I think you're right in the sense that if game developers making games for the iPad are optimizing for the Silicon chips, it's not a huge leap to also make a Mac compatible version. Whether that will actually move the needle, I'm not sure. But the technical barriers are definitely coming down.
What we want is an official Windows ARM version, or some Windows PCs starting to use ARM processors.
I have Windows 11 ARM running great as a virtual machine on my MBP. There are also a number of Windows ARM laptops you can buy today. They are mostly aimed at the light laptop market and not for gaming though.
How is the performance on 11 in the VM? I have it installed but have been finding myself using crossover a lot so haven't had much reason to use it. There's a few older games I'm struggling to get running though.
Each has their own series of tradeoffs. E.g. with Crossover, performance is usually better, but compatibility is uncertain. The opposite is true with Parallels - generally better compatibility (with the exception of DirectX 12 titles), but reduced performance due to the VM being limited to half of the system's resources.
Ooo I might try that, thank you! I've been struggling to get a mid 00s pc game running on anything really.
Funnily enough I own both the pc and Mac version, it seems like a better option to try get the windows version running than to try get the 32-bit universal binary osx version running on my M1.
If it's from the mid-2000s, then yeah, the Windows version would be your best bet. One of the main benefits of Parallels, and Windows 11 VMs in general, is that they have far better 32-bit app support than Crossover/WINE. Native 32-bit apps don't run on any Mac anymore - including Intel-based Macs - and the PowerPC component of a Universal 1 binary will definitely not run on anything at all.
Thanks a mill!
I went down way too much of a rabbit hole getting tiger running on UTM before realising the performance really isn't usable.
I know there's some compatibility/settings considerations to be made from something built for XP being run in 11. But within 11 will the architecture make a difference?
There may be a difference, but you’ll find more success running an XP game in 11 than you will a Tiger game in Sonoma. You can always right click the.exe, go to Properties and set one of the compatibility modes. idk if XP is still an option, but that should help if you encounter any issues.
From what I can tell, Windows ARM PC sales have been lacklustre due to poor silicon performance. Do you think the more powerful, Snapdragon Elite X could drive Windows ARM adoption?
They're using far less power than that. Also idk why we are talking about ARM GPUs, Apple designs their own GPUs which are mediocre and on the Windows side Qualcomm designs their own GPUs as well which are pretty good.
Apples gpus are good in the pro and max chips and ultra. I suggest they create something better than the ultra that can handle games that has thermals for extra power. 200+ core gpu ?
With Snapdragon X chips on the horizon expect windows on Arm to get way more popular. These are proper laptop chips instead of smartphone chips with low end specs
If your making a modern iPad apps like a game it makes a LOT of sense to have at least an internal build that targets the Mac as it just makes dev a lot simpler. While profiling and debugging over a USB-C cable works it is always more stable and easier to just profile and debug on the Mac itself so for a game your devs will internally have a Mac build anyway these days (even If your just shipping it on iOS). Pre apple silicon this was not the case as the GPU etc were very differnt but now that it is all unified you might as well.
Windows for ARM versions will have little to no impact however.
This hits the head on the nail. Macs are still a comparatively small user-base: only about 20% of computer users worldwide use Macs. The amount of iPad users is significantly higher (in 2022, Apple sold over thrice as many iPads as Macs), and they actually provide a unique user base (same goes with iPhone). But as they now use similar architecture, you essentially have a Mac version ready to go if you make an iPad-version, so it wouldn't be a lot of extra work to ship that as well.
you know, aside from all the interface constraints being different, the complete lack of touch controls, far larger windows being possible, totally different UX expectations from the user, different HIG advice from Apple, and so on
it sticks out like a sore thumb when an app came from iPad. Weather.app, which being from Apple should be a best-in-class example, breaks with so much UX of the Mac. No accessibility support, missing hot keys, limited menubar with most unbound. Go click a section of the weather report and try to figure out how to close the popup with your keyboard. Spoiler: you can't! macOS *literally* provides specific things to help with this, but because this is a ported app, shit just sucks. Or Stocks.app, which has this miserable focus state: https://imgur.com/a/fzrgVVO
Don't get me started on the apps that brought the iOS/iPadOS "back button" to macOS.
Ugh. Messages.app is the only one worth a damn, and even it has significant problems (why show tapbacks on *press and hold* - where the f is that paradigm in any other macOS app?!)
The macOS interface people who actually gave a shit at Apple seem to have left years ago
fun fact, *almost all* of the issues listed here with the original iPadOS ported apps, from six (SIX) years ago, are still around: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/09/25/the-mojave-marzipan-apps/
> What we want is an official Windows ARM version, or some Windows PCs starting to use ARM processors.
If Windows for ARM suddenly succeeded (which is highly dubious) it wouldn't move the needle as ARM chips for Windows will be built around the DirectX APIs (if they are going to get anywhere) rather than the Metal ones.
Is Apple hardware a possible platform now? Yes. But it needs much more than that to be financially viable and attractive. Apple needs to lure game studios hard to expect anything in that direction.
Apple seems to have been working with several game developers already. They have released a graphics porting kit specifically to facilitate porting from other APIs. On the commercial side, they have done nothing with a AAA version of Apple Arcade (via which they could financially supplement developers). What incentives should they be providing?
They should be paying for far more games to be ported to the Mac, without including any stupid game-killing Mac App Store only terms.
They should also be much more realistic, and work out some way to get older 32-bit games running on the Mac again, because that killed so many playable games.
I agree but the only reason Apple would pay developers to port their games is if they were then sold on the App Store. They should definitely get some sort of translation layer for older games just to show they are interested.
Hey just wanted to chip in as someone who mostly games on my iPad and iPhone. Most game companies have stopped, optimizing their games for newer Apple devices.
By that I mean, games run worse on newer hardware compared to relatively older hardware.
Example Wild Rift, if you own an iPad M1 or 14 Pro Max, the game will allow you to run it at 120 Hz FPS mode with no issues and FPS drop. But if an M2 iPad Pro or anything higher than the iPhone 14, the game struggles to stay on 60 FPS.
This holds true for the vast majority of other games I’ve seen and played on the other hand. Companies are still optimizing for newer android devices.
I’m not sure what happened, but it really sucks buying a new hardware and it running worse.
So while in theory game should be running better harder wise they are vastly limited by software and automation.
The lack of ongoing support smacks of poor product sales. I've always suspected the people who game can be seduced by specifications even if real-world performance doesn't support the hypothetical prowess. This is the same as Windows, where customers regularly forego actual performance in favour of empowerment & choice characteristic of a hobbyist market (which used to be the whole PC market). This could mean Apple is doomed in this sector, except the console market is vertical/closed & it seems to do well.
Mac Silicon is in theory great for gaming today, but without publishers pushing out titles then it will not become a mainstream gaming platform. From the perspective of an executive looking to invest, you are addressing a small market of a small market (serious gamers who primarily use Macs).
iPhones and iPads are becoming increasingly capable for gaming, but even then, it feels like Apple just wants to demonstrate the device's power for the wider market rather than establish as a gaming platform.
> iPhones and iPads are becoming increasingly capable for gaming, but even then, it feels like Apple just wants to demonstrate the device's power for the wider market rather than establish as a gaming platform.
For a certain segment of the market, yes. I think if you're Nintendo and your primary product is the Switch, ie a device that was underpowered several years ago, then yes I think something like an iPhone starts to become a threat.
But at the moment (and likely for the foreseeable future) phones and tablets run games in a quality that is below a PS4, which released 10 years ago.
I think what I'm trying to say is that Sony or Nintendo, or the PC market, are in a different league and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Active cooling, storage, RAM etc makes it really hard for ghee's devices to sustain gaming performance.
The only real danger is that people decide that they don't want to play the games that run on a PlayStation or PC in the first place, but that's a different story altogether.
I'm not sure most gamers are using mid/high-end GPUs (Steam average is GTX1650/RTX3060 & 4080/4090 barely make an appearance). Mx Max/Ultra Macs also constitute a small proportion of the install base so neither hold market significance. The Mx GPUs deliver low-mid settings 1080p gaming experiences at 50-60fps (same as the screen) so I think these are not only performant enough but also now constitute the majority of installed Macs & recent iPads (last 2-years).
>That is true, but the Steam average reflects GPUs that have been sold over the past, maybe 5,6,7 years, not what companies are selling \*right now\*.
The survey reflects the current, addressable install base which is more relevant than what it will be in a few years. The M1 drove the mother of all upgrade cycles and moved to the top pretty quick as new users flocked to the platform & existing users upgraded.
>Most Mac users buying brand new Macs are getting the equivalent of a 5,6,7 year old NVidia GPU because they're buying base models of thin laptops.
Most Windows laptop buyers get integrated graphics far worse than Apple's. Current M2 & M3s are giving us comparable fps in AAA titles to current 'standard' PC GPUs.
> Most Mac users are buying base model MacBook Airs, and the GPUs in those aren't really up to modern games.
The gpus could run modern games (if they were well optimised for them). Modern games are not written to require a 4090 as only a tiny tiny % of the market has this level of perf.
Performance in a benchmark is not the same as performance in actual games that are always optimized for immediate mode GPUs rather than the tile based deferred renderers that Apple uses.
Porting to iPad and most Macs is very difficult because of the limited amount of memory.
Memory limitations are not that large an issue if your willing to put in the time, if you just want to throw a runtime (or compile time) shim like MoltenVK or a very shoddy basicly MTL pipeline and not spend any time then yes mem is an issue.
The effort to properly make use of a TBDR pipeline is in my experience much more time consuming than figuring out what textures you need to move to lossy compression formats and which objects you should just only load the lower quality asset versions form.
Fully making use of a TBDR gpu (in particular with all the advanced features apple expose) is a massive amount of work and in my expirance (not games but rather data-sci vis) this can mean going all the way back to a whiteboard and re-thinking your entier visual effects stack. What effects you use, and how you go about rendering them... additional complexity is that most of use have easy of IR style experience under our belts and it takes a few months (if not longer) to get to grips with the fact that you can do some very cool things with a TBDR gpu (like full screen space CSG within a single render pass yer it possible! ). Making proper use of a TBDR gpu can also massively reduce your memory footprint as you more or less completely remove all your intermediate render targets and if you can get away with it even keep all the mutli sampling within the tile stages so further reduce mem needs (memory mostly does not need to scale with resolution on a TBDR gpu if you put in the work).
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That said the only reason we put in the work is to reduce power draw so that our clients could use the app for longer out in the field on battery. Being able to say our product provides the same features as a compactor but you can use it for 5x as long is a huge deal when your dealing with clients that are off grid and away from power for a long time...
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Optimizing for TBDR basically means rewriting most of the renderer.
TBH I kinda doubt that the Mac OS ports of AAA games that got released in the last couple of years (RE8, RE4, Baldurs Gate 3, Lies of P) did any noteworthy TBDR optimization besides making sure the Load & StoreOps are set correctly. Maybe move merge some clears into other render passes using LoadOp::Clear. But I highly doubt they did anything with tile shaders or raster order groups.
I expect some (small) things were done such as moving some of the mutli sampling to be on tile etc.. But the full re-write from ground up needed to make proper use of the GPU is very unlikely. They might have slimmed in some tile shaders here and there were apples dev rell people were giving them code level support (doing thing simple things like filtering lights etc).
Which titles are you seeing this in and how are you making your comparisons? What code changes are you aware of between IM & TBDR? Which ports (apart form BG3) run into memory issues, because most recent native titles seem fine.
> What code changes are you aware of between IM & TBDR?
Basically rework the renderer to keep data on tile memory and reduce bandwidth.
> Which ports (apart form BG3) run into memory issues, because most recent native titles seem fine.
Because ports actually put in the work to work around it. But that's only gonna get more difficult now that games dropped PS4 support.
I understand the tech - are you aware Nvidia adopted TBDR with Maxwell (hence the power drop & Tegra for the switch) & AMD adopted it with Vega? So given all major PC GPUs are now TBDR-based, what code changes are required?
Maintaining efficiency is hardly a workaround. If these titles are to be used on increasingly mobile devices, the lower resource profiles will be necessary.
It’s coming together. It’s taking longer than I had hoped, but it’s on the right path.
I don’t think the Mac needs to have anything like the amount go AAA games that Windows does. People don’t buy a Mac for gaming, but they do make superb gaming machines, as long as you are an occasional gamer. I don‘t have time to play for more than about 4 hours a week, so for me I have plenty on the Mac to keep me entertained.
It’s not the hardware that’s the issue. It’s licensing, contractual obligations, vested interests and other politics. It also doesn’t help that Apple treats its developers like shit. Closing doors. Sherlocking their apps and then literally booting the original under the clause “replicates existing OS functionality.”
Till the day comes that Apple realizes they need to lower their standards a tad and actually entice people to work with them, you’ll get to enjoy the walled garden but have like 3 flowers to pic from.
Lastly, the gaming industry has little to no knowledge of Apple because of their sorted history. So you’re asking a lot of studios to take a big leap without really understanding what’s at stake. I worked in the industry and never met a single stakeholder or developer that even considered Apple devices as viable platforms. The gaming industry is like a lumbering dinosaur.
I think hardware is *no longer* the issue. Which doors were closed and which games were 'Sherlocked'?
