That is a fair take.
I mean there are more Mx macs than Playstation 5’s but that doesn’t seem to stop console developers from making PS5 games…
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.
Apple CAN’T do AAA gaming [Merged Megathread]
- Thread starter Admiralbison
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Roughly 100% of Playstation owners bought the console to play games. How many of the Arm-Macs owners did buy their computers for this purpose?
It is probably safe to say 0% of people buy Macs with the sole intent to play games on them.
But even when we take into consideration that people buy Mac not just but also to play games? Which go beyond Wordle and Bejeweled?
How large is that fraction?
50%? 5%? 0.5%?
The fact that the majority of Mac buyers don't really care about hardware taxing AAA games hasn't changed with the capabilities of the chips in said Macs.
At the moment “not large enough for large publishers to care”%
Just to throw some numbers in as a proxy
There are 20 million members on the gaming subreddit, 2 million members on the PS5 subreddit and 100k members on the Mac gaming reddit. So yeah, those are pretty large discrepancies. But the market is there, at least in its infancy.
Will post benchmarks later when I get to it. Some of us also have to work occasionally ?
I don't want to play Elden Ring. I have very little time to play anything right now, but if I'd have to name games I'd like to play more then my vote would go to Trackmania, the current Diablo 3 season (because I have not played D3 in ages), Path of Exile, Apex and Tarkov.
I don't get the wishful-thinking-crowd here. "Soon the Mac will be relevant for gaming", when pointed out that no game studio is willing to make expensive ports per their own market analysis and therefore only simple games (when it comes to graphics and engine) might be ported because it's cheap, it's "but we already have all these wonderful games in the hundreds on Steam, so more must follow"... so if you already have all these wonderful games you're playing, then what's this all about? You've already reached your goal and nothing needs to change.
See how easy that is the other way around?
Last edited:
Why didn’t you just say “I’m fine with the decisions that preclude AAA gaming from flourishing on Mac” and save me the trouble of reading all that.
What does OpenGL or 32bit support have with AAA gaming? What recent AAA games you know that use OpenGL or are 32-bit only?
See how easy that is the other way around?
Fair enough. But you know, if we start listing back and forth various hardware features that some GPUs have or don’t it’s never going to stop.
Small triangle rasterization in the style of Nanite can probably be done more efficiently ray on AS by using tile shaders. Do the bounding box search to collect the relevant meshlets in the first compute pass, rasterize and shade the micro triangles in subsequent compute passes. Synchronization could be done using per-pixel locks, it should be fairly performant as you only work with very fast on-chip memory. But of course zum just talking out of my ass here, one would need to try it out.
Yes, of course. No one is arguing that AAA games can't be made with Metal. It's all about market share and money. Since most games either target consoles or Windows, the simple question is, will Mac sales be high enough to justify the cost porting them over. That's where to problem is and that's why "simple" (graphics and engine) have a much higher chance for a Mac version than something with an advanced custom engine and/or tailored for DX, GNM/GNMX, etc.
That's true. The next few years will tell. BTW, regarding 64-bit atomics, it is entirely possible that M1 supports them, just don't have it exposed in the API. They have introduced 64-bit ints in A14 after all.
Why don’t you ask my Steam library, which on Mac has dropped from 75+ games to 9 today. Better yet, again, just admit you don’t care about this and we can both move on.
Not only that is there any interest from the gaming community? Mostly players, what will attract them to the platform is there anything they are missing from the current offerings. There certainly is if they switch over to Mac. Imgine that Steam library that you have curated for years (ok horded), became mostly unplayable. Ugh no I want to play Elder Scrolls for the n'teen time.
According to Steam the Intel Mac user base is decreasing 1-5% per month while the M1 user base is increasing 1-5% every month. The transition is happening fast. Since Dec 2021 the Intel Mac user base has shrunk by 11% while M1 Mac user base has increased by the same amount.
Most Macs sold are M1 MBA and Mini which are incapable of playing more than basic mobile ported games. I get 20fps with MBA M1 on Shadow of the Tomb Raider which is a big no compared to ~90fps on PC gaming laptop that costs about the same.
Should you really be using Steam if you game on the Mac? Isn't that what the Mac App Store is for?
There are games are on Steam for Mac that are not on Apple app store.
I no longer have SoTR installed on MBA M1 but AppleGamingWiki guy gets the same fps at 1080p highest preset.
MBA M1 (lower left)
100W 3060 laptop
70W 3060 laptop (90fps is already optimal so I normally run at 70W)