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Apple CAN’T do AAA gaming [Merged Megathread]
- Thread starter Admiralbison
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A question @leman, if I may.
I've toyed with the idea of building a side gaming PC, while using my Mac for daily tasks and games which it supports, but I'm not sure I could justify the expense of an additional computer for the computer games that don't have a Mac release. (I mainly play isometric RPGs where almost all of them have Mac versions.) However, it would be nice to have access to other genres that have fancy features such as ray-tracing, that are currently optimized exclusively for Windows.
Some issues that I have taken into consideration, at least in regards to building a killer gaming machine, are the expenditure of having a second computer, going through the motions of building one, carting around a big case that I would use, dealing with Microsoft's backward software design and baffling UI decisions with Windows 11, unnecessary driver updates and software headaches, and finding a way to cool the behemoth case I would use with nearly a dozen cooling fans.
I have the resources and knowhow, keep up on the rumors for the latest and greatest from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, but I'm still not sure it is worth it, in my particular case. Regardless, I hope you enjoy your new Asus gaming experience with Windows 11, and that Elden Ring is worth it.
Since I am in the same proverbial boat, feel free to keep us updated, as your adventure into PC enthusiast land continues to unfold.
Speed is great, but silence is golden. How fast do the fans spin when you are playing an intensive game, and more importantly, how loud do they get? For those of us who don't use headphones, this can be an issue, particularly people with sensitive hearing, such as myself.
This seems to be the crux of the issue. The new Apple Silicon Macs would make excellent gaming machines, even the low-end models, but the selection is limited, and will likely remain so. Hence, at MacRumors we witness many a quixotic quest chasing gaming PC shaped windmills.
You have my sympatheses. As someone who still uses an Intel Mac, I spent three days collating files for a Windows 11 ISO that would properly install through Boot Camp, satisfying Apple's checks, while bypassing Microsoft's idiotic TPM restrictions. After those three days, it took me about an hour to remember why I left Windows behind back in 2005.
I've toyed with the idea of building a side gaming PC, while using my Mac for daily tasks and games which it supports, but I'm not sure I could justify the expense of an additional computer for the computer games that don't have a Mac release. (I mainly play isometric RPGs where almost all of them have Mac versions.) However, it would be nice to have access to other genres that have fancy features such as ray-tracing, that are currently optimized exclusively for Windows.
Some issues that I have taken into consideration, at least in regards to building a killer gaming machine, are the expenditure of having a second computer, going through the motions of building one, carting around a big case that I would use, dealing with Microsoft's backward software design and baffling UI decisions with Windows 11, unnecessary driver updates and software headaches, and finding a way to cool the behemoth case I would use with nearly a dozen cooling fans.
I have the resources and knowhow, keep up on the rumors for the latest and greatest from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, but I'm still not sure it is worth it, in my particular case. Regardless, I hope you enjoy your new Asus gaming experience with Windows 11, and that Elden Ring is worth it.
Since I am in the same proverbial boat, feel free to keep us updated, as your adventure into PC enthusiast land continues to unfold.
It’s ok, pretty much the same as any of my Intel MBPs under load. One does not hear it hen gaming, especially since the laptop is some distance away when hooked do my home cinema setup.
In the end it boils down to market penetration. Apple Silicon makes very capable gaming machines and developing for it is much easier than for Vulkan/DX12, but there is simply little incentive for doing it. But I’ve been saying for a while thst as Mac marketshare increases, things will likely change.
One can build a fairly capable mini-ITX system without sacrificing performance or thermals. My main constraint was the price as I simply did not want to spend too much on this indulgence. I recently moved anyway, and there are still things to set up in the new place, burning 2000 euros on a gaming PC sounds silly. As I wrote, I entertained the notion of building the PC myself, but the laptop route was ultimately cheaper and more flexible. The only annoyance is having to plug/unplug the laptop, but it’s OK.
It’s confusing, disorienting, incredibly punishing and lacks any sense of direction. Very Japanese. I’m having fun
I would like to point out that that score seems right for the 6800M (the results browser seems to show the highest score being ~23000). Which makes sense considering the 6800M is really a 6700XT and not a ”real” 6800 so the score is roughly half a 6900XT (at regular clocks, lol my own score is quite low on the leaderboard).
"These companies include Blackstone and KKR & Co., two of the world's largest in the takeover market."
Taken from Eurogamer.
Yeah I saw that too, though I would think either Tencent or Embracer Group would be a better fit.