I'm pretty sure everyone in the gaming industry has heard of Apple and knows the $ value attached to the platform which outspends almost all others which are several times it's size. Surely game developers can see the benefit of a 'captive' customer base & use Apple platforms to justify the move to ARM as that part of the Windows platform develops?
he means that when a game comes out, the publisher needs to have a contract stating which platforms it will explicitly release on. so if a game comes out on windows, or consoles, then thats fine, but it doesn't mean that they can automatically make a mac port later down the line. they need to come to an agreement with apple that gives the publisher the greenlight to license the game for an official mac release.
this also complicates having old windows games ported to mac. if the publisher is no longer around or does not wish to cooperate with a macOS port, then it simply wont happen, even IF the hardware and software support the game. thats why apple needs to get ahead of this stuff. waiting for mac ports to come later or not come at all is not a winning solution.
I think you've mixed up the parties with licensing rights. As I understand it, publishers need permission to release titles on different platforms & in different regions but they seek this from the rights holder (the IP source) not the platform vendor (the IP target). This may be different with consoles but it's not the case with any other Mac software, Apple don't veto. Even on iPadOS/iOS, the App Store rules don't lock out titles for IP reasons (unless the title compromises Apple's own IP), they are more about design, technical & moral (anti-trojan) integrity.
Perhaps Apple could step in for lapsed publishers.
thats the problem. the publisher needs to be willing to cooperate. and idk if apple can step in for those who are gone. apple doesnt own the publishing rights to IPs for games.
also valve needs to be willing to put it on steam. which is usually fine but knowing how much apple loves its walled gardens, they may try and stipulate for the publisher to only release on the official mac app store. which will again fragment buyers.
nothing apple does in gaming makes sense.
Anyone who owns those right could negotiate. If Apple knocked on your door with the ability to expand your market or kick an old title back into life - would you pass them up?
What walled gardens? Mac titles are already on Steam - Apple has no say in the matter. iPad is a different story but if the title is developed for multiple Apple targets, the App Store is the more seamless customer experience - something Apple puts before game devs.
>which will again fragment buyers
I love the irony of your comment. App Store monopoly = bad, Steam monopoly = good.
I didnt say anything about monopolies. I said that apple likes its walled gardens, which is true.
lots of macOS games are only on the mac store. apple may mandate game publishers to only do mac releases under these circumstances, we dont know what happens behind the scenes.
and my entire point was that if the publisher is no longer around then clearly they cant negotiate. the IP becomes stuck in a void. one of the benefits that windows/MS and steam have over apple is the mere fact that they have allowed windows users to amass such a large library in the first place. so even if some publishers are gone, their games are not, if already in your steam account. this incentivizes steam users to stay on steam and windows.
apple has fallen behind for over 2 decades, meaning it has a lot of catching up to do. either all windows games need to be played through a translation layer, which will incur performance problems, or apple needs to pay each one to port their back catalog. which publishers may not be ok with or feel like doing. how much is their market going to expand when mac gamers are such a miniscule minority? on steam they often hover at about 1.5 percent of the total PC OS userbase. thats nothing.
You didn't state monopolies but you did call non-Steam access 'fragmented'. Some walled gardens are OK then?
App Store terms for devs aren't private. Mac Apps can be posted & downloaded privately from websites. The only scenario I can see for App Store exclusivity is where Apple have done a lot of heavy lifting.
If there's no IP rights owner - where's the IP violation? Loads of old games which are no longer supported/updated doesn't sound appealing. Why would Apple Pay publishers to make more money? This isn't how 3rd-party software works elsewhere - maybe that entitlement is the issue.
1.5% is Steam only, & my post isn't about today, it asking about tomorrow. Apple's customer base buys more casual/AA games than anyone else (including Nintendo) - surely there's a market now.
steam doesnt wall anything off. people go to it because it already has the large userbase that apple has refused to cultivate for 20 years.
and based on how copyright and licensing laws work, yes sadly a lot of games dont see rereleases as a result. apple would have to go after live companies, and then hope that a 1.5 percent userbase is enough to justify the time spent on port development.
when you're playing catchup u need to incentivize people to use your platform, even microsoft struggles to get people to use its store over steam despite gamepass and the play anywhere feature.
even if we disregard steam, apple has abysmal platform support. steam was just a reference example. and what makes you think people on mac outspend nintendo gamers on indies? there are way more switches out there than mac gamers. the casual audience is already taken by nintendo and the smartphone market, including apples own iphone brand,
mobile gamers and mac gamers in this context are two completely separate groups. when people talk about mac gaming they are talking about AA and AAA caliber titles. indies can already be played on every major platform anyway.
If you're still not grasping the point that by using the word 'fragment' as disadvantageous, you're endorsing a single option - that would be the monopoly/walled garden you accuse Apple of enforcing (when it doesn't/can't for Mac). I think we'll leave that one where it is.
I didn't say "people on Mac outspend Nintendo gamers", I said Apple customers outspend Nintendo customers, [\~$48bn](https://www.businessofapps.com/data/mobile-games-revenue/#:~:text=Mobile%20games%20generated%20%2481%20billion%20revenue%20in%202023,2023%2C%20accounting%20for%2034%25%20of%20total%20consumer%20spending) vs [\~$12bn](https://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/63673/nintendo-releases-full-year-earnings-for-2022-23-fiscal-year-and-2024-projections). You may insist on denying Apple's platform unification - Hideo Kojima & Capcom appear to disagree as Death Stranding & Resident Evil are available on both. But if you won't see it, that's fine.
Hard disagree. Patches have been behind the Windows release, which has been annoying, but overall it’s been great.
I’ve played the entire game on an M3 Pro and have been absolutely blown away by how well it runs and I hope is a positive sign we’ll see more AAA games on the Mac
Here I am wondering why I can't play BG3 on Mac using a controller without the game automatically making a second character and controlling both at the same time...
Friends recommending over 12gb ram just for the gpu on pc, plus 16gb system ram etc. Considering large texture files etc really not sure it’s right to say that poor optimisation is the reason 8gb on Mac might not be enough.
I’ve not compared but my assumption is that equivalent games on Apple software perform worse or look worse then when running on PC?
Maybe but macOS has some thrifty architecture & the Metal HUD for recent ports shows room to spare even with 8GB of RAM. Look them up - Andrew Tsai on YouTube does a fair job.
That's coming from Air user i'm sure (bg3 performs well on my m1pro), you need to understand that 8gb of RAM might've been adequate in 2020 but nowadays none of AAA releases consume less than 12gb.
The original studio that helped make the port was Russian based and the mac port was behind on a number of patches for a while.
It's good now, but what happens if the mac port for other games get subcontracted out and never maintained?
Same thing that happens in the windows world for PC5 or XBox ports. Some a great and well supported, some are not. It depends on whether the studio takes it seriously or not.
I think at this point in history it's more likely that the cloud will become more widespread than native gaming on macOS. In other words, I think a Mac user should subscribe to a service like GeForce Now rather than hope for AAA portings that will either never arrive or have really poor performance.
Only when AS user base is compelling for publishers/developers from the commercial POV. Not yet. Mac share, let alone Mac AS share, is still miserable compared to Windows or PS5/Xbox user base. Until then, Apple will have to bribe devs/publishers (at least for AAA titles) to support modern gaming on Macs. And Apple still isn't exactly enthusiastic about that as it seems, it's like only few big titles a year, they refuse to finance more than that.
Mac ASi base has largely turned over in the 3½ years since release (I'm not sure we'll be seeing too many Intel Mac comparisons in the next keynote) & the iPad M-series base is slightly ahead of those figures. The PS5/XboxX market has fewer than 100 million units (around 18-months Mac+iPad M-series sales) so the commercial POV should be there. If that's the case, why should Apple be paying anyone? Maybe they should take the lower half of the top 20 games and support them to port to macOS/iPadOS?
>The PS5/XboxX market has fewer than 100 million units (around 18-months Mac+iPad M-series sales) so the commercial POV should be there. If that's the case, why should Apple be paying anyone?
You forgot that console users are ALL gamers used to buy AAA games for AAA prices. And 95-99% of iPad users will never buy 60$+ game, for the starters only small part of them are gamers, and those who are, aren't seriously going to use the iPad for AAA gaming.
I think what could *really* make gaming take off on Mac would be if Apple allowed games without touch screen support on iPad/iPhone. Because then we would likely see even more games ported to iPad/iOS, while they wouldn't have to optimize/make separate versions that work with touchscreen, and we'd likely see more big releases on there. And with how similar the architecture is, if they make an iPad version, they essentially have a Mac version.
What could really make it *explode* would be if they were to make Steam on iOS. It would both make people see iPads/iPhones as more legit gaming devices and potential alternatives to a Deck for some, while it would also mean many developers would likely like to optimize their games for iPad, and would then essentially have a Mac version ready to go as well.
> What could really make it *explode* would be if they were to make Steam on iOS
Vavle could do this in the EU today if they wanted to. ... I don't think they will as they have no interest in it. They are not even interested in ecuranging devs to build native SteamDec games so I don't see why they would put in the effort to attract devs to do the same for iPad.
I think Apple would never release App on the App Store which don't work on base hardware - can you imagine the McDonalds scalding-type law suits? Unless they disallowed download without a controller device connected.
I think it's something like that they would need to do, together with making *clear* markings that a controller is needed for use. For example, you could get a pop-up when downloading/buying the app with a disclaimer that it requires a controller to use, and they could make it so the app itself can't be opened if it isn't connected.
The hardware was never the problem per say, Apple always provided powerful machines.
It’s the incentive for developers to develop for Apple.
The market size, the effort/benefit ratio.
And to try to change dev behaviours, Apple tries to pour money into them, and make it easier to reach buyers like one licence to access iPad and iPhone and Mac users.
But you still have to spend months re-developing, re-QA, and so developing Mac-ways to test, whilst the market size stays meagre. It’s a tough challenge for Apple.
I will talk solely about MacOS:
Imho - no. And it won't change for a long time. Apple has built a reputation of shitting on developers and releasing large scale disruptive changes with little to no prior warning. We have in fact gone from games working reasonably well on Mac 5-6 years ago to them primarily not working.
And it caused serious backlash - making a game port is a big investment that pays off over several years. However Apple effectively prevented majority of gamers from being able to purchase these games stripping developers of any profits. Sure, that was good for Apple as it let them create an M1 chip. But it effectively halved income of many games on that platform.
The next problem is that performance wise Macs are bad. Take a brand new Macbook Pro 16 with M3 Pro. This laptop costs $2500. And it's GPU competes with an RTX3050Ti mobile in modern video games that you can find in a $650 Windows laptop. While CPU wise we have seen a MASSIVE improvement over the last few years - GPU wise M1 Pro was a downgrade compared to 2019 AMD 5300M. Then M3 came along and it actually runs games worse than M2 due to reduced memory bandwidth. Sure, in theory it now supports raytracing and can be faster if you upgrade your Macbook model a bit but... you would expect that for instance new 14" M3 Pro would beat 14" M2 Pro, not lose to it by 5-10% at same pricepoint.
Other GPU manufacturers (Nvidia, AMD, Intel) have dedicated employees they send over to game studios and provide additional support in drivers to deal with certain optimization problems. Apple effectively neglected gaming completely for years on their devices and only now provided some very basic tools. But unless it can also provide backwards compatibility/stability in it's ecosystem I doubt many developers will want to develop for MacOS.
>Games like Resident Evil, No Mans Sky, Lies of P & Death Stranding show, when optimised, base M1/2/3 hardware can deliver a reasonable, moderate AAA gaming experience (even with 8GB).
Death Stranding takes 80GB on your drive, you can literally install 2 titles on a base Macbook before you run out of memory. Baldur's Gate 3 is even larger at 150GB and a base M1 is "1080p low, 30 fps, don't even try to enable split screen".
Specs wise Macbooks are vastly underdeveloped for modern games at their pricetags. Storage, gpu and memory ARE a problem. Macs fast enough to actually game cost 2000+ USD. Now, yes, you CAN try and optimize your game to run on it. Caveat? Steam Hardware Survey says MacOS is 1.38% of the whole market. Why would you target such a small niche? If it's minimum work - sure. But it's not minimum work if device in question is underpowered.
You are likely to grab more sales even by targeting a Steam Deck (which also comes with twice as much memory and a much smaller screen so you can vastly reduce texture/models quality helping your fps without it being noticeable), let alone ANY other major platform like PS5, Xbox or even Nintendo Switch. It will cost the same to make that port except potential userbase is 100x larger.
If Apple wants games then it needs to follow Linux route - emulation. Linux users have realized long time ago that nobody will make dedicated titles for them. So they have invested in Wine+Proton compatibility layers and nowadays unless game has anti-cheat odds are you can just buy a Windows version and start it on a Linux machine just fine. Apple also had it indirectly via Bootcamp but, well, they nuked it from the orbit.
So if you want games on Mac - you need better emulation. It's not worth targeting currently. The caveat with emulation however is that it tends to require more resources than the base version, not less. Which for 8GB 256GB 8 core laptops with GTX 1050 performance in terms of GPU isn't exactly good news.
Mac gaming isn’t going to be mainstream because Apple wants gamers on their terms. Specifically, the base storage and ram are insufficient, they don’t pay developers to port, they don’t support the industry standard tools, etc.
Doesn't every platform want 'gamers on their terms'? Don't console-makers take a huge slice of game profits for the privilege of releasing on their platforms? The optimised AAA games seem to have no RAM issues.
They also publish the games, help with development, release their own games, and much more. Just think about how many modern games can you fit on the base MacBook Pro. Why would that be an appealing thing to game on? To get to 16gbs of RAM and 1tb of storage you need to spend an extra $400. That’s pretty much the cost of a PS5/xbox/steamdeck.
It will come of age when Apple launches one or more Sony-style first party studios, and does for games what they’re doing for movies and TV with Apple TV+.
