You're simply wrong! Although you're right about some others being Apple Arcade games which I didn't notice at first, Myst, Total War: Rome Remastered, Baldur's Gate 3, Disco Elysium, Total War: Warhammer III, Path of Exile, EVE Online, Luna, Starman, Red's Kingdom, The Pillar, World of Warcraft, Warzone 2100, GZDoom, Big Journey to Home, Open TTD, Pilgrims, Spacebase Startopia and Vendetta online are not "iPad ports" for example. That's 19, more than five.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
A gamer's lament: Apple please let us game on the Mac!
- Thread starter groove-agent
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
You're simply wrong! Although you're right about some others being Apple Arcade games which I didn't notice at first, Myst, Total War: Rome Remastered, Baldur's Gate 3, Disco Elysium, Total War: Warhammer III, Path of Exile, EVE Online, Luna, Starman, Red's Kingdom, The Pillar, World of Warcraft, Warzone 2100, GZDoom, Big Journey to Home, Open TTD, Pilgrims, Spacebase Startopia and Vendetta online are not "iPad ports" for example. That's 19, more than five.
Of the top 15 graphics cards:
• Nine are Nvidia GTX
• Five models are Nvidia RTX
-- One of those from the RTX 30 series
• One AMD Radeon RX (580)
So, the M series SoC should tempt gamers and game developers alike?
Sincerely, thoughts?
I think it should, since there's a clear path going forward with Metal as the graphics API and Apple's ARM-based processor – not only for Macs but the rest of Apple's hardware platforms.
The M1 optimized games I've tried – for example The Last Campfire – seem to run pretty well without stutter (60 fps) even in high resolution. Not a too demanding game perhaps, but still.
And the M1 is of course just the beginning. If graphics performance keeps improving in a good way (which it likely will) I think we will see more demanding "AAA" games make the way to macOS. Also, Apple will of course need to continue to improve the Metal and graphics drivers, which I also expect will happen.
As long as performance of a game is at least near its Windows counterpart on similar hardware (not so easy to directly compare now with Apple SoC = no AMD nor Nvidia graphics and no Intel CPU) I think things will be good. Historically the difference has been too much in Windows' favor.
Last edited:
I actually did not count them just wanted to point out that there are many apple arcade ones on there.
It is still a surprising low number considering that it has been out for nearly 1 year and some had developer kit for like another year before that.
Anyway will be interesting to see how it goes in the future.
Developing new games and porting them usually takes 3-5 years. When it comes to porting existing Mac games to Apple Silicon I understand why developers/porting houses take their time. One reason is Rosetta 2 speed. Last time native ports were much more needed because Rosetta 1 was so slow. It is much better now because Apple has implemented x86 features directly into the M1. This makes Rosetta 2 so fast it sometimes is faster than a native Intel app. Some apps/games also don't gain much speed or any at all with a native M1 port. There are already several examples.
Another reason is the upcoming M1X and M2 with 16-32 GPU cores or more. The current problem with bad performance in games is not Rosetta but M1 8-core GPU. Although many larger games still may lack good performance on M1 developers know that Macs in the near future, as near as the next month, will have 2-4 times better graphics performance. It means you should be able to run Borderlands 3 at 1440p ultra settings at 60 fps with 32 GPU cores in Rosetta. There wouldn't be much need for porting existing games with such performance.
One example is Feral. They have tested their existing games and ensured that they run fine. These games will fly on the future Macs for many years. For that reason they have decided to put their efforts on new native ports for Apple Silicon. As you can see Total War: Rome Remastered already has native M1 support and so will Total War: Warhammer III.
"For now we intend that all new Feral releases will offer native support for both new Apple hardware and older, Intel-based Macs. Our goal is to accommodate as many Mac gamers as possible for as long as it is technically feasible and commercially viable."
I think that's the path many developers have taken. People shouldn't focus so much on status quo and should instead have some patience.
Last edited:
The M1 has no x86 instructions. It is the Aarch64 instruction set with a few undocumented customized instructions but there are no indications that those have anything to do with the x86/x86-64 ISA. One thing Apple did do is add a mode to change the memory operations to use the x86 memory ordering called total store ordering or TSO. This is an x86 optimization but nothing to do with x86 instructions. Rosetta 2 works by translating x86-64 binary opcodes into Aarch64 instructions at initial installation and first time run and stores those translations in cache for later reuse.
Well pardon me for my misuse of terms since I'm no CPU engineer but I think you know very well what I meant. I even linked to the article where it exactly talks about the memory management you write about. It also mentions "speeding up JavaScript execution, retaining and releasing memory faster, and its ability to also translate apps that contain just-in-time compilers. All these reasons make Rosetta translate faster and more optimized.
Sorry but there has been a misconception for while that Apple has optimized Rosetta 2 because they have x86 instructions in their Arm SoC. Just trying to correct the record.
And for the record, no I didn't know what you meant.
Okay, do you have a source for it not being so? In my ordinary life "instructions" means to tell something/someone to do something or work in a certain way but I understand that it may not be the right technical term in the technical world.
And for the record I think you did understand what I meant, otherwise you wouldn't correct me, especially when I linked to a technical article.
And for the record I think you did understand what I meant, otherwise you wouldn't correct me, especially when I linked to a technical article.
Instructions, when it comes to CPUs, has a pretty specific meaning. Again, I didn't know if you understood that or not. I was trying to stop a meme that I see regularly before it proliferated.