Considering that those two huge recent gaming purchases included mobile IP’s and developers knowledgeable of mobile development, the fact that Ubisoft doesn’t have a lot of either might factor into not being purchased by those companies.
I find it very interesting as well that Blizzard is releasing Diablo Immortal for mobile devices and PC and NOT the Mac (when the iOS version wouldn’t be very painful to port). This was done understanding that the PC port was going to be painful and had to have special UI allowances (more coding/testing) for not having a touch screen. This is an idea of how much effort companies are willing to put into making a game for PC and how little effort they’re NOT willing to go through for macOS. Just not enough upside on the back end.
The iOS and Android versions are using the Messiah engine (Chinese developer). I don't think that engine is supporting macOS, even though iOS and macOS are somewhat similar platforms. As for the Windows version, I'm not sure what engine is used there.
Don’t need to support MacOS at all. Catalyst is the way to go when making native games for Apple platforms.
When AMD and Nvidia come out with TSMC 5nm GPU, it will be interesting to see the performance at the same wattage as the M1 Max. So limit the RTX 40xx to whatever the M1 Max/Ultra GPU is consuming.
That will be the true test. Also, real world is very different to benchmarks. We need to test actual games not theoretical. Sadly the Mac catalogue is horrible.
Why do you dislike Vulkan? The fact it is cross platform and open, royalty-free standard and is used on Windows, Linux and Android should make it easy to develop for.
I feel the same way as but with macOS.
Yes, it will be interesting to see. Of course, just going 5nm won't magically cut the power consumption by 75%. These GPUs simply have different design goals. As to RTX 40xx series, I am sure it will continue Nvidia's strategy of increasing the power consumption to reach higher performance targets.
Very true, but benchmarks show what can be done. Given how fast M-series CPU/RAM/cache is, bottlenecks on the system side are less likely than in the x86 world. So benchmarks gives us an idea what is possible in a properly optimised title.
There are very few high-end titles out currently on the Mac, but for example something like Baldur's Gate 3 alpha already shows the potential. Even a MacBook Air makes a good figure compared to dedicated gaming machines.
API ergonomy is terrible with Vulkan and I find it annoying that the API has been deliberately crippled because of some political issues. It could have been so much better.
At least macOS has a systematic administrative interface and the video outputs are working as they should.
Have you tried Catalyst? I've not, never had the use-case. How does it handle custom gesture recognizers? For standard apps, I can't see any problem. Anything tinkered, maybe.
People need to understand that power consumption doesn't really matter for people running games or performing scientific work. Sure, it's nice to have a laptop that can run 10 hours longer than others, but when doing really intensive work, people usually use desktops or plug in the laptops (or run stuff in the cloud).
I don't really think anyone dislikes Vulkan, it came with an additional learning curve after OpenGL, that's what people didn't like. I think the main reason not to use Vulkan is rather simple, your target is Windows then you go DX, your target is Mac then you go Metal your target is Linux... well, there it is Vulkan. The question is how many graphical applications, particularly games are really on Linux? And yes, I use AirSim, Carla, Isaac, Coppelia Sim + Unreal/Unity on Linux.
And speaking of pain in the rear end... my UE5 is stuck compiling shaders at 34%. It's still active, not frozen, but stuck at 34% with 3017 shaders to go and nothing... grml... that is on macOS for reference.
Never used custom gesture recognisers, so can't answer that. I think for games Catalyst is an attractive environment. Most of the UI stuff is custom-drawn anyway, you just sprinkle some Mac-specific input handling and voila, no need to maintain separate codebases or mess with targets.
Sure, but it is an advantage while developing and testing. Not being tethered to a desk is a boon. And besides, it means that you can have powerful hardware within a compact enclosure, which improves your options. Power consumption does matter.
Not likely to be anywhere close. Those others still need to perform massive amounts of operations while shuttling the data back and forth. It’s inefficient, but necessary in the model they’re working under. If I had to guess, they’ll take this as an opportunity to use a different form of cooling while still peaking out their draw (there’s little to no benefit to them to being efficient as they’re in head to head competition where the numbers rule).
Catalyst isn't great for games. It doesn't necessarily include all the API a game would expect. It's better than nothing though. It doesn't add much against a real Mac port - which also can share a codebase. Catalyst also requires that all your development libraries support it and offer versions for it. Will your physics engine support iOS? Probably. Will it support Mac? Probably. Will it support Catalyst? I haven't seen anything support Catalyst so far.
If you're going to support Intel Macs with Catalyst - you also have to go through the whole retuning and optimization process all over again with discrete GPUs. So again - advantages over a proper Mac build start to melt away.