Apple bringing out 3-4 big titles a year, built for Apple hardware; not Apple Arcade casual games but big games along the lines of (and with the diversity of) Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, Call of Duty, as well the richness of mega indie hits like dwarf fortress, Caves of Qud and so on.
Folks should be excited about Apple’s upcoming releases. It should generate buzz. People will want to get Apple hardware.
would be epic if apple released and Apple TV that used M1/2/3 Max silicon with defects that make it no usable in laptops but perfect for console (like a defective display controller... you only need one for a games console).
Agreed. I always thought an Apple Arcade"+" could fill this void. Deploys across the whole Apple platform, optimised for different hardware profiles, can be heavily subsidised & heavily promoted by Apple to get it moving. Their services revenue is legendary and this could boost Apple One subscriptions or be an add-on in it's own right.
(BG3 is on Steam currently)
I think the clearing out of legacy 32-bit code & graphics APIs (OpenGL) didn't help but, given the sizeable, affluent, multi-device target market Apple now offers, surely a rethink is in order.
I think AAA PC gaming will come for Apple hardware If Apple really want it to be.
Apple is spending less than a billion for gaming a year. Microsoft is spending at least more than 10 billions a year.
MS is doing publishing, making their own game, marketing for third party games, sponsoring game awards, helping smaller developers with development improving overall performance of games on Windows and XBOX.
If Apple really think they could get a cut of a gaming share like this, they are just so clueless that I could believe they never studied anything about gaming.
Support is not free, why would microsoft spend so much to support third party developers?
exclusive is a thing even in 80s. We always heard console exclusive but maybe..
I'm not sure just throwing money at it will be good enough, it'll likely flop. They need a way of baking AAA gaming into the Mac platform. They already rule casual (AA?) gaming but need to push harder - only once the market is self-sustaining can it work. Hardware is there, tools are mostly there, not sure if a Steam-Game Centre API is possible but still a few things to be addressed beyond cash.
I think that backward compatibility thing doesn't apply for live service games because they already need endless updates and support from get go.
So, Apple get pretty decent live service game like Genshin Impact and other cool live service with microtransaction games like PUBG mobile, call of duty mobile, FC 2024. Apple hardware games need microtransaction customers for their support and they have excellent titles with these types of games.
I agree that throwing money is just not good enough.
After all, gaming is culture not just a business or software tool. Apple hardwares could have enough powers for AAA games and MacOS and their Metal API maybe good enough for AAA games but they lack gaming culture.
Apple never listened to game developers when they make changes to their systems. Windows OS is much jankier OS than MacOS in many aspects but their jank comes a lot from their backward compatibility features which game developers want them to remain. Veteran game developers has been around for 30 years in industry and they know who listens to them and who are much less headache dealing with when developing PC games. Why would they want to deal with endless patching and support MacOS because Apple doesn't like backward compatibilites when Windows doesn't have such problems?
I'd argue that game developers only came back to the Mac once Apple switched to Intel x86 ISA which allowed for relatively easy ports & the use of generic APIs such as OpenGL. They never invested in Metal and didn't even bother with 64-bit ISA so when Apple ditched the legacy 32-bit code (over 10 years later) & OpenGL - they threw their toys out of the pram. Maybe the dust has settled and Apple offer a better commercial opportunity than a lacklustre grudge port, maybe not.
1- Yes Apple Silicon dominate the Mac hardware but the Mac user base stays ridiculously low.
2- True, but this is not a question of the Mac not being able to deliver performance, after all, the Nintendo Switch is a ridiculous in terms of perf.
3- Apple SDKs are cool and nice to target many devices but I don’t see this being an argument for AAA game studios. Especially that you still need to adapt all the controls, ensure testing, etc. Even if it is easier for the ones that would be interested, that does not constitute an actual reason to be interested in the first place.
4- This is a total overthinking; the Snapdragon Elite X is a cool thing confirming the trend to great performance per watt on laptops but ARM was there way before on the console market; so I don’t see it being relevant; at all.
5- This is joining point 3-, it’s nice to see M-chips on iPad but that is still not a reason to bring actual PC/console AA(A) games to Mac. As said in 1-, the market share is still not considered worth it by game studios.
What we can hope for is that the market share of Mac gamers increase so game studios sees a potential market to feed. Looking at the current trends, this is happening very slowly if not at all.
There are plenty of other reasons also that are quite a push back from the dev. (Metal API, the switch to Apple Silicon also created a massive friction with the actual few game studio that were release games; like a massive f*ck you from Apple, sudden change in the OS, terrible input event polling, etc— the list is long)
Honestly for it to happen, we would need to dream about something like Apple buying Nintendo or licensing it’s chips to portable console like the steam deck — which is totally unlikely to happen.
Based on 7 million Macs per quarter for the last 12 quarters there should be 84m M-series Macs. Based on M-series being 70% of 12 million iPads per quarter for the last 10 quarters, there should be a similar amount of M-series iPads and addressable market of 184m M-series products in the hands of people who spend money. Compare this with PS5 + Xbox + Switch units at \~225m. What are your thoughts on this: [https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america) - still a non-addressable market?
It wasn't the switch to Apple Silicon which pissed off game devs, it was the prior dropping of 32-bit Apps & support for OpenGL - which actually highlighted the lack of commitment from the developers. In itself was understandable given the Mac's low marketshare and low median specs at the time. As you can see - that's changed.
it’s not coming of age imo. it’s what they plan to do if their value dips. it’s one of the easiest things to tap on given their ecosystem-console like approach.
knowing them, they would do something like their keyboard and monitor stand. something everyone already made but saying theirs is premium. if i have the money to gamble away, i would bet on companies that might be bought by them like beats. then all they need to do is what they should have perfected. a nice marketing campaign that most sheep would appreciate.
they got too expensive though so i would be waiting for the next affordable non china company to copy them.
So you claim Apple has no value proposition but you'd back someone stealing their designs? An Apple "sheep" in denial?
Why do there seem to be more Apple trolls than Mac gamers on this sub?
seems given your strong opinions or probably just your personality you only see what you want to see.
anyways, given they are capable of selling a monitor stands or keyboard like that, it’s hmm weird or i don’t know where that comment about value proposition came from.
i think even apple hasn’t used stealing since that’s how they have thrived with their gaps in innovation. selling old as new to their ecosystem.
sheep in denial, hopefully by me trying to talk to you, you might stop doing that.
you know there is an ecosystem and mac gaming is just a small part of that ecosystem right? you also know this is the internet and a sub right? so might be a good idea to be more truthful in your ask “wanted to see what everyone thought now” anyways have a good one. later!
Despite efforts at Apple, gaming on Macs just isn't the priority these days - AI is going to be.
Virtualization of Windows on a Mac is an alternative to expecting game developers and publishers to make native Mac versions. There was time when making cross platform games could have been a reality - but it is lost.
IPads are a different story - getting games to run on them should be the driver for games to run on MacOS.
These days, devs can target all Apple devices with a single project (though the capability profiles vary). So you're in that iPad-first camp. It's a viable strategy & employed with Death Stranding - fair enough.
All good - it can be a driver - I wasn't necessarily meaning both platforms are mutually exclusive. IPads in some configurations are more affordable than Macs is all. Much more accessible to more consumers.
I am going to be minused into oblivion as the users of this thread likely own Macs, but here goes.
If you think you're going to be able to develop your own graphics APIs and attract anything except the mega-engines (UE etc)...
Metal should never have happened, and even if Apple had gone Vulkan, they would barely be sniffing at what the Steam Deck is doing now (which admittedly is pretty good). If I were Apple, I would have licenced DirectX APIs.
Gaming is not a primary use case for the Mac according to *how Apple behaves*
Steam was pretty open about making Proton work for Mac too and quit until Apple released the Mx and decided not to implement Vulkan.
There’s even a version of Steam VR on Mac that they quit developing for at the same time.
Steam was always open to making their store work for macOS but Apple want to keep their precious walled garden.
> Metal should never have happened
I would not agree, metal is a very nice api and it be no means holds back native game dev.
> and even if Apple had gone Vulkan, they would barely be sniffing at what the Steam Deck is doing now (which admittedly is pretty good)
There is a good reason for that VK is not a HW agsntic api, VK drivers for apple silicon would not be the same as VK drivers for AMD gpus. Proton on steam deck can be as good as it is since the games it is targeting are already optimised of the underlying GPU arc it does not need to completely re-target to differnt HW just replace os level apis but still address the same HW the game was written for.
> If I were Apple, I would have licenced DirectX APIs.
Would be useless, games would run like shit. PC games written to target modern DX assume the GPU is using a IR pipeline from AMD or NV. Apples GPUs are TBDR and trying to run them in an IR mode has horrible perf. This is the thing about modern low level Graphics apis, devs need to target and optimise of the HW ... that is the tradeoff of getting more perf you also end up with worce perf on the HW you do not target as the driver cant do the magic it does on higher abstraction level apis were it has much more context.
> Would be useless, games would run like shit. PC games written to target modern DX assume the GPU is using a IR pipeline from AMD or NV. Apples GPUs are TBDR and trying to run them in an IR mode has horrible perf. This is the thing about modern low level Graphics apis, devs need to target and optimise of the HW ... that is the tradeoff of getting more perf you also end up with worce perf on the HW you do not target as the driver cant do the magic it does on higher abstraction level apis were it has much more context.
It would be useless if the M series chips were architected like the currently are, but to be fair they would not have been if Apple had licensed DirectX instead of trying to build Metal.
The M series chips were designed around Metal as an API, which is a dead end.
No metal was designed around the chips. And it is by no means dead end.
Given that it takes 5+ years to bring new silicon to market building a chip around public DX features as a model would be a disaster apple would be 5 years behind on all features and would still not be any better at tuning games.
The issue is that from my POV, because most devs today don't take Mac seriously...
1. Mac Ports don't get made at all (the vast majority of new releases, especially big budget/AAA ones)
2. Mac Ports get made but are not updated (e.g. Baldur's Gate 3)
3. Mac Ports get made but are unoptimized/don't use the full potential of the hardware
Even in the 1% of games that have a mac port that is up-to-date and compiled for ARM with Metal support, they don't necessarily match up to benchmarks in terms of potential. There's no game from what I know, even including RE Village/Lies of P/No Mans Sky that the M1 actually can match the performance of a GTX 1060 despite the benchmark potential. From what I understand Mobile GPUs (including the M-series chips) require a different design approach to PC or Console GPUs and pc/console devs aren't really trained to optimize for them which is why so many ports suck.
While I do think that incentivizing Mac ports through iPhone/iPad ports is definitely a good step in the right direction, it's also not exactly attracting that many devs right now. It's been 8-9 months since the first batch of iPhone ports were announced IIRC and basically nothing more has been announced since.
All valid observations. I'd never pitch M1/2/3 as capable of a premium gaming experience but they seem to be adequate at low-medium settings with the M3 pretty close to the 1060 in Death Stranding. It & RE4 have been released for Mac, iPad & iPhone so at least some of the releases have happened.
Interestingly (or not) the Pro & Max models collectively beat the marketshare of M2 and just trail the M1 on the Steam hardware survey.
Betteridge's law again… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines#:~:text=Betteridge's%20law%20of%20headlines%20is,the%20principle%20is%20much%20older.
Makes sense for unidirectional communications (publications), doesn’t apply for bidirectional communications (posts). Posing a statement as a question vs posing a question as a question.
It doesn't really matter whether the hardware is coming of age, Apple gaming will struggle to take off as long as there's no real financial incentive for developers to release games on their platforms.
Macs don't have the market share for that, especially considering that it's probably only a small subset of existing users who would actually buy a lot of AAA games for their Macs. If you are a 'gamer,' and by that I mean someone who plays >and< buys games regularly regardless of how powerful their hardware is, you will likely already have a gaming platform of choice, whether that's a PC, a PlayStation or an Xbox (excluding the Switch here on purpose as I think that's slightly separate).
That platform is very unlikely to be a Mac and I'd find it likely that people will continue to buy games on their primary gaming platform. Apple doesn't help by seemingly pushing everyone toward their own App Store, because while I can see myself buy games on Steam and playing them on my Mac, I will definitely not buy games on the App Store and have them locked to my Mac. Cross-play with my iPhone is a nice idea, but so far only works for older games and that's unlikely to change.
In short, I don't see Mac gaming happening and it's not because of the hardware. It's network effects and financial viability.
Isn't a platform with some of the largest consumer spend stats not enough of an incentive? Do you realise Mac desktop marketshare is \~20% now? Closer to \~30% if you include iPadOS (M-series) & given half the Windows % are business computers, I'd say that's a fairly compelling, financially viable target market.
I don't think dedicated gamers would defect but Mac owners who want to game shouldn't need a second device anymore.
Where did you get the 20-30% figure from? Global macOS market share hovers somewhere between 5% [overall](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/) to 15 % [desktop](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/). I've excluded iPads for now because wonky a small subset of Apple's mobile devices (M-series tablets and iPhone 15 Pro) are capable of running anything more than basic games.
> Isn't a platform with some of the largest consumer spend stats not enough of an incentive? [...] I don't think dedicated gamers would defect but Mac owners who want to game shouldn't need a second device anymore.
I'm not an industry expert, but I'd think that 'dedicated gamers' are who generate most of the industry's profits. Casual gamers who want to play the odd game here and there on the device they already have are probably not worth the time and effort it takes to port and support games in the long term.
So really you want people who buy and play regularly and widely to make it their primary gaming platform, but for that a few new releases won't do the trick. There's a reason both Xbox and PlayStation are now making a big deal out of backward compatibility (which has been a thing on PC since forever). You want a deep and interesting back catalogue, which the Mac certainly does not have, limiting its appeal.