You wouldn't be the first person to link to a technical article that didn't support your supposition. I'm not sure why you seem offended. I merely corrected what seemed to be a technical misunderstanding. It wasn't personal.
Metal is not mimicking DX11, the custom OpenGL API Sony provides is. That doesn’t mean that Apple couldn’t do the same, they probably could.
That’s for compiling MSL on Windows isn’t it? It still has to be MSL.There's also:
Metal Developer Tools on Windows Offer New Gaming Opportunities
Game developers are now able to more easily develop games for Apple devices using Windows machines, thanks to a new set of Metal developer tools...www.macrumors.com
Not sure. I’d guess the difference between porting 11 and 12 is not that big, but porting in general is.
Let me exaggerate, OpenGL is dead. Apple did the right thing for their ecosystem. Even if they stuck to modern OpenGL or Vulkan, there’s still more to porting things over. It’s all in the money. MacOS is less than 3% of the computer gaming market and Apple likes to break things with every new macOS version (so every year) which means games might not work anymore and developers have to provide patches, sometimes minor ones, sometimes major. As long as there is no serious money to be made on macOS, developers won’t bother. Or their games are so simple and based on Unity/Unreal, that they just flip a switch.
Okay so you don't have a source? I wasn't offended much personally but it's a bit tiresome when someone seem to miss/ignore the whole point of one's post and focus on a minor detail that doesn't actually make a difference for the whole argument. My main point was the speed of Rosetta 2 and why game developers don't port existing games to Apple Silicon and for the technical details about the speed I linked to an article. Call it what you want.
This game – Windows and consoles only:
www.playdeathsdoor.com
Seems worthy to come to macOS.
Maybe it will…
Edit:
See now it's based on the Unity engine – which most of the games in Apple Arcade are – so shouldn't bee too much hindering the game to come to Apple platforms. But like many have mentioned, if the sales won't be big enough the developers probably won't bother. That's why Apple's computer offerings has to become more viable for gamers.
Death's Door | Out Now on PC, Xbox Series S/X, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, and Nintendo Switch
Reaping souls of the dead and punching a clock might get monotonous but it’s honest work for a Crow. The job gets lively when your assigned soul is stolen and you must track down a desperate thief to a realm untouched by death - where creatures grow far past their expiry and overflow with greed...
Seems worthy to come to macOS.
Maybe it will…
Edit:
See now it's based on the Unity engine – which most of the games in Apple Arcade are – so shouldn't bee too much hindering the game to come to Apple platforms. But like many have mentioned, if the sales won't be big enough the developers probably won't bother. That's why Apple's computer offerings has to become more viable for gamers.
Last edited:
chicken- egg problem,That's why Apple's computer offerings has to become more viable for gamers.
Gamers don’t buy Macs because they have no games
Games aren’t made for Mac because there’s no Gamers.
True, but a good start is giving more powerful graphics hardware (and a good graphics API) to people.
I see you points fully, but I still think things can change. Apple Arcade is a mixed bag, but I think that has a lot to do with the games being target for mobile first and Mac second. Which shows – many of the games on Apple Arcade don't feel at home on a Mac; the mouse cursor is often visible during game play so one has to manually tuck it away from view and there's often no graphics options one would expect in a ”non-mobile” computer game. There are some exceptions, though.
But we'll see what happens down the road. When it comes to gaming on a Mac it doesn't end with Apple Arcade.
Valve is finally moving forward? Maybe, not sure if it's just an update for use in Rosetta or natively on Apple Silicon. Encrypted Application Tickets are used to verify a user's identity between the user's game client and a secure server. libsteam_api.dylib provides both the x86 and x64 version of the Steam API.
Steam SDK 1.52 Sep 14
. Added i386/x86_64/arm64 universal builds of libsdkencryptedappticket.dylib and libsteam_api.dylib
Steam SDK 1.52 Sep 14
. Added i386/x86_64/arm64 universal builds of libsdkencryptedappticket.dylib and libsteam_api.dylib
Last edited:
I used to be a huge Valve fan, but gradually became more disillusioned with them. The company is a shell of what it used to be.
And the amount of projects that Valve has started and abandoned is legendary. Many many things with huge potential had been uncompleted because of internal dysfunction
Ex-Valve employee describes ruthless internal politics at 'self-organizing' companies
He doesn't name the company in question, but it doesn't take any stretching to figure out who he's talking about in cases.
Valve has no more 'Half-Life' writers left
Marc Laidlaw's departure from Valve last year was a shock. The author was responsible for single-handedly writing both Half-Life and Half-Life 2, and worked as the story lead on the latter's two episodic sequels. Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw, co-writers on Half-Life 2: Episode One and Episode...
web.archive.org
Valve reportedly fires more employees as part of 'great cleansing'
The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts.
Gabe Newell admits ‘childish’ Valve employees egg on Half-Life 3 rumors
Half-Life 3 is a mythological beast. Most people know it’s not real, but you’ll never convince a handful of dedicated investigators who pour over every blurry photo and alleged Gabe Newell footprints found in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. Now, Valve is confirming that some of its employees...
And just to get hl:alyx out the door, they had to abandon their famous “work on what you want” policy.
I for one, have no confidence in Valve to see projects through.
Just took a look at the ”New and Trending” list on Steam – all games available for macOS.
Same on the ”Top Sellers” and ”Popular Upcoming” tabs:
Same on the ”Top Sellers” and ”Popular Upcoming” tabs:
Last edited: