A gamer's lament: Apple please let us game on the Mac!

[marksatt]

If anyone tries to contact Apple about a bug, there's a giant stone wall and nothing gets fixed until the next point update, if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, it may never get fixed.

That's why developers don't target macOS. It has everything to do with Apple's attitude. And until Apple's attitude changes, there will never be the swath of games on macOS like there is for Windows or even Linux.

This. So very, very much this. Painfully so in fact.

I've not logged in for ages, largely because I'm no longer involved in developing Mac games at all and have moved back to the dark side to carry on my career, but this comment has to be seconded. I really don't miss dealing with Apple's attitude to games - they were never really serious about games as anything but fancy Keynote stage demos and their management would lose all interest once the Keynote was over.

The days where having the same CPU architecture really played a major role are long gone. Games are no longer written in Assembly. If the appropriate compiler support and compatible middleware is available, porting a game from one architecture to another is not much of a problem.

Porting between CPU architectures does still require a bit of care, but many engines have already shipped on ARM as well as x86 so it isn't too much of an issue in practice.

Bigger issues are Apple dropping crossplatform standards in favour of proprietary solutions (i.e. Metal)

Metal really did hold a lot of promise initially and for a while Apple were working hard to catch up, but their absolute determination to not support features on Mac prior to them being available on iOS was a huge hindrance. The Metal API is actually very nice but as thejadedmonkey mentions Apple aren't responsive.

Apple's declining market share in the gaming sector: on Steam, Macs have been dropping from >10% to <3% long before the switch to Arm based CPUs has been announced.

The declining marketshare on Steam justifies the big AAA publishers not investing in Mac releases, it doesn't make financial sense for them when they can make billions on the traditional platforms. Turning that around would require Apple investing billions of dollars just as Microsoft did to launch the Xbox & 360 and clearly they aren't interested in doing so.

This has less to do with the hardware capabilities and more with the restrictions imposed by Apple: apps Apple TV are only allowed to have a certain size and have* to be playable with that stupid remote. You can't squeeze a modern triple-A title into this lousy amount of gigabytes Apple allows for the apps.

(* Or at least had to. I'm not completely sure if Apple has lifted that particular restriction by now.)

The remote restriction when a year or two ago, but it was too little too late. If they wanted AppleTV to be a games console they'd have packed in a controller from the start and had sufficient RAM/storage for real games but they never did. It isn't a games console and isn't going to become one.

To be fair there is a lot of asset duplication that probably wouldn’t be needed on a platform with solid state storage.

Asset duplication started when we were developing for the optical drives of the XB360 & PS3 and has slowly been going away through the XBONE/PS4 generation as even on HDDs it is less important. Games released for PC this year probably aren't doing much of it and their sizes are still massively more than what AppleTV makes available.

 

[diamond.g]

This. So very, very much this. Painfully so in fact.

I've not logged in for ages, largely because I'm no longer involved in developing Mac games at all and have moved back to the dark side to carry on my career, but this comment has to be seconded. I really don't miss dealing with Apple's attitude to games - they were never really serious about games as anything but fancy Keynote stage demos and their management would lose all interest once the Keynote was over.

Porting between CPU architectures does still require a bit of care, but many engines have already shipped on ARM as well as x86 so it isn't too much of an issue in practice.

Metal really did hold a lot of promise initially and for a while Apple were working hard to catch up, but their absolute determination to not support features on Mac prior to them being available on iOS was a huge hindrance. The Metal API is actually very nice but as thejadedmonkey mentions Apple aren't responsive.

The declining marketshare on Steam justifies the big AAA publishers not investing in Mac releases, it doesn't make financial sense for them when they can make billions on the traditional platforms. Turning that around would require Apple investing billions of dollars just as Microsoft did to launch the Xbox & 360 and clearly they aren't interested in doing so.

The remote restriction when a year or two ago, but it was too little too late. If they wanted AppleTV to be a games console they'd have packed in a controller from the start and had sufficient RAM/storage for real games but they never did. It isn't a games console and isn't going to become one.

Asset duplication started when we were developing for the optical drives of the XB360 & PS3 and has slowly been going away through the XBONE/PS4 generation as even on HDDs it is less important. Games released for PC this year probably aren't doing much of it and their sizes are still massively more than what AppleTV makes available.

In that case wouldn't textures be the next large consumer of space?
I haven't updated this game in a while on my Mac but 60GB of textures seems excessive no (game is 90GB on disc)?

 

[thejadedmonkey]

In that case wouldn't textures be the next large consumer of space?
I haven't updated this game in a while on my Mac but 60GB of textures seems excessive no (game is 90GB on disc)? View attachment 1929995

Not really. I mean it is, but it's also pretty normal these days. Horizon Zero Dawn is 100gb, and even Diablo 2 resurrected (a 22 year old game with updated graphics) is 30gb.

 

[marksatt]

In that case wouldn't textures be the next large consumer of space?
I haven't updated this game in a while on my Mac but 60GB of textures seems excessive no (game is 90GB on disc)? View attachment 1929995

BG3 clearly isn't using asset duplication as it is packaging all assets by type - with asset duplication you have to package assets into paks based on location so they are streamed in together - the whole point is that they are physically together on the optical disk so they can be read linearly without moving the read head.

Textures are now very large (>=4k) and are only block compressed, which is far less space efficient than something like JPEG compression, in order to be efficient to decode on the GPU, so as games have gotten bigger with greater visual variety they have ballooned in total size.

Virtual textures can be even larger as they are never entirely loaded into VRAM, only a subset of pages are, and many more games are using them to handle texturing the world.

 

[diamond.g]

Not really. I mean it is, but it's also pretty normal these days. Horizon Zero Dawn is 100gb, and even Diablo 2 resurrected (a 22 year old game with updated graphics) is 30gb.

BG3 clearly isn't using asset duplication as it is packaging all assets by type - with asset duplication you have to package assets into paks based on location so they are streamed in together - the whole point is that they are physically together on the optical disk so they can be read linearly without moving the read head.

Textures are now very large (>=4k) and are only block compressed, which is far less space efficient than something like JPEG compression, in order to be efficient to decode on the GPU, so as games have gotten bigger with greater visual variety they have ballooned in total size.

Virtual textures can be even larger as they are never entirely loaded into VRAM, only a subset of pages are, and many more games are using them to handle texturing the world.

Very informative.

 

[groove-agent]

As it should. WoW Classic should run like a beast there also, even with Rosetta2, because it's from 2004. But WoW alone doesn't make Mac gaming suddenly viable. That's just tokenism.



It isn't the OS itself, but the rather Byzantine workings of XCode and a piss-poor implementation of any OpenGL, Metal included, that truly prevents this. And the good cross platform gaming mechanism is owned by EPIC (Fortnite!).

I tried WoW Classic and regular (retail?). It's an interesting metric as it runs on both platforms. WoW runs faster on my M1Pro MBP than my gaming PC. However my gaming PC is 4-5 years old and the GPU (Nvidia RTX2070) is a couple years old.

 

[Homy]

"On Mac, there is an additional layer of complexity when trying to use VKD3D for DirectX 12 games. That layer of complexity is Metal. Metal is Apple’s low-level, low-overhead, hardware-accelerated graphic and compute shader API. It was introduced back in 2014, and was designed specifically for Apple's GPUs. Metal does provide support for some other GPUs, but because it was geared for Apple hardware it is different from OpenGL, Vulkan, or D3D12 and its predecessors.

In general, Metal does tessellation differently, and is missing geometry shaders and transform feedback. Specific to DirectX 12 and Metal, there is an issue with limits on resources. Generally, games need access to at least one million shader resource views (SRVs). Access to that many SRVs requires resource binding at the Tier 2 level. Metal only supports about 500,000 resources per argument buffer, so Tier 2 resource binding isn’t possible. Metal’s limit of half a million is sufficient for Vulkan descriptor indexing, but not for D3D12. This limitation means CrossOver Mac can't support Tier 2 binding and therefore a lot of DirectX 12 games will not run.

Another problem is that DirectX 12 uses GPU virtual addresses (VAs) to refer to resources for several things; most significantly ray tracing. According to Vulkan, their buffer device address (BDA) extension allows for the creation of complex data structures required for ray tracing, and useful for DirectX 12 porting. However, Apple has yet to add support for VAs or BDAs, insisting that existing argument buffer support is sufficient for what games want to do. While this may be technically true, it requires game designers to make a targeted effort to run on Metal. It is difficult for translation layers (i.e., MoltenVK or VKD3D) to support BDAs/GPU VAs on top of argument buffers, because argument buffers require you to encode the buffer reference into a separate argument buffer, which makes it more comparable to a Vulkan descriptor set or a DirectX 12 descriptor heap.

Considering these obstacles, we believe support for DirectX 12 on Mac could arrive as soon as CrossOver 23."

We're Getting There — CrossOver Support for DirectX 12 | CodeWeavers Blog

By All Blogs | CrossOver support for DirectX 12 on Linux and Mac.

www.codeweavers.com

 

[Huntn]

"On Mac, there is an additional layer of complexity when trying to use VKD3D for DirectX 12 games. That layer of complexity is Metal. Metal is Apple’s low-level, low-overhead, hardware-accelerated graphic and compute shader API. It was introduced back in 2014, and was designed specifically for Apple's GPUs. Metal does provide support for some other GPUs, but because it was geared for Apple hardware it is different from OpenGL, Vulkan, or D3D12 and its predecessors.

