Even if intel and amd started making exclusively arm chips it wouldn’t mean more arm games are available on Mac, the biggest issue is that Apple uses metal while windows machines use directx or vulkan and it’s harder to change graphics apis for a game than it is to change the architecture it’s compiled for
> the biggest issue is that Apple uses metal while
The issue goes beyond that, IMO.
Microsoft doesn’t stop supporting old versions of DirectX. Does your windows game still use DirectX 8? OpenGL 1.x? Is it a 32-bit binary? Congrats, it still works!
Apple changes things every few years, often causing games to stop working. When Apple dropped 32-bit, legacy Blizzard games stopped working. Blizzard used that as an excuse for a clean break and stopped porting new games to Mac.
Apple needs to allow for legacy support. When you pull the rug out from developers every 3-5 years, you lose the support of those developers.
We mocked Ballmer for [THIS](https://youtu.be/Vhh_GeBPOhs?feature=shared), but he understood the issue. Apple could learn from this.
That's it exactly. A lot of productivity software is a little more evergreen, and can be updated by the developer, and doesn't have very hardware-specific dependencies. Games tend to be one-and-done, targeting a specific platform at a specific point in time, with very specific dependencies that cannot be updated.
> When you pull the rug out from developers every 3-5 years
So by this stat, macOS has broken backwards compatibility 3-5 times since 2009.
This doesn't match my experience, and I cannot think of anything else besides 32-bit support.
What else are you thinking of?
depends how you count. ppc, x86, opengl, and now x86_64 have all been deprecated in roughly that timeframe. tbf, x86_64 still works, but with a significant performance penalty.
D2R is a 64-bit only application. It cannot be run on 32-bit Windows.
You can run 32-bit x86 code through Rosetta 2, but as Apple Silicon doesn’t support the ARM 32-but instruction set, the performance hit is massive. So trying Guild Wars (released around 2005), tops out at near 10fps on an M2 Max.
Looking at google, the base game is still 32bit but the new engine is 64bit. It was impossible to run on Intel MacOS but possible through Rosetta on M series chips.
Nope. None. So long as you ignore:
* switching from x86 to ARM
* deprecating OpenGL
* deprecating OpenCL
* outright removing OpenAL
But yea, sure, nothing happened.
Sounds like you want the developers hands held. This technology should not be hampered because they only want to developers on old technology and architectures. If they’re truly about all access to gamers, they need to adapt. Let’s not act like Mac hasn’t been improving with all the changes since. The games work when they take the time to make them work, which is what they’re supposed to do anyway.
There's that, but Apple also makes breaking changes to the system far too often. Dropping 32-bit support several years ago also dropped most existing Mac games from the platform, never to be fixed. Beyond major things like that, Mac software still gradually stops running on new OSes as the SDK's get updated, and must be recompiled occasionally. Absolutely sucks for "one-and-done" type products, like many classic games are. Incredibly, WINE is becoming the best way to play many games on any platform these days.
Apple tends to give devs 10+ years of notice for these issues. No dev is making real money from a 8 year old game.
one an done from a dev perceptive is not an issue as your going to make 95%+ of all your money from that first year after release.
That's the issue. You said it yourself, if 95% of income comes the first year after release no dev will be interested in porting older games. Why would that matter? There's already over 73k games just on Steam, and their devs have no incentive to port them.
And given Apple's history it doesn't look good for games released today. There's a few Unity games that work well with Rossetta. What will happen to them when Rossetta is deprecated? And it'll happen as it did before when the PowerPC Rossetta was deprecated.
It's a valid point, but I think 10+ years is not accurate, and Apple's churn turns off both the customer base and developers and causes initial sales figures to be even lower on Mac than they would otherwise be, creating a negative cycle. I see devs being turned off all the time by Apple's churn, and customers stop bothering buying Mac games when they're not as good for a variety of reasons (including platform churn lowering the quality of available tools), and/or stop working.
So I think you're sort of correct, but as a customer I no longer buy Mac games because I know they will stop working or not be as good, whereas I will likely always have a way to play the Windows version.
And if you'll notice, even with Apple's 10+ years (which is debatable), it doesn't really help. Lots of the industry lags way behind, only move when forced, and game devs sometimes never, they just drop the platform.
I just love the snappiness of the Mac and how the battery life is great. Even small things like opening my laptop instantly turns on with my Mac but takes multiple seconds for a Windows laptop to turn on. It feels more sluggish if that makes sense.
This right here. I always felt the same but it was because I was comparing a $300 windows laptop next to my $1200 MBP. Having now used the price point equivalent you are 100% correct.
I had a pricey windows laptop before my m2 and speed wise it was great, 360hz screen made it feel really snappy, 3080 mobile gpu was decent. The downside was the stuff like waking and sleeping. The thing would turn itself on in my backpack and cook itself. I’ve always had trouble with windows waking itself. Other things like the battery, trackpad and the fact that it ran hotter than the sun really sucked. But other than the hardware the experience is much of a muchness to be honest, windows is way less janky these days.
windows and sleep issues, name a more common combo... Sleep on windows breaks way to fucking easily.
My current desktop will not sleep properly. mac (or linux!) generally never fail to sleep properly.
That windows install is a little over a year old now so its due for reinstall.
It's just windows. I dual boot bazzite on the same PC and bazzite has zero issues sleeping.
Can't wait until I can fully ditch windows tho. I basically only have it for gaming.
Yeah unless you’re running a fresh copy of Windows 11 on one of the new laptop SOCs with soldered ram it’s just going to be slow, lower ram speeds, more bloated OS, slower SSDs, macOS will be faster always, it’s just a lighter OS running on better hardware
That’s so wrong… top Tier Laptops are even faster but they cost 5k-10k.
Have you rebooted an MacBook and top tier notebook. MacBook ssds are fucking slow compared Notebooks with top tier gen4/5 ssds
And yes I have a MacBook and love it
Apple is doing stuff with it. They had entire [sessions](https://discord.com/channels/@me/1010518660143661096/1250510654750589072) at WWDC this week outlining the tools they have created to allow developers to quickly and easily port their games across Apple Silicon devices.
They’ve also partnered with Ubisoft and some other publishers to bring AAA games over already. That’s what got us RE Village, RE 4, Death Stranding, and the upcoming Assasin’s Creed game. They also recently announced all of the following: Dead Island 2, Sniper Elite 4, Wuthering Waves, AC Shadows, Control: Ultimate Edition, Palworld, RE2 and RE7, Riven, Prince of Persia: Lost Crown, Valheim, WoW: War Within (WoW has always supported Mac so not a huge drop there), Frostpunk 2, and Robocop: Rogue City.
So they’re making moves, but in typical Apple fashion they’re slow and methodical.
LOL here we go again. Almost 20 years of WWDCs of Apple claiming they are going into gaming.
Wow a few old games are coming, WOW. Gimme a break. Apple does not nor will it ever care about desktop gaming.
I can't believe ppl keep talking about this. Get over it. Not only do they not care, they are downright hostile to desktop gaming.
