I would like to argue how stupid this articles title is too, ‘High End Gaming’ implies to me on a level of a gaming PC worth thousands, with an RTX 4090 which will utterly destroy ANY of the current Mac GPU’s. One thing Apple cannot offer is ‘High End Gaming’, but it certainly offers high end pricing for its hardware. The 2019 Mac Pro is probably the only machine capable of high end gaming if it can run Windows and an RTX 4090?
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Apple Discusses Push Towards High-End Mac Gaming in New Interview
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That’s like saying to buy another car because if you’re with 3-4 you cant use the backseat. It’s there, but you cannot use it…
It was...back in the Before Times. 👴Apple II was the better game machine than the IBM PC.👴 👨🦳Early Mac's had lots of games. MicroSoft killed gaming on the Mac back when the bought Bungie and killed off the Mac exclusive HALO.👨🦳
HALO became an XBox exclusive and propelled MS into the gaming world. Apple never became a serious gaming machine. If not for the shareware game developer, Ambrosia, gaming on the Mac in the 90's would have been non-existent.
I have no doubt they can improve their gaming potential, but to be a serious PC contender for certain games, that's a whole different show. When they come with lip service (as per article) I'd easily bet the rest of my life income that they can't do it properly – not under Tim Apple at least. It will take a whole different ethos to even have the proper mindset, and I bet they are institutionally hell bent on their way of doing that it's just a joke. They have of course done really well and don't really need the gaming segment that hardcore PC gamers and console have.
How they operate is completely antithetical what gamers and producers of games want and need. I'd also bet on casual gaming on Mac not taking off either. People mostly enjoy their phones, it's easy and they can just sit there in the sofa half-watching TV. People also need phones, but they don't need an iPad nor a Mac.
Outside work a lot of people hardly use anything except their phones–they mostly want to avoid it as much as possible in my experience. Certain age segments might be different, but the important segments where people actually are interested in spending a bunch of time in front of the computer, are segments where they want better games than mobile ad-infested, micro-transaction hell. A bunch of it is infesting other areas as well, but gamers are getting fed up by it.
Was that on purpose or just incidental of having great hardware though? When have they truly embraced it outside some lip service? At least one could configure Macs and change parts yourself, now it's a sad state of affairs.
There's absolutely no reason for Apple to invest in a gaming studio. We don't need more conglomeration, we need less. Apple can make gaming great on the Mac pretty easily. It just takes consistent work toward that goal
I'm not a gamer, but if my MBP ran Elden Ring, i'd try it out. What I mean is there are better gaming-first products out there, but as I already have the Macbook it would be great if I could try out a wider selection of games on it. The argument against this is handhelds like the Steamdeck, which are very good for casual gaming and arguably also more comfortable than a laptop.
Its funny the people who seem to be diehard Steam nuts don’t seem to realize how Steam Deck works with a good chunk of the library. It‘s not Windows.
Or the people saying Apple doesn’t support DX12, you really have no clue.
It’s called Steam deck uses Linux and Proton as a layer, and guess what Proton is based on? Wine, the same stuff in the Apple Game Dev Toolkit along with Apple’s new Direct3D to Metal wrapper. This is the way forward. Gamers don’t care about how emulation works as long as performance is good and Steam Deck does deliver on that front.
Or the people saying Apple doesn’t support DX12, you really have no clue.
It’s called Steam deck uses Linux and Proton as a layer, and guess what Proton is based on? Wine, the same stuff in the Apple Game Dev Toolkit along with Apple’s new Direct3D to Metal wrapper. This is the way forward. Gamers don’t care about how emulation works as long as performance is good and Steam Deck does deliver on that front.
Apple likes to control what they can do "better" than others. If an off the shelf part works best, they will use it. If not, then they will work at building it to their needs.
If you look at the history here with Intel/Nvidia/AMD on Mac hardware. They all fell apart at some point or another. Intel the most as their chips stagnated and got too hot for the laptops Apple wanted to make. AMD has good GPU's but, not as powerful as Nvidia. Nvidia pissed Apple off and their GPU's were hot too (Still are). Apple had in-house talent to make chips (CPU and GPU). So they did it all the way up the chain. They now have the only 3nm chips on the market. The most efficient chips you can get anywhere.
As for OpenGL, CL, Vulkan, etc. They (Apple) would be beholden to those standards across their product line up. Good or bad for them. With Metal, they control it and can change it as they need to. DirectX would put them on with Microsoft. Either a license deal or even if it was free. They still would have to make sure it works on the platform across all devices. Something they can't control or change as needed. OpenGL was built into MacOS early on. But, always behind in terms of versions and what features are available. And not bare metal. Just another layer on top.