In general, Metal does tessellation differently, and is missing geometry shaders and transform feedback. Specific to DirectX 12 and Metal, there is an issue with limits on resources. Generally, games need access to at least one million shader resource views (SRVs). Access to that many SRVs requires resource binding at the Tier 2 level. Metal only supports about 500,000 resources per argument buffer, so Tier 2 resource binding isn’t possible. Metal’s limit of half a million is sufficient for Vulkan descriptor indexing, but not for D3D12. This limitation means CrossOver Mac can't support Tier 2 binding and therefore a lot of DirectX 12 games will not run.

Another problem is that DirectX 12 uses GPU virtual addresses (VAs) to refer to resources for several things; most significantly ray tracing. According to Vulkan, their buffer device address (BDA) extension allows for the creation of complex data structures required for ray tracing, and useful for DirectX 12 porting. However, Apple has yet to add support for VAs or BDAs, insisting that existing argument buffer support is sufficient for what games want to do. While this may be technically true, it requires game designers to make a targeted effort to run on Metal. It is difficult for translation layers (i.e., MoltenVK or VKD3D) to support BDAs/GPU VAs on top of argument buffers, because argument buffers require you to encode the buffer reference into a separate argument buffer, which makes it more comparable to a Vulkan descriptor set or a DirectX 12 descriptor heap.

Considering these obstacles, we believe support for DirectX 12 on Mac could arrive as soon as CrossOver 23."

We're Getting There — CrossOver Support for DirectX 12 | CodeWeavers Blog

By All Blogs | CrossOver support for DirectX 12 on Linux and Mac.

www.codeweavers.com

“Support for D12 on Mac” would represent a performance hit of some kind?

 

[diamond.g]

“Support for D12 on Mac” would represent a performance hit of some kind?

Depending on the D3D12 features used, that is possible.

 

[Aesthetica]

What with all the reasons listed in this thread for the Mac being a pain for developers, I wonder why any companies bother porting their games over.

Why are the Tomb Raider games on Mac for example? They're among the biggest AAA games on the platform – why the decision to bring it to the Mac when I assume it represents a tiny percentage of sales - why bother? Anyone got any insight?

 

[diamond.g]

What with all the reasons listed in this thread for the Mac being a pain for developers, I wonder why any companies bother porting their games over.

Why are the Tomb Raider games on Mac for example? They're among the biggest AAA games on the platform – why the decision to bring it to the Mac when I assume it represents a tiny percentage of sales - why bother? Anyone got any insight?

Very few "big" games are done on Mac without the help of a porting house. Even fewer still are done at the same time the Windows release is. It mostly comes down the the cost to port versus how much money they stand to make over time.

We like to think that, because Apple makes a ton of money off games in the iOS app store, Mac users are also willing to spend a ton of money on games, but it doesn't seem like that is the case. Apple has never made supporting iOS games on macOS any easier than it is right now, but it doesn't seem like those iOS devs think it is worthwhile.

 

[JMacHack]

What with all the reasons listed in this thread for the Mac being a pain for developers, I wonder why any companies bother porting their games over.

From what I recall most ports are handled by outside companies like Feral and Aspyr. The initial devs likely farm out the porting because it’s cheaper than an in-house port and boosts sales numbers after the initial six month period where most games sell well.

Also, most money in games no longer comes from sales of the game’s themselves, but through micro transactions. If initial sales are positive it’s more likely that a port will be made to get people into the in game store.

And, being that there are much more iOS users than MacOS users, and that iOS users tend to spend more, that means an iOS port is much more lucrative than a MacOS port.

Which is funny to me that Apple knocked one of their own platforms down a peg. The pecking order seems to be: consoles > pc >> iOS > Android >> Mac/Linux (Valve’s efforts with Linux will either bump it up or down in the future)

If I were head of a game company, and I wanted to maximize ROI, a Mac port wouldn’t be on my radar unless the game is wildly successful. If said game is very successful (microtransaction wise), I’d greenlight a Mac port. But only after a few months of sales figures come in.

Of course this is all spitballing, I don’t work in the industry and have pretty much sworn off gaming because of the predatory practices. But I think this is the most rational answer.

 

[JMacHack]

Mac users are also willing to spend a ton of money on games, but it doesn't seem like that is the case.