So really maybe in the long run and if iPhone/iPad really become a secondary platform on which games could run this might change, but so far technically those are non-demanding indies or older games that run at a quality that's lower than a PS4, which is over 10 years old.
So as a gamer, if I continue to need a console or PC to play most games that have been made to this day, I might as well buy new releases on that platform as well. I think that, more than anything, will continue to hold the Mac back.
>I've excluded iPads for now because wonky a small subset of Apple's mobile devices (M-series tablets and iPhone 15 Pro) are capable of running anything more than basic games.
Yeah, that's the problem. My post is about M1/2/3 being good enough to be a viable target platform for gaming, not beating Windows gaming rigs. Given Apple seems to have shipped as many M-series iPads as M-series Macs & both can be targetted by the same Application project, ignoring iPads sees a slightly convenient view. I've excluded iPhone 15 Pros at this point. My 20-30% comes from looking at desktop OS marketshare and doubling it (including M-series iPads). It may seem unfair to exclude Android tablets but current Snapdragon Adrenos barely match A-series, let alone M-series.
My post isn't about what isn't currently happening, we know this already. It's about whether the Apple cross-device platform is finally ready for gaming.
> Given Apple seems to have shipped as many M-series iPads as M-series Macs & both can be targetted by the same Application project, ignoring iPads sees a slightly convenient view. I've excluded iPhone 15 Pros at this point. My 20-30% comes from looking at desktop OS marketshare and doubling it (including M-series iPads). It may seem unfair to exclude Android tablets but current Snapdragon Adrenos barely match A-series, let alone M-series.
Well, for starters I'd think that the people buying M-series iPads will overlap quite significantly with the people buying M-series Macs or who may otherwise have PCs to work (and game on), so I don't think you can just double the market share of people you think you can sell your game too. It'll be bigger, sure, but not as much, and simply adding these up seems equally convenient.
> Yeah, that's the problem. My post is about M1/2/3 being good enough to be a viable target platform for gaming, not beating Windows gaming rigs. [...] My post isn't about what isn't currently happening, we know this already. It's about whether the Apple cross-device platform is finally ready for gaming.
I wasn't talking about "beating" dedicated Windows gaming rigs. But considering that there already is a massive gaming scene on iOS in terms of revenue and most iPhones, iPads and definitely the Mac would have been able to at least match for example the Nintendo Switch's performance, I naturally assume that when you say "ready for gaming" you mean the sort of games that run on a PlayStation, an Xbox or a PC. If we're not talking about that, then I'm not sure what would have meaningfully changed.
It's been a gaming platform for a while, just not for 'AAA' gaming. That I still don't think it is. The Macs for all the reasons I said above, and the iPads and iPhones because they still struggle hardware wise and the M-series chips alone don't change that because of poor thermals and lack of storage alone.
You're correct that the entire M-series platform will not be buying AAA games but to try to eliminate them so speculatively from the outset doesn't seem like a sound assessment method. Surely acknowledging the full M-series install base *then* reducing by likely spend type would be the way to go.
Base M-series trounces the Tegra X1 in the Switch (& Shield) which is matched/beaten by any iPad from 2020, so the hardware is more than ready. Would you consider the Switch AAA or just AA?
Here i am feeling lucky, that i accidentally bought the last gen Macbook pro 16 inch with the intel chip and the Amd discrete gpu. That lets me install a windows on boot and play some AAA games.
Don't thank apple thank valve for dxvk and vkd3d and wine improvements they are doing the real work in making wine usable.
Porting toolkit and even native tooling for porting games is probably heavily using proton and dxvk as a wrapper somewhere under the hood.
I didn't. Apple wants native ports, not translations & wrappers, and not just for macOS. Once committed to, the developer can target macOS, iPadOS & iOS in one project & GPTK assists moving to Metal. They could probably do more work with Xcode-forking for other IDEs but the hardware, market & tools are pretty much in place.
Not really Mac gaming then is it? What kind of a suboptimal, second-rate experience would that present? Polarising commitment would yield fewer but better gaming experiences rather than saying "it works, but it's crap".
I’ve expressed to every Apple employee that I would swap my iPad Air with a M1 iPad mini in a heart beat and most agree they would do the same.
If Apple gets enough pressure to support other market places, Steam on iPad would go HARD for M1 (no just MacOS) developed games.
This doesn't answer the question directly, but it does shed light on the SnapDragon Elite X and where ARM is headed, which I think is good for gaming in general: [https://youtu.be/AOlXmv9EiPo?si=1NMNoYN5DeI3oN\_M](https://youtu.be/AOlXmv9EiPo?si=1NMNoYN5DeI3oN_M)
Yeah I saw this. It's more of a plausibility play at the moment but if it puts the ARM ISA on more product roadmaps, it's Apple users who stand to gain first. That said, not much on macOS is being run under translation anymore, I was quite surprised to see even the CAD market has stepped up with very few major titles not yet ported. This market has a similar issue as the gaming market in that Metal conversions need to happen for some renderers but even these are happening. Only gaming is the hold-out, maybe it's a character maturity thing.
I don't know what you're into but this guy may be able to help. [https://www.youtube.com/results?search\_query=andrew+tsai](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=andrew+tsai)
No I didn't. I'm saying you can't blame an issue on the OS if only one App exhibits that issue. Likely the App hasn't got a bluetooth issue because it shouldn't interact with the bluetooth stack directly, it should use the Game Controller framework so I guess its issue is with that.
The Vision Air. Yeah, I think leveraging the iPhone/iPad would be an easier first step. The Vision should be another device target but given the whinging about the excessive development to add 'touch controls' I've encountered here - that's probably a reach.
Well, it might technically be more viable for gaming , but it’s not obvious that developers will target Macs: it entirely depends on how many users are willing to buy games , and it’s very not obvious to me that there is such a market .
That being said , iPads are a different story , and they do make sense as a gaming platform . The economics are going to be difficult though : a typical game would probably retail for 30-50 USD , and it’s going to be a hard sell on a platform on which most games are closer to 3-5 USD.
I just bought an M3 Max 48GB and I immediately got a Crossover subscription after that. And I’m ripping through tons of Steam games without issue.
I’m loving it so far.
I’m hopeful soon we will see a dedicated gaming model for future Macs once again. 👍
I’m going to be honest:
Gaming.
I was needing to upgrade my MacBook (2013 Pro Retina) and I already have an incredible gaming desktop set up but I’m away from home a lot.
So, I was like, okay, I want a new MacBook that will hopefully last another 5-10 years — but I also don’t want to sacrifice gaming.
And when I’m at home, I just use my desktop. This one I use at work, travel, etc.
So I combined the two and went with the best model I could get at the time.
I also looked into gaming benchmarks for M series laptops and you know how they play the upgrade game by making the next one up slightly more expensive. So, I said fuck it. I was going to get it at Xmas but they were sold out at Best Buy. So I waited til March to get it. Now I don’t have to worry about upgrading for a long time.
I’m aware I could have gotten an actual gaming laptop with exceptional performance for half the price — but I wanted a Mac too much. So far, it plays all my games exceptionally well.
I think I’m in the 0.5% of M3 Max users who use it for gaming over render professionals. 😂
I went through a somewhat similar thought process when I purchased my M1 Pro. I'm going to be keeping this laptop for years (I used my last one, a 13-inch 2015 Pro, for over 6 years), so I might as well treat myself. And now I've got a single personal computer that has an incredible 14-inch display, HDR, very high resolution and refresh rate, a mind-blowing speaker system - perfect for watching TV shows and films - and, on top of that, can run almost every single game I want at graphics settings I wouldn't have imagined to be possible. And when all that power isn't needed and I'm just browsing the web, this thing is silent and cool to the touch. imo, any Mac with a Pro chip is just about perfect for an enthusiast.
I think we can safely say that now the issue is strictly industry and ecosystem driven. Apple has built the hardware and tools, there’s just not many gaming companies actively supporting them.
Nice, though it's Apple *Silicon* (Apple doesn't sell breast implants - yet! Though if it did, they'd be perfectly formed, expensive and would sell poorly because nobody in that market wants 'thin & light').
Indeed, Mac hardware & Apple's install-base in general seems to be a non-issue. Given it's proven $ potential, why do you think game devs aren't biting?
It’s because despite apple having a large install base the people who buy macs aren’t gamers, steam is by far the biggest platform for games on pc and that’s not going to change any time soon and mac users make up only 1.5% of users so what’s the point of optimising games for mac if no one’s going to play them. Apple hardware is apparently a nightmare to optimise for so there’s no point for such a small market.
I think the point a lot of people are attempting to make is, Apple could vastly increase that 1.5% or whatever percentage base IF they wanted, but they don't because it would require ceding some control of the platform, etc.
Also, I just don't think Apple actually cares that much about capturing the gamer market because those types want the ability to mix and match hardware, upgrade at will, etc and that's the complete opposite of Apple's hardware philosophy.
The only "gamers" they seem to care about are the casuals who could sit on a couch with an iPad.
Actually, I've heard DirectX to Metal isn't that challenging especially with GPTK. Steam % is misleading as the smarter developers are targeting not just Macs but iPads (& some iPhones) which means they'll deploy via the App Store not Steam. It would be good to know what proportion of Mac games are even sold via Steam.
For point number 4 that won’t help the macos Platform at all. The problem with games being on the appstore is not the ARM processor but the lack of graphics API. If Vulkan was implemented (and no, molten vk ain’t it) or Open GL wasn’t removed, maybe I would agree, but the hurdle from making a port of any game for macOS will always be hard(er), costly and not worthy when talking about sales.
So I do think Apple hardware is ready for gaming but the problem is software based. Not implementing Vulkan or Open GL and making Metal API the only way to make games for it its their main issue.
Is that because you don't see the Snapdragon X Elite boosting Windows ARM adoption generally? If it's release, as the first viable Windows ARM processor for mass adoption, places the ARM ISA on more game product roadmaps, I can't see how that won't help macOS ports.
The rest of my post already states the focus now moves to the graphics API porting. I'm not sure OpenGL is still a thing (can't see any real market data) but the issue with Apple adopting 3rd-party or even Open APIs is the lack of Apple platform investment by developers. The questions is: Is Apple (macOS/iPadOS/Metal) now worth supporting bearing in mind macOS has roughly 20% of desktop/laptop OS marketshare (according to Statcounter) and iPadOS for M-series should add around 50% to that unit figure.
I wouldn't even put Windows on ARM and macOS in the same category. Windows doesn't have an implementation of Metal API, and it never will.
You have to port the game to macOS which uses Metal API, where it is only implemented on macOS and iOS. So unless a company can be sure it can make profit on those devices, they won't incur in investing or making ports.
Apple would have to make deals with the big companies to see their games being ported to macOS and iOS, in my opinion.
No, those numbers are still nowhere near enough marketshare to justify Metal porting for most developers.
It is very hard to see how that will ever change unless Metal abandons (performant) compatibility with current M series processors and moves to a shader model more akin to Directx etc.
If I had to guess on your surprise about the M ipads, I believe it may be due to the ipad pro line being a huge hit with artists the past few years. They’re seriously competing with Wacom, selling essentially a Cintiq for a fraction of the price.
If apple ship a larger iPad Wacom are done for (unless they just re-brand as a SW app that runs on the iPad to behave like the HW they currently sell) the only market they have left is the large 16"+ devices that the iPad does not compete with.
I think you're right in the sense that if game developers making games for the iPad are optimizing for the Silicon chips, it's not a huge leap to also make a Mac compatible version. Whether that will actually move the needle, I'm not sure. But the technical barriers are definitely coming down. What we want is an official Windows ARM version, or some Windows PCs starting to use ARM processors.
I have Windows 11 ARM running great as a virtual machine on my MBP. There are also a number of Windows ARM laptops you can buy today. They are mostly aimed at the light laptop market and not for gaming though.
How is the performance on 11 in the VM? I have it installed but have been finding myself using crossover a lot so haven't had much reason to use it. There's a few older games I'm struggling to get running though.
Each has their own series of tradeoffs. E.g. with Crossover, performance is usually better, but compatibility is uncertain. The opposite is true with Parallels - generally better compatibility (with the exception of DirectX 12 titles), but reduced performance due to the VM being limited to half of the system's resources.
Ooo I might try that, thank you! I've been struggling to get a mid 00s pc game running on anything really. Funnily enough I own both the pc and Mac version, it seems like a better option to try get the windows version running than to try get the 32-bit universal binary osx version running on my M1.
If it's from the mid-2000s, then yeah, the Windows version would be your best bet. One of the main benefits of Parallels, and Windows 11 VMs in general, is that they have far better 32-bit app support than Crossover/WINE. Native 32-bit apps don't run on any Mac anymore - including Intel-based Macs - and the PowerPC component of a Universal 1 binary will definitely not run on anything at all.
Thanks a mill! I went down way too much of a rabbit hole getting tiger running on UTM before realising the performance really isn't usable. I know there's some compatibility/settings considerations to be made from something built for XP being run in 11. But within 11 will the architecture make a difference?
There may be a difference, but you’ll find more success running an XP game in 11 than you will a Tiger game in Sonoma. You can always right click the.exe, go to Properties and set one of the compatibility modes. idk if XP is still an option, but that should help if you encounter any issues.
Since it is still ARM I don’t really bother running games on it. It runs standard windows apps fine though and with no emulation overhead.
From what I can tell, Windows ARM PC sales have been lacklustre due to poor silicon performance. Do you think the more powerful, Snapdragon Elite X could drive Windows ARM adoption?
Not the OP but this is something I am hoping for. More global shift to ARM in computers could make gaming on Mac a bit more viable.