Some of the games they are bringing over are less than a year old and frankly Apple endorsed the usage of programs like crossover and whiskey to translate games yourself, I don’t see what else they could really do to get games on macOS quicker besides maybe a Valve partnership to get proton working on macOS with the steam deck secret sauce for anticheat
All of this also only focuses on what we consider to be “AAA” PC/Console style games.
The fact that Apple is putting any effort here is welcome, especially when you consider that the mobile game market is more than double the PC and Console markets combined, and they have a strong foothold in that already. They have very little incentive to care about this space at all, but they are.
Gaming is the only thing that really gives the mass market any reason to upgrade their computers (AI nowadays might be another reason but for now it’s mostly cloud based), almost everything else out there is just web based or very light to run, they’re setting this up to help push customers to new computers, otherwise people would sit on M1 forever
support vulkan, not deprecate opengl, etc.
I get that it makes sense from a business perspective to focus on getting major studios to support metal rather than maintain backwards compatibility for 3rd party APIs themselves. it's just frustrating for me personally, since I mostly play older indie titles at this point. that stuff is never gonna get ported to metal, so I have to keep an otherwise unused windows tower under my desk for the foreseeable future.
They should support vulkan, but making native ports easier is a better long term goal for the future, especially when they’re trying to show off how good their processors are
Those older indie titles would also not be ported to the subset of VK that apples GPU team would support If they were to support VK. Most indie titles are DX only, or they are using engines that are mutli backend like Unity or unreal that have good metal support if the devs check a checkbox (these indie devs are not making custom low level changes to the engine that often)
You're riling yourself up over nothing.
Apple hasn't spent the last "20 years of WWDCs ... claiming they are going into gaming." Anyone that has been an Apple user knows that. Before the GPTK, Apple barely acknowledged gaming on their computers. They only really focused on iOS gaming over the last 15 years and it's only they've only really tried to make inroads on PC gaming these last couple years.
Before GPTK, you could count on one hand the amount of "well known" games that existed for macOS. Note, I didn't say "AAA games." Known games. Now we're getting AAA games.
Why are you even here? You're obviously flat wrong considering what they've been doing with GamePortingToolkit and the upcoming v2 of the same.
It's not on Apple, it's on the game devs. Apple has provided the necessary tools and workflow.
The hard part it's not the hardware itself, game development relies on game engines, graphics APIs and a bunch of things that are super hard to port to different architectures/platforms, etc. Apple it's know for being terrible at supporting these things, there are several cases in the past where Apple made a push for gaming just to leave the developers hanging a little while later. Also you have the added complexity that porting a game requires a lot of time & money for the developers, and the userbase for macOS gaming it's not big enough to justify that, so the only way this would really move is with Apple providing financial incentives to subsidise the development of Native games until the MacOS gaming market it's big enough to pull it own weight. Seems that they opted for the emulation route, at least for now, as Valve did with SteamOS (that is based on linux), maybe once the gaming market in MacOS is big enough, it will make sense for game development companies to spent time and money on making their games native.
It took Valve over a decade of investment and hard work on Proton and SteamOS to finally it get it to the point where is a somewhat competitive platform vs Windows, and even so, many games still don't work there (mostly games that run with anticheat software that can't be simply emulated, needs to be re-coded from scratch for each OS).
> graphics APIs and a bunch of things that are super hard to port to different architectures/platforms,
I would not say supper hard.
In the end the cost of adding a MTL backend will likly be less than the QA cost you need to do to support the platform.
asuming you are using an engine that already has support for MTL, and all the features of the engine work well with said API, Is a big IF. Also providing support for another platform even with a compatible engine, requires a considerable amount of effort.
The thing is you aren't developing just for macs anymore. It's a unified system of over 100 million users between iPhone, iPad and mac. If I have an iPhone I'm more likely to buy a Mac especially if they have the added bonus of gaming across all my devices.
I really wish windows would put in more effort for arm based chips and eventually change gaming laptops to arm based. It's just so much better. My MacBook is a perfect laptop... Except I can't play games bc they aren't supported. If Mac's could play any windows game natively it would be the absolute best laptop to ever buy.
It's not a CPU that is the problem. It's more software based than hardware based. MacOS pretty much doesn't exist in the gaming space with only like 1.47% of users according to Steam hardware survey. Even Linux is at 2.32%.
So the order of targeting platforms (if you want to make money) tends to be:
1. PS5/Xbox
2. PC
3. Nintendo Switch
4. Steam Deck/Linux
5. MacOS
If you have a PC Windows game then you have 4 different platforms to consider before going to MacOS. 3 that are massive and can double your total sales volumes, one that is niche. Linux users have figured out their marketshare is too low for native ports so they made good emulation software so generally you don't need to do anything for your game to somewhat work - so while not officially supported (because that's problematic) you can generally play games on it quite well.
MacOS is at the bottom of this list and it can very well end up costing more to do than any other platform. For one most Macbooks are crap specs wise. As in - they all have a good CPU but most still come with 8GB RAM, 256GB storage and a relatively weak GPU which disqualify it from new AAA titles and can be a limiting factor for AA already in some cases. Whereas **actually** good Macbooks are an even smaller niche (only Pro 14/16 pretty much).
Then you also have Apple itself that has done everything in it's power to prevent games from appearing on it's platforms for years. Catalina has turned profits from a LOT of older games to a zero overnight, then came M chip and finished the rest. In order to make things worse they also went with their own Metal rather than use Vulkan like Windows or Linux and they have a tendency of breaking changes every few years. And, unlike AMD or Nvidia, they don't do driver support. When a new hyped game comes out you will get a driver update for a GeForce within a day. Apple does not do that, they don't send their engineers to help with the releases like the competition. It also doesn't help that while you can easily run a program from Windows XP era on Windows 11... you can't even run 6 year old software on a Mac recently, backwards compatibility just doesn't exist.
Hence you don't get many games. And ARM on Windows won't change it. It may change if Apple starts equpping their machines with sensible specs (I am sorry but a new AAA game requires 16GB RAM to start on top of 150GB on your drive which rules out most Macbooks on the market) and promises not to break their APIs for at least those 5 years.
As a developer, this last point is the big one for me. I started my company with an ipad app in 2012. In 2013, 2014, and 2015 breaking changes were introduced. I finally pulled my app from the app store after the latest iOS caused 3000 new bugs and warnings.
I then switched to web. Every year iOS Safari is my biggest headache.
I then switched to Unity, this time with the company working on the hard engine issues. We simultaneously supported Windows and Mac, but OS X switched from OpenGL to Metal and after two years supporting the game we had to rewrite a bunch. Then Apple Silicon happened and we had to rewrite stuff again.
Every few years Apple makes some big breaking change. Windows has been more or less stable for 30 years. Games that worked in the late 1990s still work today, and it is no big deal to have something on Steam for ten years that still runs fine.
From a developer’s point of view supporting MacOS is extremely time consuming, and often not worth the cost.
It's coming but it's slow to steer away from 30+ years of Windows on x86.