I still think it’s a chicken and egg problem, “Macs no game” has been a meme for two decades now, and Mac buyers take that into account when buying a Mac. So Mac users either don’t game, or are affluent enough to buy or build a gaming pc.

“Macs no game” -> people who game don’t buy Macs -> no games released for Mac -> “Mac no game”

 

[Homy]

From what I recall most ports are handled by outside companies like Feral and Aspyr. The initial devs likely farm out the porting because it’s cheaper than an in-house port.

Aspyr's been out of the picture for some years, especially since they were bought by Embracer. Feral has shifted more towards other platforms like iOS, Android and Switch. It's understandable but sad. Gearbox ported BL3 in-house so it seems to be cheaper but the Mac port feels also cheap and very bad.

 

[diamond.g]

Aspyr's been out of the picture for some years, especially since they were bought by Embracer. Feral has shifted more towards other platforms like iOS, Android and Switch. It's understandable but sad. Gearbox ported BL3 in-house so it seems to be cheaper but the Mac port feels also cheap and very bad.

BL3 uses UE4 so I wonder what add-ons or extras it has that make the supposedly easy flip a switch for macOS support mess up so badly.

 

[JMacHack]

BL3 uses UE4 so I wonder what add-ons or extras it has that make the supposedly easy flip a switch for macOS support mess up so badly.

Randy Pitchford.

 

[diamond.g]

Randy Pitchford.

I mean I guess we shouldn't complain since he even let his team flip the switch at all, versus just making it Windows only. Right?

 

[star-affinity]

We like to think that, because Apple makes a ton of money off games in the iOS app store, Mac users are also willing to spend a ton of money on games, but it doesn't seem like that is the case. Apple has never made supporting iOS games on macOS any easier than it is right now, but it doesn't seem like those iOS devs think it is worthwhile.

I think one problem is that the ones who like to game usually want graphics hardware performance that Apple historically hasn't been offering for anything except their most expensive machines.

I guess games like Tomb Raider will get a big enough audience even on the Mac side of things, but I think we'd have even more developers focusing on the Mac if more powerful graphics hardware – that are closer to what many have on the Windows side of things – would get into a wider scope of Mac models. This seem to be a possibility now when Apple is doing their own CPU and GPU. But I'll guess we'll see.

If a desktop computer with a replaceable graphics card is only found in the costly Mac Pro I think the people wanting to play heavier AAA games will stay on PC/Windows. A the same time the PS5 and Xbox doesn't offer replaceable graphics cards, so if Apple could offer something closer to that performance in a reasonably priced package I think more ”console class” games could reach macOS.

Like I've said before; I think Apple's SoC energy efficiency is so good I think Apple really should focus on getting more people to game on their computer hardware.

 

[Flint Ironstag]

I still think it’s a chicken and egg problem, “Macs no game” has been a meme for two decades now, and Mac buyers take that into account when buying a Mac. So Mac users either don’t game, or are affluent enough to buy or build a gaming pc.

“Macs no game” -> people who game don’t buy Macs -> no games released for Mac -> “Mac no game”

Apple is big enough to solve chicken & egg. I sure as hell am not waiting on them anymore. Been enjoying VR since 2017.

 

[JMacHack]

Apple is big enough to solve chicken & egg. I sure as hell am not waiting on them anymore. Been enjoying VR since 2017.

I don’t believe it. The core gaming audience is actively hostile to Apple, any attempt to change that would be met with severe resistance.

 

[Irishman]

Apple is big enough to solve chicken & egg. I sure as hell am not waiting on them anymore. Been enjoying VR since 2017.

What is your platform of choice for VR gaming?

 

[diamond.g]

I don’t believe it. The core gaming audience is actively hostile to Apple, any attempt to change that would be met with severe resistance.

They could pull a Tencent or Embracer Group and just start buying studios (the ultimate troll would be buying one of the two aforementioned companies). Eventually when you own it all folks will show up, right?

 

[JMacHack]

They could pull a Tencent or Embracer Group and just start buying studios (the ultimate troll would be buying one of the two aforementioned companies). Eventually when you own it all folks will show up, right?

I really don’t see that going over well, but it is theoretically possible. It might run afoul of regulatory bodies too.

 

[diamond.g]

I really don’t see that going over well, but it is theoretically possible. It might run afoul of regulatory bodies too.

Why would regulatory bodies intervene? MS bought ZeniMax and no one blinked an eye, why would Apple be different.

 

[JMacHack]

Why would regulatory bodies intervene? MS bought ZeniMax and no one blinked an eye, why would Apple be different.

Just throwing **** against the wall. I have no idea, but I can’t imagine Apple buying a shitton of companies to be the only big player would go well for them.