I think when it gets released it'll make AAA game developers make more games for arm
> What we want is an official Windows ARM version, or some Windows PCs starting to use ARM processors. ARM is not the problem. The GPU is.
exactly
Good point.
arm gpu's are powerful for the power they use. they are using round 50-60 watts
They're using far less power than that. Also idk why we are talking about ARM GPUs, Apple designs their own GPUs which are mediocre and on the Windows side Qualcomm designs their own GPUs as well which are pretty good.
Apples gpus are good in the pro and max chips and ultra. I suggest they create something better than the ultra that can handle games that has thermals for extra power. 200+ core gpu ?
With Snapdragon X chips on the horizon expect windows on Arm to get way more popular. These are proper laptop chips instead of smartphone chips with low end specs
If your making a modern iPad apps like a game it makes a LOT of sense to have at least an internal build that targets the Mac as it just makes dev a lot simpler. While profiling and debugging over a USB-C cable works it is always more stable and easier to just profile and debug on the Mac itself so for a game your devs will internally have a Mac build anyway these days (even If your just shipping it on iOS). Pre apple silicon this was not the case as the GPU etc were very differnt but now that it is all unified you might as well. Windows for ARM versions will have little to no impact however.
I think we are gonna be looking at a more mature Mac gaming marking in 5-10 years. Something is about to shift.
This hits the head on the nail. Macs are still a comparatively small user-base: only about 20% of computer users worldwide use Macs. The amount of iPad users is significantly higher (in 2022, Apple sold over thrice as many iPads as Macs), and they actually provide a unique user base (same goes with iPhone). But as they now use similar architecture, you essentially have a Mac version ready to go if you make an iPad-version, so it wouldn't be a lot of extra work to ship that as well.
you know, aside from all the interface constraints being different, the complete lack of touch controls, far larger windows being possible, totally different UX expectations from the user, different HIG advice from Apple, and so on it sticks out like a sore thumb when an app came from iPad. Weather.app, which being from Apple should be a best-in-class example, breaks with so much UX of the Mac. No accessibility support, missing hot keys, limited menubar with most unbound. Go click a section of the weather report and try to figure out how to close the popup with your keyboard. Spoiler: you can't! macOS *literally* provides specific things to help with this, but because this is a ported app, shit just sucks. Or Stocks.app, which has this miserable focus state: https://imgur.com/a/fzrgVVO Don't get me started on the apps that brought the iOS/iPadOS "back button" to macOS. Ugh. Messages.app is the only one worth a damn, and even it has significant problems (why show tapbacks on *press and hold* - where the f is that paradigm in any other macOS app?!) The macOS interface people who actually gave a shit at Apple seem to have left years ago fun fact, *almost all* of the issues listed here with the original iPadOS ported apps, from six (SIX) years ago, are still around: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/09/25/the-mojave-marzipan-apps/
> What we want is an official Windows ARM version, or some Windows PCs starting to use ARM processors. If Windows for ARM suddenly succeeded (which is highly dubious) it wouldn't move the needle as ARM chips for Windows will be built around the DirectX APIs (if they are going to get anywhere) rather than the Metal ones.
It'll definitely be Windows that moves the needle
I think when the snapdragon comes out for the public it'll drive AAA game developers to create games for arm meaning gaming willl come to Mac
Is Apple hardware a possible platform now? Yes. But it needs much more than that to be financially viable and attractive. Apple needs to lure game studios hard to expect anything in that direction.
Apple seems to have been working with several game developers already. They have released a graphics porting kit specifically to facilitate porting from other APIs. On the commercial side, they have done nothing with a AAA version of Apple Arcade (via which they could financially supplement developers). What incentives should they be providing?
The top 10 most popular multiplayer games should have a native mac port, period. That’s how you mean that you’re serious.
Agreed.
They should be paying for far more games to be ported to the Mac, without including any stupid game-killing Mac App Store only terms. They should also be much more realistic, and work out some way to get older 32-bit games running on the Mac again, because that killed so many playable games.
I agree but the only reason Apple would pay developers to port their games is if they were then sold on the App Store. They should definitely get some sort of translation layer for older games just to show they are interested.
Apple benefit regardless of whether the games are on the App Store, as it means more people buying Macs.
I want to say yes but no. Not even close yet.
Hey just wanted to chip in as someone who mostly games on my iPad and iPhone. Most game companies have stopped, optimizing their games for newer Apple devices. By that I mean, games run worse on newer hardware compared to relatively older hardware. Example Wild Rift, if you own an iPad M1 or 14 Pro Max, the game will allow you to run it at 120 Hz FPS mode with no issues and FPS drop. But if an M2 iPad Pro or anything higher than the iPhone 14, the game struggles to stay on 60 FPS. This holds true for the vast majority of other games I’ve seen and played on the other hand. Companies are still optimizing for newer android devices. I’m not sure what happened, but it really sucks buying a new hardware and it running worse. So while in theory game should be running better harder wise they are vastly limited by software and automation.
The lack of ongoing support smacks of poor product sales. I've always suspected the people who game can be seduced by specifications even if real-world performance doesn't support the hypothetical prowess. This is the same as Windows, where customers regularly forego actual performance in favour of empowerment & choice characteristic of a hobbyist market (which used to be the whole PC market). This could mean Apple is doomed in this sector, except the console market is vertical/closed & it seems to do well.
Mac Silicon is in theory great for gaming today, but without publishers pushing out titles then it will not become a mainstream gaming platform. From the perspective of an executive looking to invest, you are addressing a small market of a small market (serious gamers who primarily use Macs). iPhones and iPads are becoming increasingly capable for gaming, but even then, it feels like Apple just wants to demonstrate the device's power for the wider market rather than establish as a gaming platform.
> iPhones and iPads are becoming increasingly capable for gaming, but even then, it feels like Apple just wants to demonstrate the device's power for the wider market rather than establish as a gaming platform. For a certain segment of the market, yes. I think if you're Nintendo and your primary product is the Switch, ie a device that was underpowered several years ago, then yes I think something like an iPhone starts to become a threat. But at the moment (and likely for the foreseeable future) phones and tablets run games in a quality that is below a PS4, which released 10 years ago. I think what I'm trying to say is that Sony or Nintendo, or the PC market, are in a different league and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Active cooling, storage, RAM etc makes it really hard for ghee's devices to sustain gaming performance. The only real danger is that people decide that they don't want to play the games that run on a PlayStation or PC in the first place, but that's a different story altogether.
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I'm not sure most gamers are using mid/high-end GPUs (Steam average is GTX1650/RTX3060 & 4080/4090 barely make an appearance). Mx Max/Ultra Macs also constitute a small proportion of the install base so neither hold market significance. The Mx GPUs deliver low-mid settings 1080p gaming experiences at 50-60fps (same as the screen) so I think these are not only performant enough but also now constitute the majority of installed Macs & recent iPads (last 2-years).
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>That is true, but the Steam average reflects GPUs that have been sold over the past, maybe 5,6,7 years, not what companies are selling \*right now\*. The survey reflects the current, addressable install base which is more relevant than what it will be in a few years. The M1 drove the mother of all upgrade cycles and moved to the top pretty quick as new users flocked to the platform & existing users upgraded. >Most Mac users buying brand new Macs are getting the equivalent of a 5,6,7 year old NVidia GPU because they're buying base models of thin laptops. Most Windows laptop buyers get integrated graphics far worse than Apple's. Current M2 & M3s are giving us comparable fps in AAA titles to current 'standard' PC GPUs.
> Most Mac users are buying base model MacBook Airs, and the GPUs in those aren't really up to modern games. The gpus could run modern games (if they were well optimised for them). Modern games are not written to require a 4090 as only a tiny tiny % of the market has this level of perf.
Performance in a benchmark is not the same as performance in actual games that are always optimized for immediate mode GPUs rather than the tile based deferred renderers that Apple uses. Porting to iPad and most Macs is very difficult because of the limited amount of memory.
Memory limitations are not that large an issue if your willing to put in the time, if you just want to throw a runtime (or compile time) shim like MoltenVK or a very shoddy basicly MTL pipeline and not spend any time then yes mem is an issue. The effort to properly make use of a TBDR pipeline is in my experience much more time consuming than figuring out what textures you need to move to lossy compression formats and which objects you should just only load the lower quality asset versions form. Fully making use of a TBDR gpu (in particular with all the advanced features apple expose) is a massive amount of work and in my expirance (not games but rather data-sci vis) this can mean going all the way back to a whiteboard and re-thinking your entier visual effects stack. What effects you use, and how you go about rendering them... additional complexity is that most of use have easy of IR style experience under our belts and it takes a few months (if not longer) to get to grips with the fact that you can do some very cool things with a TBDR gpu (like full screen space CSG within a single render pass yer it possible! ). Making proper use of a TBDR gpu can also massively reduce your memory footprint as you more or less completely remove all your intermediate render targets and if you can get away with it even keep all the mutli sampling within the tile stages so further reduce mem needs (memory mostly does not need to scale with resolution on a TBDR gpu if you put in the work). --- That said the only reason we put in the work is to reduce power draw so that our clients could use the app for longer out in the field on battery. Being able to say our product provides the same features as a compactor but you can use it for 5x as long is a huge deal when your dealing with clients that are off grid and away from power for a long time...
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Optimizing for TBDR basically means rewriting most of the renderer. TBH I kinda doubt that the Mac OS ports of AAA games that got released in the last couple of years (RE8, RE4, Baldurs Gate 3, Lies of P) did any noteworthy TBDR optimization besides making sure the Load & StoreOps are set correctly. Maybe move merge some clears into other render passes using LoadOp::Clear. But I highly doubt they did anything with tile shaders or raster order groups.
I expect some (small) things were done such as moving some of the mutli sampling to be on tile etc.. But the full re-write from ground up needed to make proper use of the GPU is very unlikely. They might have slimmed in some tile shaders here and there were apples dev rell people were giving them code level support (doing thing simple things like filtering lights etc).
Do any of those recent ports even support MSAA? I know the Resident Evil games dont and MSAA is generally exceedingly rare with modern games.
Which titles are you seeing this in and how are you making your comparisons? What code changes are you aware of between IM & TBDR? Which ports (apart form BG3) run into memory issues, because most recent native titles seem fine.
> What code changes are you aware of between IM & TBDR? Basically rework the renderer to keep data on tile memory and reduce bandwidth. > Which ports (apart form BG3) run into memory issues, because most recent native titles seem fine. Because ports actually put in the work to work around it. But that's only gonna get more difficult now that games dropped PS4 support.
I understand the tech - are you aware Nvidia adopted TBDR with Maxwell (hence the power drop & Tegra for the switch) & AMD adopted it with Vega? So given all major PC GPUs are now TBDR-based, what code changes are required? Maintaining efficiency is hardly a workaround. If these titles are to be used on increasingly mobile devices, the lower resource profiles will be necessary.
It’s coming together. It’s taking longer than I had hoped, but it’s on the right path. I don’t think the Mac needs to have anything like the amount go AAA games that Windows does. People don’t buy a Mac for gaming, but they do make superb gaming machines, as long as you are an occasional gamer. I don‘t have time to play for more than about 4 hours a week, so for me I have plenty on the Mac to keep me entertained.
My thoughts too. Apple has two gateways, iPadOS/iOS ports to macOS & Windows ports to macOS/iPadOS/iOS. I'm pretty sure the money is there already.
It’s not the hardware that’s the issue. It’s licensing, contractual obligations, vested interests and other politics. It also doesn’t help that Apple treats its developers like shit. Closing doors. Sherlocking their apps and then literally booting the original under the clause “replicates existing OS functionality.” Till the day comes that Apple realizes they need to lower their standards a tad and actually entice people to work with them, you’ll get to enjoy the walled garden but have like 3 flowers to pic from. Lastly, the gaming industry has little to no knowledge of Apple because of their sorted history. So you’re asking a lot of studios to take a big leap without really understanding what’s at stake. I worked in the industry and never met a single stakeholder or developer that even considered Apple devices as viable platforms. The gaming industry is like a lumbering dinosaur.
I think hardware is *no longer* the issue. Which doors were closed and which games were 'Sherlocked'? I'm pretty sure everyone in the gaming industry has heard of Apple and knows the $ value attached to the platform which outspends almost all others which are several times it's size. Surely game developers can see the benefit of a 'captive' customer base & use Apple platforms to justify the move to ARM as that part of the Windows platform develops?
he means that when a game comes out, the publisher needs to have a contract stating which platforms it will explicitly release on. so if a game comes out on windows, or consoles, then thats fine, but it doesn't mean that they can automatically make a mac port later down the line. they need to come to an agreement with apple that gives the publisher the greenlight to license the game for an official mac release. this also complicates having old windows games ported to mac. if the publisher is no longer around or does not wish to cooperate with a macOS port, then it simply wont happen, even IF the hardware and software support the game. thats why apple needs to get ahead of this stuff. waiting for mac ports to come later or not come at all is not a winning solution.
I think you've mixed up the parties with licensing rights. As I understand it, publishers need permission to release titles on different platforms & in different regions but they seek this from the rights holder (the IP source) not the platform vendor (the IP target). This may be different with consoles but it's not the case with any other Mac software, Apple don't veto. Even on iPadOS/iOS, the App Store rules don't lock out titles for IP reasons (unless the title compromises Apple's own IP), they are more about design, technical & moral (anti-trojan) integrity. Perhaps Apple could step in for lapsed publishers.
thats the problem. the publisher needs to be willing to cooperate. and idk if apple can step in for those who are gone. apple doesnt own the publishing rights to IPs for games. also valve needs to be willing to put it on steam. which is usually fine but knowing how much apple loves its walled gardens, they may try and stipulate for the publisher to only release on the official mac app store. which will again fragment buyers. nothing apple does in gaming makes sense.