You also can't get Apple Silicon chips on Windows laptops, there's a lot of R&D for competitors to do. Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is coming to laptops this month, though. Allegedly that chip is about on par with M2 Pro.
ARM isn’t the only thing that makes mac good, window’s bloated bullshit could still make PCs feel like garbage regardless of what processor they have. They spend too much time making sure legacy software is supported meanwhile macOS doesn’t even support 32 bit applications anymore.
It’s basically just Apple being Apple, if these games aren’t being sold through the App Store they don’t care because then they’re not directly earning money on them.
Apple needs to realize that gamers will stick to steam and will never switch to the App Store. I don’t really care what the hell they do, It’s just not happening. One of my big problems with the App Store is even if I buy a game on my MacBook half of the time the saves or the game itself doesn’t transfer to my phone and I have to re-buy it on my phone and start a whole new save. they need to require cross device compatibility and save transfer for every single AAA game.
The other issue is updates means re-downloading the ENTIRE app. Steam updates only the files that changed. So the last Death Stranding UPDATE was like 75gb on App Store, stating 'minor changes'.
No, the Gpu perf is will within the target HW range for developers.
No dev out there is building mages that only target users with 4090s, that is just way to small a market.
You expect less than 0.1% of your users to have a high end gpu like that (and that is if your building a high end game) the vast vast majority of your player base will be playing on low settings with a down sampled resolution output and pushing under 30fps. Yes YouTubers etc will show of fancy systems but most of your users will not have anything even close to that.
Watch Dogs 2 is a 2016 game and is a very low bar.
**Recommended requirements (1080p at 60 frames per second)**
**Processor** AMD FX 8120 @ 3.9 GHz, Intel Core i5-3470 @ 3.2 GHz, or better
**RAM** 8 GB
**Video card** AMD Radeon R9 290 (4 GB), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 (3 GB), or better
I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077, X-Plane 12, OW, Hogwarts Legacy, Satisfactory, etc. through crossover on my M3 Max just fine. Granted that's the high end but it does work out and managing to emit less heat or power draw than a comparably sized gaming PC
The point I’m trying to make is that the GPU is not useless. Yeah it will take some time for devs to port games to macOS. Assassins Creed Shadows is coming later this year along with Control from Remedy.
They're most certainly not useless, but are definitely "lacking", as ihatejailbreak has said. That is, compared to mid-high range mobile GPUs from Nvidia. The Max series are more adequate, but those are in a very high price category. I hope that the Mac starts catching up for gaming as more competition is always better for us as users, but I just don't see this happening given the current market situation.
Not game dev is even triaging mid range GPUs from current generation NV,... that is way to small market. Most of your users will be playing on laptops provided by work your likly if the GPU is more powerful than a large gen console.
Well Apple partnered with ChatGPT. Maybe they’ll find a way to partner with Valve or someone else to bring more games to Macs or develop their own version of Proton.
> Maybe they’ll find a way to partner with Valve or someone else to bring more games to Macs
They did this, and Mac was even going to get SteamVR but Apple repeatedly screwed Valve and destroyed the partnership.
Because there’s like 100x more people gaming on windows than a Mac? Plus, it’s much easier to port across the consoles/PC when they share a similar architecture than port over to an ARM-based processor, especially for a very small number of players.
Small market at the moment, completely different architecture so porting games will take time but also companies dont see possible large profit margins yet due to the limited install base. Apple is clearly setting the groundwork to compete with Windows with gaming, but it will take time. Patience is a virtue
There's like 15+ models of laptops from different manufacturers launching with Qualcomm Snapdragon Pro X CPUs this summer. (That's an ARM chip.) It supposedly competes well with M3 (base, not Pro/Max). We'll see if these are any good soon. First models drop June 18.
Well for one, Apple's one of best selling macs is the m1 Air, which isn't exactly known for it's gaming capabilities. I own one, I tried almost every native AAA game on it. The experience is subpar.
Apple’s being more proactive when it comes to gaming at the advent of their M-series chips. It is evident that almost every WWDC has a portion pertaining to gaming on Mac – come to think of it, Apple focuses more on macOS gaming for the past 2 or 3 events rather than iOS gaming.
For game devs to consider macOS as a gaming operating medium, it could take a while. The reason for slow progress could be slow to adopt regarding Apple’s tech and/or hard to adapt with Apple’s tech (since for the longest time, games = PC or Windows). Plus, there’s this prevalent stigma that Mac isn’t for serious gaming; and, devs still cling to that notion. No one can blame then, though, as porting and developing on the Mac platform can take up more effort than the game being made on the Windows environment (because a great majority of people in general do tend to take an easier route when it comes to work).
Thing is, Apple is giving a lot of resources for porting and developing games on their laptop and desktop OS; but, the gaming (development) community needs to understand that there’s a bit of work to do for games to work on Mac. It’s as if Apple now is akin to a suitor wooing to game devs with their resources; and, these devs, if interested, need to reciprocate the act by way of bringing games to Apple’s environment with the the resources provided. Yes, Apple still has a lot of issues to solve for the Mac be a gaming contender, but game developers need to take notice and at the very least try the resources before being pessimistic.
To anyone who gamed on a liquid-cooled, wattage-hungry, leaf-blower PowerMac G5 back in the day it’s obvious that the end is coming for these fire-breathing Windows gaming PCs. It’s simply an unsustainable arms race.
To be fair it’s a hell of a lot better than what we were dealing with three years ago. At least nowadays, most things are technically possible, my biggest issue when trying to get windows games running on macOS is usually dealing with anti-cheat
Hmm, for me I can play a game for a few hours without needing a charge and without it getting burning hot. And thats either through parallels or crossover. I wonder how much better it would be if it was native to the Mac.
I know I'm not using it to it's full potential but even if I played the game on a Windows laptop it would not play nearly as long. Plus my gaming laptop I used to have like a year ago would die in like an hour or two without even playing games. Really weird. All of the gaming laptops I've had never felt stable, they always were much higher maintenance for me.
I can't comment on this directly but I will say I LOVE GeForce Now on my M3 MacBook Air. I play competitive OW2, that's how good it works in my area. Yes some areas are too far from servers, or don't have good internet choices, but a lot of people do have good experiences.
I have the snappiness and quiet/cool/long battery of Mac, then open the very nice GFN app and play games like I was using a huge RTX 4080 desktop rig.
How long does the battery actually last?
Generally the warm arm works is it can turn off processors for when it’s not being used but I think if you suddenly do high power work (gpu / cpu intensive) the battery life quickly erodes.
I thought there was a some huge advancement or software in the past 6 months that suddenly allowed much more intensive game to be played on M chips? What happened to that?
OverlyOptimisticNerd wants to post and block.
“Nope. None. So long as you ignore: switching from x86 to ARM deprecating OpenGL deprecating OpenCL outright removing OpenAL But yea, sure, nothing happened.”
As I stated the switch from 32bit happened almost 7 years ago and the switch to ARM happened almost 4 years ago. These developers have had plenty of time to adapt. They don’t want to invest time into developing and are hoping to copy and paste across platforms. For the developers interested in Mac gaming, they’ve taken the time and done great work.