Intel Macs could run games so long as you boot camped into Windows to do it. Then everything worked fine. But, now since the hardware is more than capable. The software is also capable. And they seem to be more than willing to make the system as a whole support AAA games. It's up to developers to want to jump on board. AND for us (the end user) to buy the games. Apple built it and is pushing it more than I have seen in the past. Let's hope it works this time.
There's no doubt that those people are the target, but are they enough of a market to pour serious resources into developing for a platform that in itself is comparably small?
I think unless you make the Mac a viable platform for gamers it's just not viable for developers. Just to be clear, by gamers I don't necessarily mean people who need a 4090 to run games at 4K at ultra settings, but people who play video games as a hobby and buy games regularly and often.
OK but none of that is accessible to end users. And Apple has some good reasons to avoid making it accessible to end users. For one thing, they want to encourage devs to create native builds
That's the challenge they have cut out for them right now. And it's not that easy. It never was, but dropping support for OpenGL was a huge blow against Mac gaming because it was a great cross platform graphics system. Now devs have to port from DirectX to Metal
Or to put it another way - nobody likes being told they can't have it all, and that every choice has its cost.
You want the benefits of Apple Silicon for your work (smaller form factor, better power efficiency), you get the accompanying downsides (lack of upgradability). Getting a gaming PC to play high-end games at the best settings solves one problem, but simply creates another one (that you have a computer that may be wholly unsuitable for other purposes).
I am not sure why that's such a difficult concept to grasp here.
Instead of "Still a niche platform" more accurate might be to say today a niche platform. Apple owns the smartphone and tablet markets and is the fourth largest personal computer manufacturer. As such its efforts in support of gaming are very significant, especially given what a huge market games on the phone and tablet side are. And we have no idea what the impact of Vision Pro will be.
Those here dissing Apple and gaming will be on the outside looking in in a few years when today's furnace-hot $1k graphics card devices slowly become dinosaurs.
Just my $0.02 but you may quote me.
Wrong, today it is not about last year's consoles or whatever. Apple has more than a billion handheld Apple devices out there with (mostly hokey) games on them. With some handheld devices now having M-series power and the various Apple OS versions playing better with each other all the time, Apple has a huge platform for future gaming development. No way gaming devs will not go after that market.
Agreed the headline is misleading for exactly the reasons you state. The Apple and gaming issue is not simplistically about ‘High End Gaming.’
”High end gaming” is arguably not about gaming at all, but PC hardware enthusiasts justifying their purchases with games. There is a hardware business around those enthusiasts that supports media that in turn supports that narrative.
If you look at what people actually play though, it paints a very different picture.
Steams most played games.
Note the absense of the hyped games where Nvidia has paid for some ray traced functionality, and the popular always-benchmarked-at-ultra-settings tech apps.
In fact, all the popular games can be played on potato hardware. (Well, maybe not 8GB RAM,256GB storage. Pea computers? 😉) The decision whether to support the Mac platform or not is made in game publisher board rooms, based expected ROI and industry inertia.
The idea of Macs being suitable for AAA gaming with less than 1TB storage and 16GB RAM is a bit of a joke, isn't it, especially when the components are so very cheap...
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Haha. I appreciate your enthusiasm. Please mark this thread and come back in 2 years when this “There’s no way…” plays out in a robust mix of AAA games available for Silicon. I will heartily acknowledge how “this time” actually proved to be “different” than the many times before when Apple proclaimed “we’re serious about gaming” and then little-to-nothing followed. I’ll be first in line to herald your “I told you so” prediction.
Else, consider that there was a gigantic amount of “latest-greatest” iDevices 2 years ago to have fulfilled this prophecy in the present… and a gigantic amount of iDevices 2 years before that to have fulfilled this prophecy 2 years ago. Where’s the abundance of AAA games for Silicon? Did gaming devs hold back their burning hot interest until the number became a full billion instead of X00,000,000 iDevices in the last few years? “No team, we will develop nothing for Silicon with only 900 million iDevices in the wild… but when they get to 1 Billion, we’re all in on all of our games.”
What would work is what I shared. If it was solely about phones in the wild and only the retail revenue of sales of games, not quite a billion volume of iDevices in the wild years ago would have already proven your conjecture.