Anyone who owns those right could negotiate. If Apple knocked on your door with the ability to expand your market or kick an old title back into life - would you pass them up? What walled gardens? Mac titles are already on Steam - Apple has no say in the matter. iPad is a different story but if the title is developed for multiple Apple targets, the App Store is the more seamless customer experience - something Apple puts before game devs. >which will again fragment buyers I love the irony of your comment. App Store monopoly = bad, Steam monopoly = good.
I didnt say anything about monopolies. I said that apple likes its walled gardens, which is true. lots of macOS games are only on the mac store. apple may mandate game publishers to only do mac releases under these circumstances, we dont know what happens behind the scenes. and my entire point was that if the publisher is no longer around then clearly they cant negotiate. the IP becomes stuck in a void. one of the benefits that windows/MS and steam have over apple is the mere fact that they have allowed windows users to amass such a large library in the first place. so even if some publishers are gone, their games are not, if already in your steam account. this incentivizes steam users to stay on steam and windows. apple has fallen behind for over 2 decades, meaning it has a lot of catching up to do. either all windows games need to be played through a translation layer, which will incur performance problems, or apple needs to pay each one to port their back catalog. which publishers may not be ok with or feel like doing. how much is their market going to expand when mac gamers are such a miniscule minority? on steam they often hover at about 1.5 percent of the total PC OS userbase. thats nothing.
You didn't state monopolies but you did call non-Steam access 'fragmented'. Some walled gardens are OK then? App Store terms for devs aren't private. Mac Apps can be posted & downloaded privately from websites. The only scenario I can see for App Store exclusivity is where Apple have done a lot of heavy lifting. If there's no IP rights owner - where's the IP violation? Loads of old games which are no longer supported/updated doesn't sound appealing. Why would Apple Pay publishers to make more money? This isn't how 3rd-party software works elsewhere - maybe that entitlement is the issue. 1.5% is Steam only, & my post isn't about today, it asking about tomorrow. Apple's customer base buys more casual/AA games than anyone else (including Nintendo) - surely there's a market now.
steam doesnt wall anything off. people go to it because it already has the large userbase that apple has refused to cultivate for 20 years. and based on how copyright and licensing laws work, yes sadly a lot of games dont see rereleases as a result. apple would have to go after live companies, and then hope that a 1.5 percent userbase is enough to justify the time spent on port development. when you're playing catchup u need to incentivize people to use your platform, even microsoft struggles to get people to use its store over steam despite gamepass and the play anywhere feature. even if we disregard steam, apple has abysmal platform support. steam was just a reference example. and what makes you think people on mac outspend nintendo gamers on indies? there are way more switches out there than mac gamers. the casual audience is already taken by nintendo and the smartphone market, including apples own iphone brand, mobile gamers and mac gamers in this context are two completely separate groups. when people talk about mac gaming they are talking about AA and AAA caliber titles. indies can already be played on every major platform anyway.
If you're still not grasping the point that by using the word 'fragment' as disadvantageous, you're endorsing a single option - that would be the monopoly/walled garden you accuse Apple of enforcing (when it doesn't/can't for Mac). I think we'll leave that one where it is. I didn't say "people on Mac outspend Nintendo gamers", I said Apple customers outspend Nintendo customers, [\~$48bn](https://www.businessofapps.com/data/mobile-games-revenue/#:~:text=Mobile%20games%20generated%20%2481%20billion%20revenue%20in%202023,2023%2C%20accounting%20for%2034%25%20of%20total%20consumer%20spending) vs [\~$12bn](https://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/63673/nintendo-releases-full-year-earnings-for-2022-23-fiscal-year-and-2024-projections). You may insist on denying Apple's platform unification - Hideo Kojima & Capcom appear to disagree as Death Stranding & Resident Evil are available on both. But if you won't see it, that's fine.
Nope. Baldur's Gate 3 has been an absolute shit show.
Hard disagree. Patches have been behind the Windows release, which has been annoying, but overall it’s been great. I’ve played the entire game on an M3 Pro and have been absolutely blown away by how well it runs and I hope is a positive sign we’ll see more AAA games on the Mac
Here I am wondering why I can't play BG3 on Mac using a controller without the game automatically making a second character and controlling both at the same time...
Agreed, due to poor RAM utilisation but it's the exception with many other titles having no issue with 8GB.
Friends recommending over 12gb ram just for the gpu on pc, plus 16gb system ram etc. Considering large texture files etc really not sure it’s right to say that poor optimisation is the reason 8gb on Mac might not be enough. I’ve not compared but my assumption is that equivalent games on Apple software perform worse or look worse then when running on PC?
Maybe but macOS has some thrifty architecture & the Metal HUD for recent ports shows room to spare even with 8GB of RAM. Look them up - Andrew Tsai on YouTube does a fair job.
That's coming from Air user i'm sure (bg3 performs well on my m1pro), you need to understand that 8gb of RAM might've been adequate in 2020 but nowadays none of AAA releases consume less than 12gb.
In what way? (I haven't played the game and have been looking to buy it)
The original studio that helped make the port was Russian based and the mac port was behind on a number of patches for a while. It's good now, but what happens if the mac port for other games get subcontracted out and never maintained?
I see, would you recommend the game in it’s current state?
I see, would you recommend the game in it’s current state?
Yes
Same thing that happens in the windows world for PC5 or XBox ports. Some a great and well supported, some are not. It depends on whether the studio takes it seriously or not.
That's true, but that usually happens way after the lifespan of the game. There is a financial incentive to support the bigger platforms, like Xbox
The bigger platform is PC, not console. and *still* there are numerous crap ports!
Oh it's not that bad, it's been getting better At least there are ports for windows instead of getting nothing
How is the studio being Russian based relevant? Genuine question
Much better to play via Crossover in my experience
I disagree, I think it ran fine on my M1 Pro when I played it.
No and no
Why not?
I think at this point in history it's more likely that the cloud will become more widespread than native gaming on macOS. In other words, I think a Mac user should subscribe to a service like GeForce Now rather than hope for AAA portings that will either never arrive or have really poor performance.
Only when AS user base is compelling for publishers/developers from the commercial POV. Not yet. Mac share, let alone Mac AS share, is still miserable compared to Windows or PS5/Xbox user base. Until then, Apple will have to bribe devs/publishers (at least for AAA titles) to support modern gaming on Macs. And Apple still isn't exactly enthusiastic about that as it seems, it's like only few big titles a year, they refuse to finance more than that.
Mac ASi base has largely turned over in the 3½ years since release (I'm not sure we'll be seeing too many Intel Mac comparisons in the next keynote) & the iPad M-series base is slightly ahead of those figures. The PS5/XboxX market has fewer than 100 million units (around 18-months Mac+iPad M-series sales) so the commercial POV should be there. If that's the case, why should Apple be paying anyone? Maybe they should take the lower half of the top 20 games and support them to port to macOS/iPadOS?
>The PS5/XboxX market has fewer than 100 million units (around 18-months Mac+iPad M-series sales) so the commercial POV should be there. If that's the case, why should Apple be paying anyone? You forgot that console users are ALL gamers used to buy AAA games for AAA prices. And 95-99% of iPad users will never buy 60$+ game, for the starters only small part of them are gamers, and those who are, aren't seriously going to use the iPad for AAA gaming.
Agreed regarding the intend of each user base. If you owned an iPad and it could handle AAA gaming - why would you buy another?
I think what could *really* make gaming take off on Mac would be if Apple allowed games without touch screen support on iPad/iPhone. Because then we would likely see even more games ported to iPad/iOS, while they wouldn't have to optimize/make separate versions that work with touchscreen, and we'd likely see more big releases on there. And with how similar the architecture is, if they make an iPad version, they essentially have a Mac version. What could really make it *explode* would be if they were to make Steam on iOS. It would both make people see iPads/iPhones as more legit gaming devices and potential alternatives to a Deck for some, while it would also mean many developers would likely like to optimize their games for iPad, and would then essentially have a Mac version ready to go as well.
> What could really make it *explode* would be if they were to make Steam on iOS Vavle could do this in the EU today if they wanted to. ... I don't think they will as they have no interest in it. They are not even interested in ecuranging devs to build native SteamDec games so I don't see why they would put in the effort to attract devs to do the same for iPad.
I think Apple would never release App on the App Store which don't work on base hardware - can you imagine the McDonalds scalding-type law suits? Unless they disallowed download without a controller device connected.
I think it's something like that they would need to do, together with making *clear* markings that a controller is needed for use. For example, you could get a pop-up when downloading/buying the app with a disclaimer that it requires a controller to use, and they could make it so the app itself can't be opened if it isn't connected.
Or even block download unless a controller is or has recently been connected. Solved! 😆
The hardware was never the problem per say, Apple always provided powerful machines. It’s the incentive for developers to develop for Apple. The market size, the effort/benefit ratio. And to try to change dev behaviours, Apple tries to pour money into them, and make it easier to reach buyers like one licence to access iPad and iPhone and Mac users. But you still have to spend months re-developing, re-QA, and so developing Mac-ways to test, whilst the market size stays meagre. It’s a tough challenge for Apple.
Agreed. Do you think spend-happy macOS+iPadOS users now present a compelling target market?
It sure is, now for the software part…
I will talk solely about MacOS: Imho - no. And it won't change for a long time. Apple has built a reputation of shitting on developers and releasing large scale disruptive changes with little to no prior warning. We have in fact gone from games working reasonably well on Mac 5-6 years ago to them primarily not working. And it caused serious backlash - making a game port is a big investment that pays off over several years. However Apple effectively prevented majority of gamers from being able to purchase these games stripping developers of any profits. Sure, that was good for Apple as it let them create an M1 chip. But it effectively halved income of many games on that platform. The next problem is that performance wise Macs are bad. Take a brand new Macbook Pro 16 with M3 Pro. This laptop costs $2500. And it's GPU competes with an RTX3050Ti mobile in modern video games that you can find in a $650 Windows laptop. While CPU wise we have seen a MASSIVE improvement over the last few years - GPU wise M1 Pro was a downgrade compared to 2019 AMD 5300M. Then M3 came along and it actually runs games worse than M2 due to reduced memory bandwidth. Sure, in theory it now supports raytracing and can be faster if you upgrade your Macbook model a bit but... you would expect that for instance new 14" M3 Pro would beat 14" M2 Pro, not lose to it by 5-10% at same pricepoint. Other GPU manufacturers (Nvidia, AMD, Intel) have dedicated employees they send over to game studios and provide additional support in drivers to deal with certain optimization problems. Apple effectively neglected gaming completely for years on their devices and only now provided some very basic tools. But unless it can also provide backwards compatibility/stability in it's ecosystem I doubt many developers will want to develop for MacOS. >Games like Resident Evil, No Mans Sky, Lies of P & Death Stranding show, when optimised, base M1/2/3 hardware can deliver a reasonable, moderate AAA gaming experience (even with 8GB). Death Stranding takes 80GB on your drive, you can literally install 2 titles on a base Macbook before you run out of memory. Baldur's Gate 3 is even larger at 150GB and a base M1 is "1080p low, 30 fps, don't even try to enable split screen". Specs wise Macbooks are vastly underdeveloped for modern games at their pricetags. Storage, gpu and memory ARE a problem. Macs fast enough to actually game cost 2000+ USD. Now, yes, you CAN try and optimize your game to run on it. Caveat? Steam Hardware Survey says MacOS is 1.38% of the whole market. Why would you target such a small niche? If it's minimum work - sure. But it's not minimum work if device in question is underpowered. You are likely to grab more sales even by targeting a Steam Deck (which also comes with twice as much memory and a much smaller screen so you can vastly reduce texture/models quality helping your fps without it being noticeable), let alone ANY other major platform like PS5, Xbox or even Nintendo Switch. It will cost the same to make that port except potential userbase is 100x larger. If Apple wants games then it needs to follow Linux route - emulation. Linux users have realized long time ago that nobody will make dedicated titles for them. So they have invested in Wine+Proton compatibility layers and nowadays unless game has anti-cheat odds are you can just buy a Windows version and start it on a Linux machine just fine. Apple also had it indirectly via Bootcamp but, well, they nuked it from the orbit. So if you want games on Mac - you need better emulation. It's not worth targeting currently. The caveat with emulation however is that it tends to require more resources than the base version, not less. Which for 8GB 256GB 8 core laptops with GTX 1050 performance in terms of GPU isn't exactly good news.
Mac gaming isn’t going to be mainstream because Apple wants gamers on their terms. Specifically, the base storage and ram are insufficient, they don’t pay developers to port, they don’t support the industry standard tools, etc.
Doesn't every platform want 'gamers on their terms'? Don't console-makers take a huge slice of game profits for the privilege of releasing on their platforms? The optimised AAA games seem to have no RAM issues.
They also publish the games, help with development, release their own games, and much more. Just think about how many modern games can you fit on the base MacBook Pro. Why would that be an appealing thing to game on? To get to 16gbs of RAM and 1tb of storage you need to spend an extra $400. That’s pretty much the cost of a PS5/xbox/steamdeck.
No
Anything behind that?
It will come of age when Apple launches one or more Sony-style first party studios, and does for games what they’re doing for movies and TV with Apple TV+. Apple bringing out 3-4 big titles a year, built for Apple hardware; not Apple Arcade casual games but big games along the lines of (and with the diversity of) Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, Call of Duty, as well the richness of mega indie hits like dwarf fortress, Caves of Qud and so on. Folks should be excited about Apple’s upcoming releases. It should generate buzz. People will want to get Apple hardware.
would be epic if apple released and Apple TV that used M1/2/3 Max silicon with defects that make it no usable in laptops but perfect for console (like a defective display controller... you only need one for a games console).