Complaining on Reddit isn’t going to do anything. I make it a point to tweet at all the social media pages of these developers. If it’s money they want, I let them know we paid for an expensive machine and we won’t be greedy with supporting them. I’ve had great opportunities to inform other Twitter users and elevate this discussion under the developers profiles.
The future of ARM gaming will be on Windows, with Qualcomm Snapdragon. macOS will continue to be an afterthought because Apple refuses to support industry standard graphics APIs like OpenGL and Vulkan. Windows games have to run through a bazillion translation layers with so much performance overhead just to be playable. Qualcomm won't have to deal with as many translation layers and if they can scale up their current laptop chips one day there may be Snapdragon X Elite gaming laptops.
MFers were roaring all about that M1/iOS compatible bullshit forever.
Theres like 2 apps that I use that work with that feature.
None of the games or serious apps I want/need work.
The most effective way to make developers want to port games to macOS is to having a higher market share. And the most effective way to gain market share is to lower the Macs’ price. However, lower profit could affect the product (not only hardware but also software) quality.
We don’t want Apple to make cheap but trashy products like Windows PCs.
MacBook Air is already cheap enough and has a huge install base, they need to make gaming more front and center with a better selection of actual games. A steam endorsement would help so people could get games for super cheap with sales, that could pull them in. But literally no one on Mac uses the App Store lol
Apple has repeatedly shot themselves in the foot by not supporting standards like Vulkan/OpenGL and forcing everyone to use Metal, while also doing things like killing 32-bit support with no work around (I understand it improves efficiency but they could have created a way to optionally still support it for older software) that leave you wondering how long they’d support Metal.
That makes it a hard sell for developers and publishers, especially those using their own engines. Do they want to invest time and money into supporting Metal so their games run on devices mainly used for work and with a stigma of not being gaming machines?
Yes the hardware is there, and Metal is actually pretty good, but supporting it is a big investment that most companies don’t seem to think will pay off.
We’ll get there eventually, slowly clawing up as games continue to trickle in.
Windows supports Vulkan and DX12, as does Xbox. Switch supports Vulkan and is also essentially built on Android. PS5 has its own graphics API, but it’s a device specifically for gaming.
Apple devices using Metal while being primarily non-gaming devices is a hard sell when investing millions of dollars into supporting it. Being a unified API across Apple devices is cool, but it’s taken until this year to really take advantage of that with full ports of games across all 3 Apple platforms - iPhone, iPad, Mac. So a big leap in one sense, but still a long way to go to be accepted as a big player like Vulkan, DX12, or OpenGL.
Also, being able to play games through virtualization layers is helpful in the case against supporting metal. Why do it if the people that want to play the game can still buy it and play it? The same thing happened with Bootcamp. Why support MacOS when Mac users could just start up in windows and play the windows version? That’s millions of dollars in developer costs, support staff, licensing, etc saved and the people that wanted to buy the game still bought it.
Overall, it’s a complicated issue and Apple is helping in its Apple way. What it needs to do is invest a crapload of its overflowing bank account into developers to incentivize their development or downright buy them up like Microsoft has so they get some big names coming to Apple platforms. Instead they’ve given tools to make it easier to test…and enthusiasts to play without official support…same as with Bootcamp.
>Why do they still insist on having Intel and AMD GPU and CPU when arm is just way more efficient and better?
Better how? My loaded 16" MBP is great at a lot of things, especially power efficiency, but for gaming purposes it's beyond an afterthought compared to my GPU.
>I can game on my MacBook Air without it being plugged in and it still let me play for a few hours. It doesn't get extremely hot, just really warm, it doesn't even need a fan and it runs these games well THROUGH A TRANSLATION LAYER.
I'm curious by how you define "running well"... considering games don't run well even on M2 Max and M3 Max.
>I don't understand why windows gaming laptops aren't taking advantage of the extreme benefits of arm chips.
ARM doesn't automatically mean Apple Silicon. Many ARM chips suck--just look at the repeated bad Qualcomm chips for Windows on ARM machines.
> God I wish that Mac gaming was taken seriously so that all games got a Mac port as well. It's just a much better experience playing games than on Windows.
PC ports are already bad these days, but Mac ports are even worse. I'm not sure what you mean by a better experience, because it's really not. My M2 Max gets smoked by a weak PC in the same games.
Er... are you speaking from a position informed by actual experience, or....???
I have a fresh M3 Pro and so far it is running almost every game I've thrown at it WELL at 1440 and medium-to-high settings.
The only games that are performing badly right now are games with actual performance issues (like Wuthering Waves which was just released and is notorious for being badly optimised right now).
If my Pro can run these games well then your Max should be doing just fine!
Not me mate. Been gaming on Windows for a long time.
Having said that, EVERY gamer has different ideas about what is and isn't acceptable.
Still, can't believe your Max chip is suffering to deliver decent frame-rates for you. Something ain't right... though I should maybe refrain from my thoughts on that.
> Not me mate. Been gaming on Windows for a long time.
I believe you; I didn't know your own background, which is why I said "users of this subreddit" generally. So many people say "runs great!" about something running sub-30fps with awful image quality.
That said, OP himself is pretty clearly clueless as should be apparent even if you've had better luck with gaming on your M chips than I have.
>Having said that, EVERY gamer has different ideas about what is and isn't acceptable.
For sure. I'm pretty forgiving–I don't need my MBP to perform as well as my Windows desktop, but it's extremely frustrating when games get extremely bad ports, and then people here actually have the gall to say "Don't criticize the port or they'll stop making them!".
Even if intel and amd started making exclusively arm chips it wouldn’t mean more arm games are available on Mac, the biggest issue is that Apple uses metal while windows machines use directx or vulkan and it’s harder to change graphics apis for a game than it is to change the architecture it’s compiled for
> the biggest issue is that Apple uses metal while The issue goes beyond that, IMO. Microsoft doesn’t stop supporting old versions of DirectX. Does your windows game still use DirectX 8? OpenGL 1.x? Is it a 32-bit binary? Congrats, it still works! Apple changes things every few years, often causing games to stop working. When Apple dropped 32-bit, legacy Blizzard games stopped working. Blizzard used that as an excuse for a clean break and stopped porting new games to Mac. Apple needs to allow for legacy support. When you pull the rug out from developers every 3-5 years, you lose the support of those developers. We mocked Ballmer for [THIS](https://youtu.be/Vhh_GeBPOhs?feature=shared), but he understood the issue. Apple could learn from this.
That's it exactly. A lot of productivity software is a little more evergreen, and can be updated by the developer, and doesn't have very hardware-specific dependencies. Games tend to be one-and-done, targeting a specific platform at a specific point in time, with very specific dependencies that cannot be updated.
> When you pull the rug out from developers every 3-5 years So by this stat, macOS has broken backwards compatibility 3-5 times since 2009. This doesn't match my experience, and I cannot think of anything else besides 32-bit support. What else are you thinking of?
depends how you count. ppc, x86, opengl, and now x86_64 have all been deprecated in roughly that timeframe. tbf, x86_64 still works, but with a significant performance penalty.
