Having a dedicated GPU of any kind breaks the Apple Silicon Unified memory model in Metal. Or at least that is my understanding of @leman argument.
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A gamer's lament: Apple please let us game on the Mac!
- Thread starter groove-agent
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Quite contrary. Fully or primarily single player games like the latest Assassin's Creed and Ghost Recon titles, Doom Eternal, Hitman 1-3, Metal Gear Survive, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, or Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor all have elements of GaaS to varying degree.
Not saying you’re wrong overall, but Apple switched to Intel in 2005, and the instant that Boot Camp was revealed, I knew that MacOS native gaming would be (largely) dead.
Why would I buy a worse running MacOS game at full price, when I could buy the same, better running, game with dlc and full mod support for $20 on a Steam sale and run it under Windows on the same box?
Or, alternatively, get instant gratification playing a new game NOW using Boot Camp or wait two years to buy an inferior version on MacOS, adding insult to injury by running slower?
Boot Camp is no longer around. That’s a huge change.
If this also means that the gaming situation under MacOS is going to change, and if so, how and when, I have no idea. But the landscape is not the same.
Fair enough, and your skepticism is warranted. But I am optimistic for one simple reason - it’s the first time in 20 years that baseline Macs actually ship with gaming-capable hardware. This significantly expands the market. And game developers do take notice of this. I think pretty much every new game I was interested in recently has a Mac version (BG3, Humankind, Crusader Kings 2, Total War…)
Apple Silicon GPU programming model is based around UMA and zero-copy data sharing. Can’t have that with GPUs connected via an external bus. It doesn’t make any sense for Apple to tell the devs that they can rely on zero-copy behavior when coding their pro software and then kill that behavior on the most pro-level computer.
I don’t believe they will, for reasons outlined above.
Why not? Most Metal apps have to support both model anyway, every professional app needs to run on a Mac Pro with a discrete gpu at the moment, I don't think there is anything preventing Apple from using discrete GPUs with their arm CPU in the future. Unless they can scale their GPU to beat the equivalent AMD and Nvidia top cards.
True, but the Intel programming model is de-facto being phased out and Apple has been advising the devs to assume UMA on the newer machines. Not to mention that innovations in Metal have been limited to Apples own GPUs since last year.
The great thing about a unified programming model is that your software works on a wide range of hardware. The often overlooked but key benefit of Apple Silicon is hardware platform unification. One can for example develop an image editing engine using a Mac Pro and then ship the same code to an iOS app. The quality of the software will improve significantly in the coming years because of this.
Nothing on the technical level, sure, but they don’t have anything to gain by using discrete GPUs. On the other hand, using powerful integrated GPUs gives them a consistent programming model, unified capabilities as well as UMA.
If you instead refer to third-party GPUs, no chance. Why would they want to cripple their most powerful workstations? And why would they want to fragment their software ecosystem? Apple wants you to use the unique features of their GPUs, and third-party GPU support is an obstacle. I mean, would you code your video processing engine to take advantage of tile shaders and new simd shuffle+fill hardware if you know that half of your customers run AMD GPUs that simply doesn’t support these features? Most will probably just target the common ground (the AMD GPU), leaving the potential of Apples‘s GPU underused. This is especially deadly to Apple given the fact that they will probably always lack in bandwidth compared to third-party GPUs. They need the devs to take the jump to the new smarter programming models to succeed.
By the way, these considerations is why I don’t share the enthusiasm Linux folks have regarding Proton. Sure, it’s a short-term victory, but the likely price will be the very existence of native Linux games. Why bother using Vulkan and texting for Linux if you can just develop for DX12 and Windows and make the community sort out the edge cases? Long term it might even lead to problems for Vulkan…
Of course they can. Apples GPU IP is around 2-3 times more power efficient than Nvidia or AMD, and that’s just G13. We have no idea what kind of surprises they have for us this year.
You sound like you are advocating them stopping support for non Apple Silicon systems. That would force the tradition you are speaking of and answer the other persons concern about having to support discreet GPUs anyways.
Hitman 1-3 (I'm talking about the new ones, if that wasn't clear) have the time-limited Elusive Targets, Escalation Contracts, and Challenges, which all are only playable on the game's online servers, and they are still adding new Escalations at least for Hitman 3.
Animal Crossing has time-limited events giving out event related objects, in which you can only take part when the game is connected to the online servers.
Middle-earth: SoW had loot-boxes giving out gear and/or troops (they have changed the economy by now so that there no longer are paid microtransactions, though), which only were available when you were connected to the game's online servers.
When IOI shuts down the Hitman servers for good, all these Elusive Targets, challenges and Escalations are gone. When Nintendo shuts down the AC:NH servers, all these seasonal events are gone.
Whatever you bought are not "complete packages", but clients for the games' online functionalities which will go away completely once the servers are shut down.
This is what makes the games live services.
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That's the plan, no? Of course, Intel systems will still be supported for the next 5-6 years, but that's about it. And most major pro apps have already committed to building their engines with dedicated Apple Silicon support. In a couple of years, if you are writing new software, it probably won't make much sense to even support Intel Macs — Apple Silicon ones are going to be much more performant and easier to develop for anyway.
Then the obvious question becomes, why bother updating the MPX modules with RDNA2 GPU's if no one should be developing software for them.
Because there are plenty of users that will be relying on Intel Macs for years to come, and because why not? Money is always good
In fact, wasn't Apple supposed to release another Intel Mac Pro? But that will be the end of it.The dude is delusional. Games as a service is the future and as far as I can tell game streaming is next.
The major media companies have seen the profits of subscription models and the added bonus of people no longer having any control over their content. It’s the end stage of media now.
Ugh, I sure hope not. That's a worrying picture you are painting.
cope, Fallout 76, Cyberpunk 2077, No Mans Sky and soon to be more were released in beta and only on paper were “full releases”. In fact, DLC itself has become cut content from the original game and packaged as expansions day 1.
This doesn’t compare to new content made long after the release of functional and fun games.
It’s happening now. Stadia died, but GeForce now lives, and I’m sure the service will take off when Valve does the same. They’re in the store perfect position to do so. Streaming services for video and music paved the way for this.
All of this to defend lazy game devs? Damn dude, you need a better less exploitative hobby. Maybe you define “imaginative experiences” as being sold gambling mechanics as buggy releases, but I don’t and feel all the better for it.
If you’re frustrated with the system and given up hope then go to Windows and don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.
Doesnt GFN require you to buy the content first before you can play it remotely? That is different than say xCloud or Luna right?
"Games as a service" is a decades-old business model. It works well with multi-player games and to a degree with gameplay-focused single-player games but not at all with story-focused single-player games. Firaxis can sell new content and game mechanics for Civilization games for ~5 years, but eventually the game becomes too complex and impossible to balance, and they have to start from scratch with a new game. Something like XCOM is already too story-heavy for the same model to work.
The proper term for entertainment software with microtransactions and loot boxes is "drug", not "game". That business model is deeply unethical and exploitative.
My dude you’re the guy attached to games at the hip. You really need to find a different hobby.
You jumped into this thread with a childish tantrum about how your old games no longer work with Apple’s new architecture and began crying about how no games are released for Mac.
Also I double post because I’m too lazy to edit on mobile most of the time. Feel free to deal with it.
My impression is that the most significant thing Apple did to increase market share was to go Intel and create Bootcamp. Now that is dumped, so whatever focus Apple had arguable was not expanding itself as a gaming platform, those benefits were coincidental. At the price they have historically charged for their hardware, that was never going to happen anyway. ?