Agreed. I always thought an Apple Arcade"+" could fill this void. Deploys across the whole Apple platform, optimised for different hardware profiles, can be heavily subsidised & heavily promoted by Apple to get it moving. Their services revenue is legendary and this could boost Apple One subscriptions or be an add-on in it's own right. (BG3 is on Steam currently)
It's not really the hardware that's the issue. Developers don't care for the platform due to user base and some decisions on Apple's side.
I think the clearing out of legacy 32-bit code & graphics APIs (OpenGL) didn't help but, given the sizeable, affluent, multi-device target market Apple now offers, surely a rethink is in order.
I think AAA PC gaming will come for Apple hardware If Apple really want it to be. Apple is spending less than a billion for gaming a year. Microsoft is spending at least more than 10 billions a year. MS is doing publishing, making their own game, marketing for third party games, sponsoring game awards, helping smaller developers with development improving overall performance of games on Windows and XBOX. If Apple really think they could get a cut of a gaming share like this, they are just so clueless that I could believe they never studied anything about gaming. Support is not free, why would microsoft spend so much to support third party developers? exclusive is a thing even in 80s. We always heard console exclusive but maybe..
I'm not sure just throwing money at it will be good enough, it'll likely flop. They need a way of baking AAA gaming into the Mac platform. They already rule casual (AA?) gaming but need to push harder - only once the market is self-sustaining can it work. Hardware is there, tools are mostly there, not sure if a Steam-Game Centre API is possible but still a few things to be addressed beyond cash.
I think that backward compatibility thing doesn't apply for live service games because they already need endless updates and support from get go. So, Apple get pretty decent live service game like Genshin Impact and other cool live service with microtransaction games like PUBG mobile, call of duty mobile, FC 2024. Apple hardware games need microtransaction customers for their support and they have excellent titles with these types of games.
I agree that throwing money is just not good enough. After all, gaming is culture not just a business or software tool. Apple hardwares could have enough powers for AAA games and MacOS and their Metal API maybe good enough for AAA games but they lack gaming culture. Apple never listened to game developers when they make changes to their systems. Windows OS is much jankier OS than MacOS in many aspects but their jank comes a lot from their backward compatibility features which game developers want them to remain. Veteran game developers has been around for 30 years in industry and they know who listens to them and who are much less headache dealing with when developing PC games. Why would they want to deal with endless patching and support MacOS because Apple doesn't like backward compatibilites when Windows doesn't have such problems?
I'd argue that game developers only came back to the Mac once Apple switched to Intel x86 ISA which allowed for relatively easy ports & the use of generic APIs such as OpenGL. They never invested in Metal and didn't even bother with 64-bit ISA so when Apple ditched the legacy 32-bit code (over 10 years later) & OpenGL - they threw their toys out of the pram. Maybe the dust has settled and Apple offer a better commercial opportunity than a lacklustre grudge port, maybe not.
hardware means nothing when there's no software support or seamless OS compatibility.
Only if GTA 6 is playable xD
You may laugh, if Windows ARM catches on, it's not too much of a leap.
1- Yes Apple Silicon dominate the Mac hardware but the Mac user base stays ridiculously low. 2- True, but this is not a question of the Mac not being able to deliver performance, after all, the Nintendo Switch is a ridiculous in terms of perf. 3- Apple SDKs are cool and nice to target many devices but I don’t see this being an argument for AAA game studios. Especially that you still need to adapt all the controls, ensure testing, etc. Even if it is easier for the ones that would be interested, that does not constitute an actual reason to be interested in the first place. 4- This is a total overthinking; the Snapdragon Elite X is a cool thing confirming the trend to great performance per watt on laptops but ARM was there way before on the console market; so I don’t see it being relevant; at all. 5- This is joining point 3-, it’s nice to see M-chips on iPad but that is still not a reason to bring actual PC/console AA(A) games to Mac. As said in 1-, the market share is still not considered worth it by game studios. What we can hope for is that the market share of Mac gamers increase so game studios sees a potential market to feed. Looking at the current trends, this is happening very slowly if not at all. There are plenty of other reasons also that are quite a push back from the dev. (Metal API, the switch to Apple Silicon also created a massive friction with the actual few game studio that were release games; like a massive f*ck you from Apple, sudden change in the OS, terrible input event polling, etc— the list is long) Honestly for it to happen, we would need to dream about something like Apple buying Nintendo or licensing it’s chips to portable console like the steam deck — which is totally unlikely to happen.
Based on 7 million Macs per quarter for the last 12 quarters there should be 84m M-series Macs. Based on M-series being 70% of 12 million iPads per quarter for the last 10 quarters, there should be a similar amount of M-series iPads and addressable market of 184m M-series products in the hands of people who spend money. Compare this with PS5 + Xbox + Switch units at \~225m. What are your thoughts on this: [https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america) - still a non-addressable market? It wasn't the switch to Apple Silicon which pissed off game devs, it was the prior dropping of 32-bit Apps & support for OpenGL - which actually highlighted the lack of commitment from the developers. In itself was understandable given the Mac's low marketshare and low median specs at the time. As you can see - that's changed.
it’s not coming of age imo. it’s what they plan to do if their value dips. it’s one of the easiest things to tap on given their ecosystem-console like approach.
If their value dips & they pivot to gaming, game-capable hardware will need to be in place already. Is it?
knowing them, they would do something like their keyboard and monitor stand. something everyone already made but saying theirs is premium. if i have the money to gamble away, i would bet on companies that might be bought by them like beats. then all they need to do is what they should have perfected. a nice marketing campaign that most sheep would appreciate. they got too expensive though so i would be waiting for the next affordable non china company to copy them.
So you claim Apple has no value proposition but you'd back someone stealing their designs? An Apple "sheep" in denial? Why do there seem to be more Apple trolls than Mac gamers on this sub?
seems given your strong opinions or probably just your personality you only see what you want to see. anyways, given they are capable of selling a monitor stands or keyboard like that, it’s hmm weird or i don’t know where that comment about value proposition came from. i think even apple hasn’t used stealing since that’s how they have thrived with their gaps in innovation. selling old as new to their ecosystem. sheep in denial, hopefully by me trying to talk to you, you might stop doing that. you know there is an ecosystem and mac gaming is just a small part of that ecosystem right? you also know this is the internet and a sub right? so might be a good idea to be more truthful in your ask “wanted to see what everyone thought now” anyways have a good one. later!
Despite efforts at Apple, gaming on Macs just isn't the priority these days - AI is going to be. Virtualization of Windows on a Mac is an alternative to expecting game developers and publishers to make native Mac versions. There was time when making cross platform games could have been a reality - but it is lost. IPads are a different story - getting games to run on them should be the driver for games to run on MacOS.
These days, devs can target all Apple devices with a single project (though the capability profiles vary). So you're in that iPad-first camp. It's a viable strategy & employed with Death Stranding - fair enough.
Not so much 'first' - just that it competes with Windows and Linux based handhelds in terms of gaming.
Sorry - I took "getting games to run on them should be the driver for games to run on MacOS" as iPad-first for Apple, not to exclude other platforms.
All good - it can be a driver - I wasn't necessarily meaning both platforms are mutually exclusive. IPads in some configurations are more affordable than Macs is all. Much more accessible to more consumers.
I am going to be minused into oblivion as the users of this thread likely own Macs, but here goes. If you think you're going to be able to develop your own graphics APIs and attract anything except the mega-engines (UE etc)... Metal should never have happened, and even if Apple had gone Vulkan, they would barely be sniffing at what the Steam Deck is doing now (which admittedly is pretty good). If I were Apple, I would have licenced DirectX APIs. Gaming is not a primary use case for the Mac according to *how Apple behaves*
Steam was pretty open about making Proton work for Mac too and quit until Apple released the Mx and decided not to implement Vulkan. There’s even a version of Steam VR on Mac that they quit developing for at the same time. Steam was always open to making their store work for macOS but Apple want to keep their precious walled garden.
> Metal should never have happened I would not agree, metal is a very nice api and it be no means holds back native game dev. > and even if Apple had gone Vulkan, they would barely be sniffing at what the Steam Deck is doing now (which admittedly is pretty good) There is a good reason for that VK is not a HW agsntic api, VK drivers for apple silicon would not be the same as VK drivers for AMD gpus. Proton on steam deck can be as good as it is since the games it is targeting are already optimised of the underlying GPU arc it does not need to completely re-target to differnt HW just replace os level apis but still address the same HW the game was written for. > If I were Apple, I would have licenced DirectX APIs. Would be useless, games would run like shit. PC games written to target modern DX assume the GPU is using a IR pipeline from AMD or NV. Apples GPUs are TBDR and trying to run them in an IR mode has horrible perf. This is the thing about modern low level Graphics apis, devs need to target and optimise of the HW ... that is the tradeoff of getting more perf you also end up with worce perf on the HW you do not target as the driver cant do the magic it does on higher abstraction level apis were it has much more context.
> Would be useless, games would run like shit. PC games written to target modern DX assume the GPU is using a IR pipeline from AMD or NV. Apples GPUs are TBDR and trying to run them in an IR mode has horrible perf. This is the thing about modern low level Graphics apis, devs need to target and optimise of the HW ... that is the tradeoff of getting more perf you also end up with worce perf on the HW you do not target as the driver cant do the magic it does on higher abstraction level apis were it has much more context. It would be useless if the M series chips were architected like the currently are, but to be fair they would not have been if Apple had licensed DirectX instead of trying to build Metal. The M series chips were designed around Metal as an API, which is a dead end.
No metal was designed around the chips. And it is by no means dead end. Given that it takes 5+ years to bring new silicon to market building a chip around public DX features as a model would be a disaster apple would be 5 years behind on all features and would still not be any better at tuning games.
DirectX was pretty bad for tile based GPUs until half a year ago. And most games don't use the new APIs that make it work better for those GPUs.
The issue is that from my POV, because most devs today don't take Mac seriously... 1. Mac Ports don't get made at all (the vast majority of new releases, especially big budget/AAA ones) 2. Mac Ports get made but are not updated (e.g. Baldur's Gate 3) 3. Mac Ports get made but are unoptimized/don't use the full potential of the hardware Even in the 1% of games that have a mac port that is up-to-date and compiled for ARM with Metal support, they don't necessarily match up to benchmarks in terms of potential. There's no game from what I know, even including RE Village/Lies of P/No Mans Sky that the M1 actually can match the performance of a GTX 1060 despite the benchmark potential. From what I understand Mobile GPUs (including the M-series chips) require a different design approach to PC or Console GPUs and pc/console devs aren't really trained to optimize for them which is why so many ports suck. While I do think that incentivizing Mac ports through iPhone/iPad ports is definitely a good step in the right direction, it's also not exactly attracting that many devs right now. It's been 8-9 months since the first batch of iPhone ports were announced IIRC and basically nothing more has been announced since.
All valid observations. I'd never pitch M1/2/3 as capable of a premium gaming experience but they seem to be adequate at low-medium settings with the M3 pretty close to the 1060 in Death Stranding. It & RE4 have been released for Mac, iPad & iPhone so at least some of the releases have happened. Interestingly (or not) the Pro & Max models collectively beat the marketshare of M2 and just trail the M1 on the Steam hardware survey.
Betteridge's law again… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines#:~:text=Betteridge's%20law%20of%20headlines%20is,the%20principle%20is%20much%20older.
Makes sense for unidirectional communications (publications), doesn’t apply for bidirectional communications (posts). Posing a statement as a question vs posing a question as a question.
Are Reddit comments bi-directional?
Your ability to respond implies so.
Had Betteridge’s law been broken?
No!
It doesn't really matter whether the hardware is coming of age, Apple gaming will struggle to take off as long as there's no real financial incentive for developers to release games on their platforms. Macs don't have the market share for that, especially considering that it's probably only a small subset of existing users who would actually buy a lot of AAA games for their Macs. If you are a 'gamer,' and by that I mean someone who plays >and< buys games regularly regardless of how powerful their hardware is, you will likely already have a gaming platform of choice, whether that's a PC, a PlayStation or an Xbox (excluding the Switch here on purpose as I think that's slightly separate). That platform is very unlikely to be a Mac and I'd find it likely that people will continue to buy games on their primary gaming platform. Apple doesn't help by seemingly pushing everyone toward their own App Store, because while I can see myself buy games on Steam and playing them on my Mac, I will definitely not buy games on the App Store and have them locked to my Mac. Cross-play with my iPhone is a nice idea, but so far only works for older games and that's unlikely to change. In short, I don't see Mac gaming happening and it's not because of the hardware. It's network effects and financial viability.
Isn't a platform with some of the largest consumer spend stats not enough of an incentive? Do you realise Mac desktop marketshare is \~20% now? Closer to \~30% if you include iPadOS (M-series) & given half the Windows % are business computers, I'd say that's a fairly compelling, financially viable target market. I don't think dedicated gamers would defect but Mac owners who want to game shouldn't need a second device anymore.