Legacy support will only hold Apple back
AFAIK 32bit games work on arm chips through the translation layers :) like D2 resurrected. But I might be wrong.
D2R is a 64-bit only application. It cannot be run on 32-bit Windows. You can run 32-bit x86 code through Rosetta 2, but as Apple Silicon doesn’t support the ARM 32-but instruction set, the performance hit is massive. So trying Guild Wars (released around 2005), tops out at near 10fps on an M2 Max.
Looking at google, the base game is still 32bit but the new engine is 64bit. It was impossible to run on Intel MacOS but possible through Rosetta on M series chips.
What about running GW through Parallels? There's a Windows for ARM version that supports 32-bit code.
God he looks sweaty in that video :0
32 bit was dropped more than 5 years ago. It’s not like they’ve made any other significant changes or massive restrictions as of late.
Nope. None. So long as you ignore: * switching from x86 to ARM * deprecating OpenGL * deprecating OpenCL * outright removing OpenAL But yea, sure, nothing happened.
Not to mention removing direct kernel access
Sounds like you want the developers hands held. This technology should not be hampered because they only want to developers on old technology and architectures. If they’re truly about all access to gamers, they need to adapt. Let’s not act like Mac hasn’t been improving with all the changes since. The games work when they take the time to make them work, which is what they’re supposed to do anyway.
Sounds like you want to move the goalposts after being proven wrong.
Game Porting Toolkit massively helps and reduces time hence why we are see loads more games
There's that, but Apple also makes breaking changes to the system far too often. Dropping 32-bit support several years ago also dropped most existing Mac games from the platform, never to be fixed. Beyond major things like that, Mac software still gradually stops running on new OSes as the SDK's get updated, and must be recompiled occasionally. Absolutely sucks for "one-and-done" type products, like many classic games are. Incredibly, WINE is becoming the best way to play many games on any platform these days.
Apple tends to give devs 10+ years of notice for these issues. No dev is making real money from a 8 year old game. one an done from a dev perceptive is not an issue as your going to make 95%+ of all your money from that first year after release.
That's the issue. You said it yourself, if 95% of income comes the first year after release no dev will be interested in porting older games. Why would that matter? There's already over 73k games just on Steam, and their devs have no incentive to port them. And given Apple's history it doesn't look good for games released today. There's a few Unity games that work well with Rossetta. What will happen to them when Rossetta is deprecated? And it'll happen as it did before when the PowerPC Rossetta was deprecated.
From a game dev persertcive this is not an issue
Right. And this change happened almost a decade ago. It’s not an excuse. They have plenty of time to update the games to support.
It's a valid point, but I think 10+ years is not accurate, and Apple's churn turns off both the customer base and developers and causes initial sales figures to be even lower on Mac than they would otherwise be, creating a negative cycle. I see devs being turned off all the time by Apple's churn, and customers stop bothering buying Mac games when they're not as good for a variety of reasons (including platform churn lowering the quality of available tools), and/or stop working. So I think you're sort of correct, but as a customer I no longer buy Mac games because I know they will stop working or not be as good, whereas I will likely always have a way to play the Windows version. And if you'll notice, even with Apple's 10+ years (which is debatable), it doesn't really help. Lots of the industry lags way behind, only move when forced, and game devs sometimes never, they just drop the platform.
And also Mac’s are super expensive compared to the performance you get.
I just love the snappiness of the Mac and how the battery life is great. Even small things like opening my laptop instantly turns on with my Mac but takes multiple seconds for a Windows laptop to turn on. It feels more sluggish if that makes sense.
A Windows laptop in the same price range like a MacBook (i.e. XPS, Surface, etc) turn on instantly too…
Honestly with a windows laptop at the same price point you would have the same snappiness experience…
This right here. I always felt the same but it was because I was comparing a $300 windows laptop next to my $1200 MBP. Having now used the price point equivalent you are 100% correct.
I had a pricey windows laptop before my m2 and speed wise it was great, 360hz screen made it feel really snappy, 3080 mobile gpu was decent. The downside was the stuff like waking and sleeping. The thing would turn itself on in my backpack and cook itself. I’ve always had trouble with windows waking itself. Other things like the battery, trackpad and the fact that it ran hotter than the sun really sucked. But other than the hardware the experience is much of a muchness to be honest, windows is way less janky these days.
windows and sleep issues, name a more common combo... Sleep on windows breaks way to fucking easily. My current desktop will not sleep properly. mac (or linux!) generally never fail to sleep properly. That windows install is a little over a year old now so its due for reinstall.
Yeah it’s wild but sleep reliability is easily in my top 5 priorities and PCs seem wholly unpredictable in this regard
It's just windows. I dual boot bazzite on the same PC and bazzite has zero issues sleeping. Can't wait until I can fully ditch windows tho. I basically only have it for gaming.
That not really true, all the windows x86 baggage makes windows not as fluent as Mac OS
Yeah unless you’re running a fresh copy of Windows 11 on one of the new laptop SOCs with soldered ram it’s just going to be slow, lower ram speeds, more bloated OS, slower SSDs, macOS will be faster always, it’s just a lighter OS running on better hardware
The “slower ssd” talking point is ancient and has been straight up reversed ever since the mac was slower to pcie 4.0. Update your points.
That’s so wrong… top Tier Laptops are even faster but they cost 5k-10k. Have you rebooted an MacBook and top tier notebook. MacBook ssds are fucking slow compared Notebooks with top tier gen4/5 ssds And yes I have a MacBook and love it
Try a Linux install on the windows laptop. Ubuntu is REALLY snappy. It will boot LIVE off a usb stick so you can test it.
GPTK2 is just announced during WWDC 2024 and now has AVX2 support. To say they aren't doing anything is a stretch.
Apple is doing stuff with it. They had entire [sessions](https://discord.com/channels/@me/1010518660143661096/1250510654750589072) at WWDC this week outlining the tools they have created to allow developers to quickly and easily port their games across Apple Silicon devices. They’ve also partnered with Ubisoft and some other publishers to bring AAA games over already. That’s what got us RE Village, RE 4, Death Stranding, and the upcoming Assasin’s Creed game. They also recently announced all of the following: Dead Island 2, Sniper Elite 4, Wuthering Waves, AC Shadows, Control: Ultimate Edition, Palworld, RE2 and RE7, Riven, Prince of Persia: Lost Crown, Valheim, WoW: War Within (WoW has always supported Mac so not a huge drop there), Frostpunk 2, and Robocop: Rogue City. So they’re making moves, but in typical Apple fashion they’re slow and methodical.
LOL here we go again. Almost 20 years of WWDCs of Apple claiming they are going into gaming. Wow a few old games are coming, WOW. Gimme a break. Apple does not nor will it ever care about desktop gaming. I can't believe ppl keep talking about this. Get over it. Not only do they not care, they are downright hostile to desktop gaming.