Heck - Blizzard wouldn't even have to do any porting work technically. They could roll it out as an iOS-on-the-Mac game like Among Us did. No porting work, not even a recompile. But they can't even be bother to do that.
Of course, it depends on your dev environment. If you are using third-party libraries that are heavily integrated with certain platforms of have special requirements, that’s a different story. But why would a physics engine depend on system APIs?
Few different possible answers to that question:
- Catalyst (for now) implies Intel and ARM support. Even if a library supports both those platforms, builds may not be able to assemble the right output for Catalyst. Apple Silicon macOS support is in a similar place for a lot of libraries. A library might support ARM, and might support macOS, but might not support the two together. Stuff like Physx exists in that space. They don't have a Catalyst build despite Catalyst being around for years. (And there isn't even an official AS Mac build.)
- If your libraries are closed source - Catalyst libraries are a new build. You can't just reuse the iOS libraries. If you vendor doesn't supply Catalyst support just because they don't care, you're stuck.
Just generally Catalyst still doesn't make a lot of sense:
- Catalyst support isn't popular because most games don't even use iOS libraries. Unless you're writing your game in UIKit, there just isn't a point. All you'd really take with you is your touch support, which right away is mostly useless. Frameworks like the Game Controller framework are cross platform already.
- Catalyst may not have direct access to important APIs like resolution querying, window/GPU affinity, etc.
- If your code talks to the GPU, you may need to rewrite chunks of that code anyway to deal with AMD/Nvidia GPUs.
- If your game is cross platform, it's probably using a cross platform build system like CMake, or even an entire game engine. Those tools will already cover up the differences between iOS and Mac builds and eliminate the multi target problem.
- Even if you're directly working in Xcode - Xcode now supports single target/multi OS outputs. Truly cross platform app frameworks like SwiftUI also eliminate the multi target problem completely.
That's one of those things... some developers have special needs which Apple doesn't provide, so it's off to a 3rd party. It's not just for games. I've seen plenty of people successfully navigating around CoreData in the past.
People also think Catalyst is just recompiling your iOS apps and then you're done, and it's not. Catalyst makes no promises that it won't break code - especially where Metal is involved. It's more like a remastering technology - not a recompiling technology. If you're Blizzard - Catalyst still means a full debugging pass, and a full QA pass. You have to deal with a Catalyst app just like it's a new build on a new platform.
I've seen a few games use Catalyst - but it's not surprising to me that there hasn't been wider adoption. And if you're using Unreal or Unity - not much point. Just export a Mac build.
Apple has often mentioned the Unity engine in press releases and in public presentations. Unity Technologies is one of Apple's primary partners in providing tools for game developers on their platforms. Many games that have Mac versions are made with Unity. I found these comments from a developer who is learning Unity to be of interest when they compared a PC with a 3080 and a Mac Studio, at a similar price point. In terms of performance:
Their thoughts on how other devs may perceive it:
Comment about the low-end:
And, of course, a highly scientific thermal test:
This developer sounds optimistic, in that Apple Silicon Macs are capable gaming machines, which are easily able to meet or exceed an equivalent PC. In the past, the vast majority of x86 Macs used Intel integrated graphics, which were garbage for anything other than basic office tasks. Today, even the "low-end" base M1 has substantial horsepower, making it far more attractive for gaming. Whether this impacts the availability of titles in the future is up for debate, but the hardware is definitely competitive with, if not superior to a PC of the same caliber. Graphics performance, or lack thereof, is one barrier that has historically been an issue which is no longer a factor.
Their thoughts on how other devs may perceive it:
Comment about the low-end:
And, of course, a highly scientific thermal test:
This developer sounds optimistic, in that Apple Silicon Macs are capable gaming machines, which are easily able to meet or exceed an equivalent PC. In the past, the vast majority of x86 Macs used Intel integrated graphics, which were garbage for anything other than basic office tasks. Today, even the "low-end" base M1 has substantial horsepower, making it far more attractive for gaming. Whether this impacts the availability of titles in the future is up for debate, but the hardware is definitely competitive with, if not superior to a PC of the same caliber. Graphics performance, or lack thereof, is one barrier that has historically been an issue which is no longer a factor.
Roughly speaking, the 5800X isn't that much faster than the 3700X that the developer is using, so the CPU side probably isn't making a huge impact. That will vary depending upon benchmark, but not so much as to explain the substantial gap between the PC and Mac Studio, in those Unity benchmarks.