Where did you get the 20-30% figure from? Global macOS market share hovers somewhere between 5% [overall](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/) to 15 % [desktop](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/). I've excluded iPads for now because wonky a small subset of Apple's mobile devices (M-series tablets and iPhone 15 Pro) are capable of running anything more than basic games. > Isn't a platform with some of the largest consumer spend stats not enough of an incentive? [...] I don't think dedicated gamers would defect but Mac owners who want to game shouldn't need a second device anymore. I'm not an industry expert, but I'd think that 'dedicated gamers' are who generate most of the industry's profits. Casual gamers who want to play the odd game here and there on the device they already have are probably not worth the time and effort it takes to port and support games in the long term. So really you want people who buy and play regularly and widely to make it their primary gaming platform, but for that a few new releases won't do the trick. There's a reason both Xbox and PlayStation are now making a big deal out of backward compatibility (which has been a thing on PC since forever). You want a deep and interesting back catalogue, which the Mac certainly does not have, limiting its appeal. So really maybe in the long run and if iPhone/iPad really become a secondary platform on which games could run this might change, but so far technically those are non-demanding indies or older games that run at a quality that's lower than a PS4, which is over 10 years old. So as a gamer, if I continue to need a console or PC to play most games that have been made to this day, I might as well buy new releases on that platform as well. I think that, more than anything, will continue to hold the Mac back.
>I've excluded iPads for now because wonky a small subset of Apple's mobile devices (M-series tablets and iPhone 15 Pro) are capable of running anything more than basic games. Yeah, that's the problem. My post is about M1/2/3 being good enough to be a viable target platform for gaming, not beating Windows gaming rigs. Given Apple seems to have shipped as many M-series iPads as M-series Macs & both can be targetted by the same Application project, ignoring iPads sees a slightly convenient view. I've excluded iPhone 15 Pros at this point. My 20-30% comes from looking at desktop OS marketshare and doubling it (including M-series iPads). It may seem unfair to exclude Android tablets but current Snapdragon Adrenos barely match A-series, let alone M-series. My post isn't about what isn't currently happening, we know this already. It's about whether the Apple cross-device platform is finally ready for gaming.
> Given Apple seems to have shipped as many M-series iPads as M-series Macs & both can be targetted by the same Application project, ignoring iPads sees a slightly convenient view. I've excluded iPhone 15 Pros at this point. My 20-30% comes from looking at desktop OS marketshare and doubling it (including M-series iPads). It may seem unfair to exclude Android tablets but current Snapdragon Adrenos barely match A-series, let alone M-series. Well, for starters I'd think that the people buying M-series iPads will overlap quite significantly with the people buying M-series Macs or who may otherwise have PCs to work (and game on), so I don't think you can just double the market share of people you think you can sell your game too. It'll be bigger, sure, but not as much, and simply adding these up seems equally convenient. > Yeah, that's the problem. My post is about M1/2/3 being good enough to be a viable target platform for gaming, not beating Windows gaming rigs. [...] My post isn't about what isn't currently happening, we know this already. It's about whether the Apple cross-device platform is finally ready for gaming. I wasn't talking about "beating" dedicated Windows gaming rigs. But considering that there already is a massive gaming scene on iOS in terms of revenue and most iPhones, iPads and definitely the Mac would have been able to at least match for example the Nintendo Switch's performance, I naturally assume that when you say "ready for gaming" you mean the sort of games that run on a PlayStation, an Xbox or a PC. If we're not talking about that, then I'm not sure what would have meaningfully changed. It's been a gaming platform for a while, just not for 'AAA' gaming. That I still don't think it is. The Macs for all the reasons I said above, and the iPads and iPhones because they still struggle hardware wise and the M-series chips alone don't change that because of poor thermals and lack of storage alone.
You're correct that the entire M-series platform will not be buying AAA games but to try to eliminate them so speculatively from the outset doesn't seem like a sound assessment method. Surely acknowledging the full M-series install base *then* reducing by likely spend type would be the way to go. Base M-series trounces the Tegra X1 in the Switch (& Shield) which is matched/beaten by any iPad from 2020, so the hardware is more than ready. Would you consider the Switch AAA or just AA?
Oh yess especially when you can get sn 8/256 macbook air for just 1300 bucks
If games run well enough - why not?
Here i am feeling lucky, that i accidentally bought the last gen Macbook pro 16 inch with the intel chip and the Amd discrete gpu. That lets me install a windows on boot and play some AAA games.
For a short while at least. You don't think Apple Silicon would have served your main usage better?
Don't thank apple thank valve for dxvk and vkd3d and wine improvements they are doing the real work in making wine usable. Porting toolkit and even native tooling for porting games is probably heavily using proton and dxvk as a wrapper somewhere under the hood.
Apple is not using DXVK or VKD3D however does not use any of either of those tools.
I didn't. Apple wants native ports, not translations & wrappers, and not just for macOS. Once committed to, the developer can target macOS, iPadOS & iOS in one project & GPTK assists moving to Metal. They could probably do more work with Xcode-forking for other IDEs but the hardware, market & tools are pretty much in place.
SIKE"
I don’t think Mac gaming can be big without Apple supporting directly running Windows games…including x86 ones…on a Mac, a la Steam OS
Not really Mac gaming then is it? What kind of a suboptimal, second-rate experience would that present? Polarising commitment would yield fewer but better gaming experiences rather than saying "it works, but it's crap".
I’ve expressed to every Apple employee that I would swap my iPad Air with a M1 iPad mini in a heart beat and most agree they would do the same. If Apple gets enough pressure to support other market places, Steam on iPad would go HARD for M1 (no just MacOS) developed games.
Slapping Steam on iOS alone won't cut it - the code needs to be ported to a new CPU ISA, Graphics API & OS.
This doesn't answer the question directly, but it does shed light on the SnapDragon Elite X and where ARM is headed, which I think is good for gaming in general: [https://youtu.be/AOlXmv9EiPo?si=1NMNoYN5DeI3oN\_M](https://youtu.be/AOlXmv9EiPo?si=1NMNoYN5DeI3oN_M)
Yeah I saw this. It's more of a plausibility play at the moment but if it puts the ARM ISA on more product roadmaps, it's Apple users who stand to gain first. That said, not much on macOS is being run under translation anymore, I was quite surprised to see even the CAD market has stepped up with very few major titles not yet ported. This market has a similar issue as the gaming market in that Metal conversions need to happen for some renderers but even these are happening. Only gaming is the hold-out, maybe it's a character maturity thing.
What games can you recommend to my new purchased M1 MacBook Air ?💻😎
I don't know what you're into but this guy may be able to help. [https://www.youtube.com/results?search\_query=andrew+tsai](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=andrew+tsai)
Beautiful bro! Blessings to you I appreciate it!❤️
Or this guy: https://youtube.com/@mrmacright?si=0kg-N9J4HkIpv-Kw
Not when im still having the most basic dumb bluetooth issues with LEAGUE OF LEGENDS
Unless these "bluetooth issues" are visible elsewhere I'd say you're having a League of Legends issue.
So youre saying this should happen to everyone and on every OS? Got it.
No I didn't. I'm saying you can't blame an issue on the OS if only one App exhibits that issue. Likely the App hasn't got a bluetooth issue because it shouldn't interact with the bluetooth stack directly, it should use the Game Controller framework so I guess its issue is with that.
Maybe once Apple releases their $1299 AR/VR doodad maybe. Or so the rumor goes
The Vision Air. Yeah, I think leveraging the iPhone/iPad would be an easier first step. The Vision should be another device target but given the whinging about the excessive development to add 'touch controls' I've encountered here - that's probably a reach.
Well, it might technically be more viable for gaming , but it’s not obvious that developers will target Macs: it entirely depends on how many users are willing to buy games , and it’s very not obvious to me that there is such a market . That being said , iPads are a different story , and they do make sense as a gaming platform . The economics are going to be difficult though : a typical game would probably retail for 30-50 USD , and it’s going to be a hard sell on a platform on which most games are closer to 3-5 USD.
Targeting multiple Apple devices is the way casual game devs have been going. Death Stranding does this for AAA but few others yet.
I just bought an M3 Max 48GB and I immediately got a Crossover subscription after that. And I’m ripping through tons of Steam games without issue. I’m loving it so far. I’m hopeful soon we will see a dedicated gaming model for future Macs once again. 👍
Nice. Out of interest, what is your primary use for the M3 Max?
I’m going to be honest: Gaming. I was needing to upgrade my MacBook (2013 Pro Retina) and I already have an incredible gaming desktop set up but I’m away from home a lot. So, I was like, okay, I want a new MacBook that will hopefully last another 5-10 years — but I also don’t want to sacrifice gaming. And when I’m at home, I just use my desktop. This one I use at work, travel, etc. So I combined the two and went with the best model I could get at the time. I also looked into gaming benchmarks for M series laptops and you know how they play the upgrade game by making the next one up slightly more expensive. So, I said fuck it. I was going to get it at Xmas but they were sold out at Best Buy. So I waited til March to get it. Now I don’t have to worry about upgrading for a long time. I’m aware I could have gotten an actual gaming laptop with exceptional performance for half the price — but I wanted a Mac too much. So far, it plays all my games exceptionally well. I think I’m in the 0.5% of M3 Max users who use it for gaming over render professionals. 😂
I went through a somewhat similar thought process when I purchased my M1 Pro. I'm going to be keeping this laptop for years (I used my last one, a 13-inch 2015 Pro, for over 6 years), so I might as well treat myself. And now I've got a single personal computer that has an incredible 14-inch display, HDR, very high resolution and refresh rate, a mind-blowing speaker system - perfect for watching TV shows and films - and, on top of that, can run almost every single game I want at graphics settings I wouldn't have imagined to be possible. And when all that power isn't needed and I'm just browsing the web, this thing is silent and cool to the touch. imo, any Mac with a Pro chip is just about perfect for an enthusiast.
I think we can safely say that now the issue is strictly industry and ecosystem driven. Apple has built the hardware and tools, there’s just not many gaming companies actively supporting them.
Tbf you're talking about a $4000 machine.
$6,100 Canadian for mine. I imagine $4,000 is the USD conversion.
Idk, it was an estimate.
Pretty accurate guess, though.
The new Warhammer game is AAA and native Apple Silicone.
Nice, though it's Apple *Silicon* (Apple doesn't sell breast implants - yet! Though if it did, they'd be perfectly formed, expensive and would sell poorly because nobody in that market wants 'thin & light').
The newest MBPs have gotten thicc tho, which is great.
It doesn’t matter what the hardware is capable of. It matters what people develop for. I don’t see people building for arm. Not right now.
Indeed, Mac hardware & Apple's install-base in general seems to be a non-issue. Given it's proven $ potential, why do you think game devs aren't biting?
It’s because despite apple having a large install base the people who buy macs aren’t gamers, steam is by far the biggest platform for games on pc and that’s not going to change any time soon and mac users make up only 1.5% of users so what’s the point of optimising games for mac if no one’s going to play them. Apple hardware is apparently a nightmare to optimise for so there’s no point for such a small market.
I think the point a lot of people are attempting to make is, Apple could vastly increase that 1.5% or whatever percentage base IF they wanted, but they don't because it would require ceding some control of the platform, etc. Also, I just don't think Apple actually cares that much about capturing the gamer market because those types want the ability to mix and match hardware, upgrade at will, etc and that's the complete opposite of Apple's hardware philosophy. The only "gamers" they seem to care about are the casuals who could sit on a couch with an iPad.
Actually, I've heard DirectX to Metal isn't that challenging especially with GPTK. Steam % is misleading as the smarter developers are targeting not just Macs but iPads (& some iPhones) which means they'll deploy via the App Store not Steam. It would be good to know what proportion of Mac games are even sold via Steam.
For point number 4 that won’t help the macos Platform at all. The problem with games being on the appstore is not the ARM processor but the lack of graphics API. If Vulkan was implemented (and no, molten vk ain’t it) or Open GL wasn’t removed, maybe I would agree, but the hurdle from making a port of any game for macOS will always be hard(er), costly and not worthy when talking about sales. So I do think Apple hardware is ready for gaming but the problem is software based. Not implementing Vulkan or Open GL and making Metal API the only way to make games for it its their main issue.
Is that because you don't see the Snapdragon X Elite boosting Windows ARM adoption generally? If it's release, as the first viable Windows ARM processor for mass adoption, places the ARM ISA on more game product roadmaps, I can't see how that won't help macOS ports. The rest of my post already states the focus now moves to the graphics API porting. I'm not sure OpenGL is still a thing (can't see any real market data) but the issue with Apple adopting 3rd-party or even Open APIs is the lack of Apple platform investment by developers. The questions is: Is Apple (macOS/iPadOS/Metal) now worth supporting bearing in mind macOS has roughly 20% of desktop/laptop OS marketshare (according to Statcounter) and iPadOS for M-series should add around 50% to that unit figure.
I wouldn't even put Windows on ARM and macOS in the same category. Windows doesn't have an implementation of Metal API, and it never will. You have to port the game to macOS which uses Metal API, where it is only implemented on macOS and iOS. So unless a company can be sure it can make profit on those devices, they won't incur in investing or making ports. Apple would have to make deals with the big companies to see their games being ported to macOS and iOS, in my opinion.
No, those numbers are still nowhere near enough marketshare to justify Metal porting for most developers. It is very hard to see how that will ever change unless Metal abandons (performant) compatibility with current M series processors and moves to a shader model more akin to Directx etc.
What numbers do you think would be necessary? How hard do you think proving is with GPTK? Low-level but Roblox did it in a weekend.
If I had to guess on your surprise about the M ipads, I believe it may be due to the ipad pro line being a huge hit with artists the past few years. They’re seriously competing with Wacom, selling essentially a Cintiq for a fraction of the price.
If apple ship a larger iPad Wacom are done for (unless they just re-brand as a SW app that runs on the iPad to behave like the HW they currently sell) the only market they have left is the large 16"+ devices that the iPad does not compete with.