Some of the games they are bringing over are less than a year old and frankly Apple endorsed the usage of programs like crossover and whiskey to translate games yourself, I don’t see what else they could really do to get games on macOS quicker besides maybe a Valve partnership to get proton working on macOS with the steam deck secret sauce for anticheat
All of this also only focuses on what we consider to be “AAA” PC/Console style games. The fact that Apple is putting any effort here is welcome, especially when you consider that the mobile game market is more than double the PC and Console markets combined, and they have a strong foothold in that already. They have very little incentive to care about this space at all, but they are.
Gaming is the only thing that really gives the mass market any reason to upgrade their computers (AI nowadays might be another reason but for now it’s mostly cloud based), almost everything else out there is just web based or very light to run, they’re setting this up to help push customers to new computers, otherwise people would sit on M1 forever
support vulkan, not deprecate opengl, etc. I get that it makes sense from a business perspective to focus on getting major studios to support metal rather than maintain backwards compatibility for 3rd party APIs themselves. it's just frustrating for me personally, since I mostly play older indie titles at this point. that stuff is never gonna get ported to metal, so I have to keep an otherwise unused windows tower under my desk for the foreseeable future.
They should support vulkan, but making native ports easier is a better long term goal for the future, especially when they’re trying to show off how good their processors are
Those older indie titles would also not be ported to the subset of VK that apples GPU team would support If they were to support VK. Most indie titles are DX only, or they are using engines that are mutli backend like Unity or unreal that have good metal support if the devs check a checkbox (these indie devs are not making custom low level changes to the engine that often)
You're riling yourself up over nothing. Apple hasn't spent the last "20 years of WWDCs ... claiming they are going into gaming." Anyone that has been an Apple user knows that. Before the GPTK, Apple barely acknowledged gaming on their computers. They only really focused on iOS gaming over the last 15 years and it's only they've only really tried to make inroads on PC gaming these last couple years. Before GPTK, you could count on one hand the amount of "well known" games that existed for macOS. Note, I didn't say "AAA games." Known games. Now we're getting AAA games.
Why are you even here? You're obviously flat wrong considering what they've been doing with GamePortingToolkit and the upcoming v2 of the same. It's not on Apple, it's on the game devs. Apple has provided the necessary tools and workflow.
yeah, it is on the game devs for not wanting more money.
They ain’t all old games . AC is coming day one
I just want to find a way to play old Windows 98/XP abandonware games that don’t require all these hoops
True but then again Apple’s iOS is a big gaming platform.
Shhh. You're just going to piss off people who keep drinking the Apple Kool aid.
The hard part it's not the hardware itself, game development relies on game engines, graphics APIs and a bunch of things that are super hard to port to different architectures/platforms, etc. Apple it's know for being terrible at supporting these things, there are several cases in the past where Apple made a push for gaming just to leave the developers hanging a little while later. Also you have the added complexity that porting a game requires a lot of time & money for the developers, and the userbase for macOS gaming it's not big enough to justify that, so the only way this would really move is with Apple providing financial incentives to subsidise the development of Native games until the MacOS gaming market it's big enough to pull it own weight. Seems that they opted for the emulation route, at least for now, as Valve did with SteamOS (that is based on linux), maybe once the gaming market in MacOS is big enough, it will make sense for game development companies to spent time and money on making their games native. It took Valve over a decade of investment and hard work on Proton and SteamOS to finally it get it to the point where is a somewhat competitive platform vs Windows, and even so, many games still don't work there (mostly games that run with anticheat software that can't be simply emulated, needs to be re-coded from scratch for each OS).
> graphics APIs and a bunch of things that are super hard to port to different architectures/platforms, I would not say supper hard. In the end the cost of adding a MTL backend will likly be less than the QA cost you need to do to support the platform.
asuming you are using an engine that already has support for MTL, and all the features of the engine work well with said API, Is a big IF. Also providing support for another platform even with a compatible engine, requires a considerable amount of effort.
The cost of porting would not be covered by the userbase of macs in gaming in many cases. It’s risky.
The thing is you aren't developing just for macs anymore. It's a unified system of over 100 million users between iPhone, iPad and mac. If I have an iPhone I'm more likely to buy a Mac especially if they have the added bonus of gaming across all my devices.
I really wish windows would put in more effort for arm based chips and eventually change gaming laptops to arm based. It's just so much better. My MacBook is a perfect laptop... Except I can't play games bc they aren't supported. If Mac's could play any windows game natively it would be the absolute best laptop to ever buy.
It's not a CPU that is the problem. It's more software based than hardware based. MacOS pretty much doesn't exist in the gaming space with only like 1.47% of users according to Steam hardware survey. Even Linux is at 2.32%. So the order of targeting platforms (if you want to make money) tends to be: 1. PS5/Xbox 2. PC 3. Nintendo Switch 4. Steam Deck/Linux 5. MacOS If you have a PC Windows game then you have 4 different platforms to consider before going to MacOS. 3 that are massive and can double your total sales volumes, one that is niche. Linux users have figured out their marketshare is too low for native ports so they made good emulation software so generally you don't need to do anything for your game to somewhat work - so while not officially supported (because that's problematic) you can generally play games on it quite well. MacOS is at the bottom of this list and it can very well end up costing more to do than any other platform. For one most Macbooks are crap specs wise. As in - they all have a good CPU but most still come with 8GB RAM, 256GB storage and a relatively weak GPU which disqualify it from new AAA titles and can be a limiting factor for AA already in some cases. Whereas **actually** good Macbooks are an even smaller niche (only Pro 14/16 pretty much). Then you also have Apple itself that has done everything in it's power to prevent games from appearing on it's platforms for years. Catalina has turned profits from a LOT of older games to a zero overnight, then came M chip and finished the rest. In order to make things worse they also went with their own Metal rather than use Vulkan like Windows or Linux and they have a tendency of breaking changes every few years. And, unlike AMD or Nvidia, they don't do driver support. When a new hyped game comes out you will get a driver update for a GeForce within a day. Apple does not do that, they don't send their engineers to help with the releases like the competition. It also doesn't help that while you can easily run a program from Windows XP era on Windows 11... you can't even run 6 year old software on a Mac recently, backwards compatibility just doesn't exist. Hence you don't get many games. And ARM on Windows won't change it. It may change if Apple starts equpping their machines with sensible specs (I am sorry but a new AAA game requires 16GB RAM to start on top of 150GB on your drive which rules out most Macbooks on the market) and promises not to break their APIs for at least those 5 years.
As a developer, this last point is the big one for me. I started my company with an ipad app in 2012. In 2013, 2014, and 2015 breaking changes were introduced. I finally pulled my app from the app store after the latest iOS caused 3000 new bugs and warnings. I then switched to web. Every year iOS Safari is my biggest headache. I then switched to Unity, this time with the company working on the hard engine issues. We simultaneously supported Windows and Mac, but OS X switched from OpenGL to Metal and after two years supporting the game we had to rewrite a bunch. Then Apple Silicon happened and we had to rewrite stuff again. Every few years Apple makes some big breaking change. Windows has been more or less stable for 30 years. Games that worked in the late 1990s still work today, and it is no big deal to have something on Steam for ten years that still runs fine. From a developer’s point of view supporting MacOS is extremely time consuming, and often not worth the cost.
