Are you arguing that the current architecture Apple uses on their MacBook Pro isn’t worth being used to game on?
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Apple CAN’T do AAA gaming [Merged Megathread]
- Thread starter Admiralbison
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No, not at all. It is already capable of handling these demands and will continue to improve in that regard. But it's not specifically optimized for gaming, and it shouldn't be.
It doesn't need to be. It's pretty well set up for 3d workloads, the software side is where the optimisation needs to happen and to be honest its amazing how well ports run as it is. Nvidia and AMD are releasing game specific drivers 2-3 times per month to fix glitches and improve performance.
3d apps on the Apple Silicon Macs just run pretty well as is.
There are many ways to "focus on gaming". Apple is certainly "focusing on gaming" in the sense that they now build computers that work great for gaming — they put a lot of effort in developing gaming capable hardware and software. In fact, their currently have the fastest gaming GPUs per watt in the world. At the same time, Apple has no interest in marketing their hardware for the mainstream gaming social stratum, which is also fine.
Apple wants to make a premium computer that works for everybody. This includes gaming obviously. They are not interested in making a computer that is only good for gaming, and it's very obvious from the $$$$ they are pouring into their gaming-grade hardware that they are also not interested in making a computer that is bad at gaming.
BTW, Apple's mainstream gaming Mac is the MacBook Air.
I'm not an expert on this topic, but I'm skeptical of your optimism that die-hard gamers will love it as is. These people will go over to Phoronix and have 1,000 page discussions about benchmarks comparing platforms.
Of course it is. G13 is an extremely capable gaming GPU and Apple Silicon architecture is insanely good for games. Superb single-core performance, best in class vector processing, huge caches, unified hardware platform over a wide range of devices — that architecture is any gamedev's dream.
This kinda proves my point. I don't want to deal with this **** while using my Macbook Pro.
I don't know and don't care. But there must be something, which is why you see topics titled "Apple CAN’T do AAA gaming and sorely needs to employ game guru leads."
High-end games, were they to exist, would run fine on Macs, just like all of the pro software runs fine on PCs right now for the majority of creative professionals in the world. This pigeonholing of general-purpose computers into defined roles is weird.
And you don't have to. Because it's an entirely different ecosystem and entirely different culture.
"Die hard gamers" (by which I take it you mean people who spend >$500 on a GPU alone for a PC) are like 5-10% of the market, tops. They're largely irrelevant.
Now we're going in circles. The current focus, for users of Mac products, is the right one. Whatever goes into "competing in the gaming market" entails, I want Apple to stay as unfocused on it as they have been.
And as I have said, I don't know what that specifically means. Just like I don't know what would be involved in employing gaming gurus. Wouldn't it mean focusing on something different?
AAA games take multiple years to develop. M1 Macs are like... 12 months old.
Yeah Apple doesnt do graphics driver updates outside of system updates. They expect developers to “code things right the first time”. That and their API doesn’t have to run on a wide range of hardware so there are less odd things the byte code compilers (Metal has an equivalent to DXIL right?) can get wrong.
I use my phone for making phone calls, and my MBP for computing.
And yes, it bothers me that Apple is focused on TV,
That doesn’t explain why Genshin Impact is missing on macOS or why Call of Duty Mobile isn’t available.
Genshin Impact is some game I've never heard of (so uh... yay?) and Call of Duty is an FPS, which do not translate well to mobile.
So you think gamers will be like "oh lol the game developer didn't get it right the first time on drivers, guess I'll just get back to this game at an undetermined future date?"
No, they will piss and moan about Apple neglecting driver updates.
Then where are we disagreeing at all? I'm saying Apple is already focusing their resources appropriately, and no change to address games is needed or wanted.
I was saying Apple doesn’t have to because they support a very small set of hardware, therefore their compilers already eek every bit of performance out of what hardware it does support (I am suuuuuper ignoring Apples recent RDNA2 support).