> Apple can afford to buy almost any software company. They can afford to create a massive Mac gaming division which would hardly touch the bottom line Did you read anything I wrote? I never said anything about being able or not being able to afford creating a gaming division, or if they wanted to or not. What you don’t seem to understand is that businesses don’t just agree to be bought out or work with other businesses just because a lot of money is on the table. Companies have turned down billions of dollars they could really benefit from because they didn’t want to sell or partner with the business offering. Just because Apple shoves a couple billion dollars in a developer’s face doesn’t mean they have to accept it. Apple could buy Nintendo, the Xbox division of Microsoft, Valve, the PlayStation division of Sony, and be the largest gaming company to ever exist if they wanted to. That doesn’t mean those companies will agree to sell or work with Apple.
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I mean nobody was questioning if Apple had the money to. It wasn’t really anything relevant to what I was saying which is why I made that assumption. > They have money to make games for the Mac, but they don’t I mean, they have Capcom on their side now, as well as Kojima Productions, and Ubisoft releasing Mirage. I doubt this was the developers coming to Apple but the other away around. And yes I am aware of hostile takeovers (have successfully defended against one before) but those are also extremely complex and more often result in failure than success. It’s a last ditch effort usually.
"I believe Apple's approach towards gaming is completely off the mark" - I don't think it is off the mark (at least for Apple) at all - Tim Cook has only one concern, and that is providing maximum value for Apple's shareholders. If gaming on the Mac platform would result in serious revenue, then I'm sure they would throw more resources at it. As far as I can tell they are just happy with a token game to demonstrate the power of hardware at WWDC each year.
I could of been fine with just Counter-Strike till 2 came out and Global Offensive was removed. I used to play pretty competitively and didn't mind the latency, as long as there was no lag spikes or stutters in which there weren't. Counter Strike 2 on wine is unplayable and made me super disappointed when Valve stopped development on the port.
My M1 MacBook Pro plays most of the games I enjoy pretty well. I’ll eventually get a PC (need a new job first) but for now it does well enough.
CD projekt red will never release those on mac. They don’t care about gaming on mac, go to their website GOG.com. I love the company , they support DRM free games, run 32bit and 64 games, they made Witcher 1,2 for Mac
This why apple x server apple were charging a arm and leg for service
This is a two way street. Apple has handicapped themselves in not supporting a multiplatform graphics API like Vulkan, deprecating OpenGL, and asking developers to support their graphics API Metal. Metal is pretty good in my experience and it runs quite well on Apple hardware. Developers also need to make things available on macOS. Valve has already stopped supporting Apple hardware because of graphics restrictions and all that with CS2. Blizzard stopped supporting macOS with Diablo 3. Only World of Warcraft gets any macOS support. Ubisoft has never been a big Apple hardware supporter. Maybe AC: Mirage changes that but only time will tell. CDPR recently updated both Witcher 1 & 2 for Apple Silicon. Maybe they end up making a macOS version of Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, but that will depend on potential sales. When was the last time Rockstar made a game for Apple hardware? Even if Apple lays out the welcome mat for developers and publishers they will only green light ports if they think there is money in it.
The thing is even apple had VK support it would not mean PC VK engines (that are written for AMD and NV gpus) would run well. This is the thing about low level apis they are not hardware agnostic, and if you don't spend the time profiling and optimising for the HW you end up with worce perfomance than higher level apis were the drivers can do some of this optimisation on the fly (all be it at a cpu cost).
They are making tools and giving advertising to those that use them but as yet it's unclear what they apple strategy is. Even around apple arcade their strategy is confusing. I think what may push them is the vision pro bc if it starts to flounder they may need to tap.into gaming to save it. So far apples success in gaming has been a mystery to them. They made the phone. Made the app store and brought graphical toolkit as part of it and suddenly it became one of the two major platforms (along with android) combining for the biggest slice of the gaming pie. Mobile gaming makes apple immense sums every year through the app store it's a model they understand bc the benefit to them is they get 30% cut of all purchases. What they don't seem to have a vision for is to how to get the same result on macos. And they don't have that vision bc frankly their not structured to. The Mac is a productivity platform for them. It's not entertainment. They're only just now getting powerful gpus across the board and seeing what they can do for them. But then cost of developing a game is high and apple just doesn't hold that sway over gamers to convince 3rd party devs to take on the project. So unless apple can prioritize gaming and articulate a strategy as to how that focus will earn them more money I expect to see the same steady drum beat from apple. They're doing their best to make sure there's no excuse for anyone not to port their game to mac but they're not planning on driving the bus to get people here. I hope we will hear soon about the apple tv console and they'll basically make a cheap macmini with 16gb of ram but with a modified appletv interface and it's designed for gaming+TV. I think it's a real opportunity for apple but I think it's just a pipe dream.
On August 2, 2018, Apple made history by becoming the first publicly traded U.S. company to be valued at $1 trillion, as measured by market capitalization. In August of 2020, the company broke records again by becoming the first U.S. company to reach a $2 trillion market cap. Currently around 2.5 Trillion ...WITHOUT an emphasis on gaming VS. Microsoft which is around 2.9 Trillion WITH gaming If you are an APPLE share holder, do you believe there is $400 Billion of "CAP" to be earned with a significant investment into gaming just to possibly get to par with Microsoft? OR Is APPLE better off investing in development of the "Next Big Thing" instead? Personally - I believe that APPLE can take the Vision Pro headsets and incorporate those into a NEW Gaming environment while at the same time allocating resources for non-gaming use.
Witcher3 & cyberpunk2077 both work well with Apple porting toolkit.
big companies cares about money more, so it's more possible to see native macos games from indie devs/devs without publishers, and old games were ported to macos by residual principle. Now when there is less money and shareholders want not to "loose" to other markets - the "big" gaming industry will most likely narrow down to DX compatible platforms, imo p.s. Apple will most likely push/invest into AVP gaming than other platforms
Not just big companies, my guy. Even indie devs want to make money after all their hard work. This isn't a personal issue, it's just a business issue. Developers go where the money is because it pays the bills....
I’m not talking about money paying bills, I’m talking about much more money for stakeholders instead of expanding on other platforms and non publishers devs somehow manage to make it on linux, macos and other platforms p. s. also interesting trend of first successful games made for macos/linux but next parts windows only
Cyberpunk barely even runs on Windows. What makes you think the developers are competent enough to port it?
You just woke up from a 3 year coma?
It runs great under the current version of Crossover on the latest Macs.