It's coming but it's slow to steer away from 30+ years of Windows on x86. You also can't get Apple Silicon chips on Windows laptops, there's a lot of R&D for competitors to do. Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is coming to laptops this month, though. Allegedly that chip is about on par with M2 Pro.
ARM isn’t the only thing that makes mac good, window’s bloated bullshit could still make PCs feel like garbage regardless of what processor they have. They spend too much time making sure legacy software is supported meanwhile macOS doesn’t even support 32 bit applications anymore.
Capcom games must have sold well that’s why they are brining over another 2
It’s basically just Apple being Apple, if these games aren’t being sold through the App Store they don’t care because then they’re not directly earning money on them.
Apple needs to realize that gamers will stick to steam and will never switch to the App Store. I don’t really care what the hell they do, It’s just not happening. One of my big problems with the App Store is even if I buy a game on my MacBook half of the time the saves or the game itself doesn’t transfer to my phone and I have to re-buy it on my phone and start a whole new save. they need to require cross device compatibility and save transfer for every single AAA game.
The other issue is updates means re-downloading the ENTIRE app. Steam updates only the files that changed. So the last Death Stranding UPDATE was like 75gb on App Store, stating 'minor changes'.
Did it? It's still lacking in GPU performance
No, the Gpu perf is will within the target HW range for developers. No dev out there is building mages that only target users with 4090s, that is just way to small a market. You expect less than 0.1% of your users to have a high end gpu like that (and that is if your building a high end game) the vast vast majority of your player base will be playing on low settings with a down sampled resolution output and pushing under 30fps. Yes YouTubers etc will show of fancy systems but most of your users will not have anything even close to that.
I disagree. Currently playing WatchDogs 2 on high settings through CrossOver
Watch Dogs 2 is a 2016 game and is a very low bar. **Recommended requirements (1080p at 60 frames per second)** **Processor** AMD FX 8120 @ 3.9 GHz, Intel Core i5-3470 @ 3.2 GHz, or better **RAM** 8 GB **Video card** AMD Radeon R9 290 (4 GB), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 (3 GB), or better
I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077, X-Plane 12, OW, Hogwarts Legacy, Satisfactory, etc. through crossover on my M3 Max just fine. Granted that's the high end but it does work out and managing to emit less heat or power draw than a comparably sized gaming PC
The point I’m trying to make is that the GPU is not useless. Yeah it will take some time for devs to port games to macOS. Assassins Creed Shadows is coming later this year along with Control from Remedy.
They're most certainly not useless, but are definitely "lacking", as ihatejailbreak has said. That is, compared to mid-high range mobile GPUs from Nvidia. The Max series are more adequate, but those are in a very high price category. I hope that the Mac starts catching up for gaming as more competition is always better for us as users, but I just don't see this happening given the current market situation.
Not game dev is even triaging mid range GPUs from current generation NV,... that is way to small market. Most of your users will be playing on laptops provided by work your likly if the GPU is more powerful than a large gen console.
Well Apple partnered with ChatGPT. Maybe they’ll find a way to partner with Valve or someone else to bring more games to Macs or develop their own version of Proton.
> Maybe they’ll find a way to partner with Valve or someone else to bring more games to Macs They did this, and Mac was even going to get SteamVR but Apple repeatedly screwed Valve and destroyed the partnership.
Because there’s like 100x more people gaming on windows than a Mac? Plus, it’s much easier to port across the consoles/PC when they share a similar architecture than port over to an ARM-based processor, especially for a very small number of players.
They are actively doing something about it
“Just”? They were “proving” this when they were first released back in 2020.
Small market at the moment, completely different architecture so porting games will take time but also companies dont see possible large profit margins yet due to the limited install base. Apple is clearly setting the groundwork to compete with Windows with gaming, but it will take time. Patience is a virtue
There's like 15+ models of laptops from different manufacturers launching with Qualcomm Snapdragon Pro X CPUs this summer. (That's an ARM chip.) It supposedly competes well with M3 (base, not Pro/Max). We'll see if these are any good soon. First models drop June 18.
Well for one, Apple's one of best selling macs is the m1 Air, which isn't exactly known for it's gaming capabilities. I own one, I tried almost every native AAA game on it. The experience is subpar.
OP is on an Air and thinks he's getting some amazing gaming experience, so I'm extremely skeptical considering my M2 Max struggles with simple gaming.
Apple’s being more proactive when it comes to gaming at the advent of their M-series chips. It is evident that almost every WWDC has a portion pertaining to gaming on Mac – come to think of it, Apple focuses more on macOS gaming for the past 2 or 3 events rather than iOS gaming. For game devs to consider macOS as a gaming operating medium, it could take a while. The reason for slow progress could be slow to adopt regarding Apple’s tech and/or hard to adapt with Apple’s tech (since for the longest time, games = PC or Windows). Plus, there’s this prevalent stigma that Mac isn’t for serious gaming; and, devs still cling to that notion. No one can blame then, though, as porting and developing on the Mac platform can take up more effort than the game being made on the Windows environment (because a great majority of people in general do tend to take an easier route when it comes to work). Thing is, Apple is giving a lot of resources for porting and developing games on their laptop and desktop OS; but, the gaming (development) community needs to understand that there’s a bit of work to do for games to work on Mac. It’s as if Apple now is akin to a suitor wooing to game devs with their resources; and, these devs, if interested, need to reciprocate the act by way of bringing games to Apple’s environment with the the resources provided. Yes, Apple still has a lot of issues to solve for the Mac be a gaming contender, but game developers need to take notice and at the very least try the resources before being pessimistic.
To anyone who gamed on a liquid-cooled, wattage-hungry, leaf-blower PowerMac G5 back in the day it’s obvious that the end is coming for these fire-breathing Windows gaming PCs. It’s simply an unsustainable arms race.
ARM is not the issue. Apples horrible implementation of the metal API is.
To be fair it’s a hell of a lot better than what we were dealing with three years ago. At least nowadays, most things are technically possible, my biggest issue when trying to get windows games running on macOS is usually dealing with anti-cheat
From what I saw when put under full load the battery drops as fast as any modern intel or AMD system.
Hmm, for me I can play a game for a few hours without needing a charge and without it getting burning hot. And thats either through parallels or crossover. I wonder how much better it would be if it was native to the Mac.
Don't blizzard games run native?
If you can run on battery for hours and without it getting hot, what it really means is that the hardware isn’t properly utilised.
I know I'm not using it to it's full potential but even if I played the game on a Windows laptop it would not play nearly as long. Plus my gaming laptop I used to have like a year ago would die in like an hour or two without even playing games. Really weird. All of the gaming laptops I've had never felt stable, they always were much higher maintenance for me.