That shared though, I’ll be happy to eat opinion crow if this billion is some magic number that motivates a huge volume of AAA games to come to Silicon without the cash subsidies and/or much larger market on PC, accustomed to paying up for games instead of scoffing if they are priced at higher than nearly nothing… and much more accepting of in-app purchases & advertising OPM vs. that nearly nothing our Apple crowd demands.
My fork will be ready for eating that crow. Bring on that “I told you so” in 2 years. It will be great if this time, it actually is different. An abundance of AAA games on Silicon will be a great consolation to the crow feast.
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HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
To encapsulate A-series & M-series offerings from Apple. Per the ideas offered in this thread, the great abundance of A-series chips "in the wild" can motivate game developers to develop multitudes of AAA games... implying a relatively easy path to AAA games for M-series chips. It's a lovely bit of speculation but- IMO- it's not about the greatness of chips or even platform tech that moves development of the big games (see the Amiga story as perhaps the ultimate example), it's money.
The model that motivates AAA game development involves lucrative subsidies, buying gaming studios for exclusives and an end (consumer) market that is willing to pay more than phone app prices for the game AND accepting of in-app purchases AND accepting of advertising built into the game.
Apple doesn't seem to want to do the first two at all- just spin "we're serious about gaming" words and we Apple consumers seem to have little tolerance for PC-like game pricing and basically abhor in-app and advertising. As such, even if Apple rolls out an M20 in the next iteration of Macs with Raytracing super-retina mach 7 deluxe++ graphics, I still do NOT expect much beyond a trickle of AAA games for the platform. Why? Money talks much louder than words. Show developers a way to make MORE money coding AAA for Silicon and they will come. Else, we know how this movie plays out because we've seen it over and over and over again.
If some rich nut would allocate more money for AAA game development for Amiga or C64 than is available for PC/Console, there would soon be AAA games for those nearly-extinct platforms and ancient tech. Money will do it, not talk, not hope, not spectacular chips, no PPW, not our own love of the platform. We are collectively fooling ourselves (or each other)- AGAIN- if we believe otherwise.
If we Apple people want AAA games in abundance, take a portion of what we might spend on a good Mac and buy a PC with graphics card. Then you'll have access to a huge number of them immediately... and many more in the pipeline. If we are embarrassed to own a PC, hide it behind the ASD and stream the video to our TVs via the Moonlight app for AppleTV. That's currently the way to play a wide variety of AAA games with at least some Apple hardware involved.
Else, hang in there and wait "a little longer" for all the AAA games to come to Mac. Maybe next year... AGAIN. If we can simply maintain the anticipation about "coming soon," it might eventually happen... someday.
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Diablo Immortal is available on Windows too. It is not “only” a mobile game.
It is generally not possible to run iOS games on Apple Silicon Macs without resorting to third-party hacks. Most well-known iOS games block the ability to run on macOS even though it would be possible to make them work with very little (virtually zero) effort.
recent iphones are more powerful than a quest 2, and its pretty amazing what that can run on device, not tethered to a pc). And i'm not saying that as a console peasant either (though i do have most of the consoles since the atari 2600 inc. ps5) - i'm saying that as someone who does AAA gaming on the PC in my sig.
modern iphones are plenty powerful enough. they're just missing the software library.
Frankly I think that's the long and short of it. My MBA M1 recently died after only a year, so unless I can get it repaired under statutory warranty for free I need a new computer.
I've been a Mac user for over 20 years but I don't need my computer to be mobile anymore and gaming has become a renewed interest over the pandemic.
Irregardless of the impressive hardware -- and Apple Silicon really is impressive and I would have killed for an M1 MBA in grad school or even now at work over my company-issued Surface laptop -- there just isn't a lot going for the Mac as a gaming platform (at the moment) because there just aren't any games. Even if they started releasing most new games on Mac, a lot of gamers would still miss old and recent classics and being able to play the games they spent time and money building up.
So I'm considering buying my first PC in over 20 years and switching away from the Mac, which frankly I'd miss. But between the Steam Deck, PS releases on PC and GamePass the PC is just the better gaming platform and a more than capable computing platform for my other (very limited) needs.
The Mac continues to be the machine you game on if you already have one (and there's plenty of use cases where it's just so much better than a PC) and you don't actually care about gaming all that much. That's great and I genuinely hope the Mac gaming library will continue to grow. Together with the iPhone and iPad, Apple is in a unique position to actually create a pretty attractive gaming environment. Where not there yet and I have my doubts whether they can pull it off for various reasons.
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