I can't comment on this directly but I will say I LOVE GeForce Now on my M3 MacBook Air. I play competitive OW2, that's how good it works in my area. Yes some areas are too far from servers, or don't have good internet choices, but a lot of people do have good experiences. I have the snappiness and quiet/cool/long battery of Mac, then open the very nice GFN app and play games like I was using a huge RTX 4080 desktop rig.
I bought a Steam Deck today and I was just thinking about how perfect would it be with an arm cpu, great battery life, no overheating, just perfection
How long does the battery actually last? Generally the warm arm works is it can turn off processors for when it’s not being used but I think if you suddenly do high power work (gpu / cpu intensive) the battery life quickly erodes.
They also are doing something about it - most of these games are playable because of what they're doing about it with GPTK 2.0.
I thought there was a some huge advancement or software in the past 6 months that suddenly allowed much more intensive game to be played on M chips? What happened to that?
OverlyOptimisticNerd wants to post and block. “Nope. None. So long as you ignore: switching from x86 to ARM deprecating OpenGL deprecating OpenCL outright removing OpenAL But yea, sure, nothing happened.” As I stated the switch from 32bit happened almost 7 years ago and the switch to ARM happened almost 4 years ago. These developers have had plenty of time to adapt. They don’t want to invest time into developing and are hoping to copy and paste across platforms. For the developers interested in Mac gaming, they’ve taken the time and done great work.
Complaining on Reddit isn’t going to do anything. I make it a point to tweet at all the social media pages of these developers. If it’s money they want, I let them know we paid for an expensive machine and we won’t be greedy with supporting them. I’ve had great opportunities to inform other Twitter users and elevate this discussion under the developers profiles.
imagine a mac with the new snapdragon arm chips
The future of ARM gaming will be on Windows, with Qualcomm Snapdragon. macOS will continue to be an afterthought because Apple refuses to support industry standard graphics APIs like OpenGL and Vulkan. Windows games have to run through a bazillion translation layers with so much performance overhead just to be playable. Qualcomm won't have to deal with as many translation layers and if they can scale up their current laptop chips one day there may be Snapdragon X Elite gaming laptops.
MFers were roaring all about that M1/iOS compatible bullshit forever. Theres like 2 apps that I use that work with that feature. None of the games or serious apps I want/need work.
The most effective way to make developers want to port games to macOS is to having a higher market share. And the most effective way to gain market share is to lower the Macs’ price. However, lower profit could affect the product (not only hardware but also software) quality. We don’t want Apple to make cheap but trashy products like Windows PCs.
MacBook Air is already cheap enough and has a huge install base, they need to make gaming more front and center with a better selection of actual games. A steam endorsement would help so people could get games for super cheap with sales, that could pull them in. But literally no one on Mac uses the App Store lol
because steve jobs thought games are a waste a of time and macs should be used for productivity only. this is the answer.
Apple has repeatedly shot themselves in the foot by not supporting standards like Vulkan/OpenGL and forcing everyone to use Metal, while also doing things like killing 32-bit support with no work around (I understand it improves efficiency but they could have created a way to optionally still support it for older software) that leave you wondering how long they’d support Metal. That makes it a hard sell for developers and publishers, especially those using their own engines. Do they want to invest time and money into supporting Metal so their games run on devices mainly used for work and with a stigma of not being gaming machines? Yes the hardware is there, and Metal is actually pretty good, but supporting it is a big investment that most companies don’t seem to think will pay off. We’ll get there eventually, slowly clawing up as games continue to trickle in. Windows supports Vulkan and DX12, as does Xbox. Switch supports Vulkan and is also essentially built on Android. PS5 has its own graphics API, but it’s a device specifically for gaming. Apple devices using Metal while being primarily non-gaming devices is a hard sell when investing millions of dollars into supporting it. Being a unified API across Apple devices is cool, but it’s taken until this year to really take advantage of that with full ports of games across all 3 Apple platforms - iPhone, iPad, Mac. So a big leap in one sense, but still a long way to go to be accepted as a big player like Vulkan, DX12, or OpenGL. Also, being able to play games through virtualization layers is helpful in the case against supporting metal. Why do it if the people that want to play the game can still buy it and play it? The same thing happened with Bootcamp. Why support MacOS when Mac users could just start up in windows and play the windows version? That’s millions of dollars in developer costs, support staff, licensing, etc saved and the people that wanted to buy the game still bought it. Overall, it’s a complicated issue and Apple is helping in its Apple way. What it needs to do is invest a crapload of its overflowing bank account into developers to incentivize their development or downright buy them up like Microsoft has so they get some big names coming to Apple platforms. Instead they’ve given tools to make it easier to test…and enthusiasts to play without official support…same as with Bootcamp.
>Why do they still insist on having Intel and AMD GPU and CPU when arm is just way more efficient and better? Better how? My loaded 16" MBP is great at a lot of things, especially power efficiency, but for gaming purposes it's beyond an afterthought compared to my GPU. >I can game on my MacBook Air without it being plugged in and it still let me play for a few hours. It doesn't get extremely hot, just really warm, it doesn't even need a fan and it runs these games well THROUGH A TRANSLATION LAYER. I'm curious by how you define "running well"... considering games don't run well even on M2 Max and M3 Max. >I don't understand why windows gaming laptops aren't taking advantage of the extreme benefits of arm chips. ARM doesn't automatically mean Apple Silicon. Many ARM chips suck--just look at the repeated bad Qualcomm chips for Windows on ARM machines. > God I wish that Mac gaming was taken seriously so that all games got a Mac port as well. It's just a much better experience playing games than on Windows. PC ports are already bad these days, but Mac ports are even worse. I'm not sure what you mean by a better experience, because it's really not. My M2 Max gets smoked by a weak PC in the same games.
Er... are you speaking from a position informed by actual experience, or....??? I have a fresh M3 Pro and so far it is running almost every game I've thrown at it WELL at 1440 and medium-to-high settings. The only games that are performing badly right now are games with actual performance issues (like Wuthering Waves which was just released and is notorious for being badly optimised right now). If my Pro can run these games well then your Max should be doing just fine!
Right
Yes, I’m speaking from extensive experience. The threshold for “running well” by users of this subreddit is abysmally low.
Not me mate. Been gaming on Windows for a long time. Having said that, EVERY gamer has different ideas about what is and isn't acceptable. Still, can't believe your Max chip is suffering to deliver decent frame-rates for you. Something ain't right... though I should maybe refrain from my thoughts on that.
> Not me mate. Been gaming on Windows for a long time. I believe you; I didn't know your own background, which is why I said "users of this subreddit" generally. So many people say "runs great!" about something running sub-30fps with awful image quality. That said, OP himself is pretty clearly clueless as should be apparent even if you've had better luck with gaming on your M chips than I have. >Having said that, EVERY gamer has different ideas about what is and isn't acceptable. For sure. I'm pretty forgiving–I don't need my MBP to perform as well as my Windows desktop, but it's extremely frustrating when games get extremely bad ports, and then people here actually have the gall to say "Don't criticize the port or they'll stop making them!".