Rome was no longer the capital by the time it was sacked. The collapse of the Roman empire took a long time. And the Byzantine Empire (AKA Eastern Roman Empire) would have some words to say about that as well.
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Apple Releases Tool to Help Developers Port Windows Games to Mac
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Rome was no longer the capital by the time it was sacked. The collapse of the Roman empire took a long time. And the Byzantine Empire (AKA Eastern Roman Empire) would have some words to say about that as well.
It's a baby step in the right direction. But at best, it will only create baby-progress towards Mac gaming.
What Apple should be doing, in addition to the above Windows-Mac emulation port push, is for Apple to encourage, provide support, and invest million$$$ for Game Devs to make native Apple Silicon games.
What Apple should be doing, in addition to the above Windows-Mac emulation port push, is for Apple to encourage, provide support, and invest million$$$ for Game Devs to make native Apple Silicon games.
1. While people are successfully getting games running, the toolkit’s purpose is to help devs evaluate potential performance (and potential issues) _before_ specifically porting their game to Metal. Anything that makes a dev’s life easier is good news.
2. Macs are never going to intentionally compete with the latest high-end PC graphics cards, nor do they need to. 1337 PC gamers remain a minority, with people gaming on a huge variety of hardware. The Nintendo Switch, for example, was underpowered relative to the latest iOS devices on its release in 2017 - and it is still very popular. Not every game has to be played on the bleeding edge.
3. Combined with Game Mode, I would say this is one of the strongest pushes Apple has made for Mac gaming in a long time. I’m cautiously optimistic about it as another way to play games - I flip between a Switch, Steam Deck, PS5 and XSX around the house, but some genres work better at a desk with a mouse.
2. Macs are never going to intentionally compete with the latest high-end PC graphics cards, nor do they need to. 1337 PC gamers remain a minority, with people gaming on a huge variety of hardware. The Nintendo Switch, for example, was underpowered relative to the latest iOS devices on its release in 2017 - and it is still very popular. Not every game has to be played on the bleeding edge.
3. Combined with Game Mode, I would say this is one of the strongest pushes Apple has made for Mac gaming in a long time. I’m cautiously optimistic about it as another way to play games - I flip between a Switch, Steam Deck, PS5 and XSX around the house, but some genres work better at a desk with a mouse.
Well, if I’m honest then I’ll have to say that anyone who thinks this move is a power play for the gaming market is probably going to disappointed. All Apple is doing is adding a bit more appeal for Mac users who see gaming as a hobby, not a religion. There are PCs and consoles for that stuff.
Folk need to remember what Jobs said about the PC market: The war is over; we lost.
But more importantly: We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Windows has to lose.
There is no point wasting billions trying to (unsuccessfully) gain a foothold in the gaming market. Apple should carry on doing what it has done since the iPod: create their own multi-billion dollar markets and dominate them.
It is pretty good but it still hitches sometimes even on the ultimate tier for me and gigabit fiber wired.
And you are precisely the gamer Apple is aiming for.
This is why I scoffed at the base config of most Apple consumer facing machines being 8 GB of unified RAM when RAM upgrades are not possible. 8 GB of unified RAM isn’t enough to entice most developers to port their games unless they are planning on doing a complete and total rewrite from the bottom up which just isn’t realistic. To entice developers to port their games Apple was always going to need some solution like this to make porting as easy as possible and an emulation style solution was never going to work well, no matter how good Apple Silicon was, with 8 GB of unified RAM. The base M1 and M2 models could’ve done with more GPU cores out of the box as well.
Now that being said I realize it would have priced a good chuck of people out of the market which is why IMO Apple needs three distinct classes of laptops and desktops moving forward. A bare minimum fine for most consumer activities and basic games, a mid level starting with more CPU and GPU cores, 16 GB of RAM and a 516 GB SSD capable of gaming at a decent frame rate in an environment where most or all of the code is emulated and then the Pro level. Apple gets a bit of a pass here because the fact that they are adding this GPT now tells me they either expected more developers to get onboard with Apple Silicone and Metal out of the gate than actually happened or they once again weren’t serious about gaming when they started the move and have only recently seen the light.
I’m under no illusion this will be some kind of panacea for serious gaming on the Mac but if Apple fully embraces it, starts putting out more base models of their hardware with the resources necessary to run more games without requiring major rewrites to get them to run at decent frame rates when emulated and if developers are willing to make some modifications to their code, specifically those with anti-cheat systems that would shut things down right out of the gate, and keep the GPT in mind when coding moving forward then perhaps gaming on the Mac will become a thing even if it’s nowhere near a dominant platform.
Now that being said I realize it would have priced a good chuck of people out of the market which is why IMO Apple needs three distinct classes of laptops and desktops moving forward. A bare minimum fine for most consumer activities and basic games, a mid level starting with more CPU and GPU cores, 16 GB of RAM and a 516 GB SSD capable of gaming at a decent frame rate in an environment where most or all of the code is emulated and then the Pro level. Apple gets a bit of a pass here because the fact that they are adding this GPT now tells me they either expected more developers to get onboard with Apple Silicone and Metal out of the gate than actually happened or they once again weren’t serious about gaming when they started the move and have only recently seen the light.
I’m under no illusion this will be some kind of panacea for serious gaming on the Mac but if Apple fully embraces it, starts putting out more base models of their hardware with the resources necessary to run more games without requiring major rewrites to get them to run at decent frame rates when emulated and if developers are willing to make some modifications to their code, specifically those with anti-cheat systems that would shut things down right out of the gate, and keep the GPT in mind when coding moving forward then perhaps gaming on the Mac will become a thing even if it’s nowhere near a dominant platform.
But "Apple doesn't care about gaming on the Mac". LOL
Gaming on the Mac is coming naysayers. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
Sure. I have hearing this for over a decade at least. Some games will. They will be out on PC and console for at least a year and when they do hit the Mac they will run worse than on the PC or latest Gen console. This will be on a $3000 Mac not a $599 Mini. It will possibly missing some features like multiplayer.
95% of AAA games are targeted at the play station and ported to every other platform with the Mac being dead last, if at all. Using layers upon layers of emulation and virtualization = bad experience in my experience.
Get a PS5 and save your self some grief.
Never going to happen. Too many if’s. Game devs regularly turn out buggy games because they do not have enough time. PC versions of new games get the short end of the stick on launch day. Latest Jedi game is a perfect example. The consoles, the PlayStation first get the most dev time and priority. This is simply because of game sales.
A Mac version of any game would get the least attention, because the market share would be the lowest.
I think it's funny that some seem to be of the idea of that just because things has been in a certain way historically it has to be the same for the rest of eternity. Apple's efforts when it comes to this seem bigger than ever. And like someone said the hardware power of the every popular Nintendo switch is relatively weak. While Macs will be upgraded with internals yearly the console hardware stand still for many years.
We'll see what happen, but I wouldn't be so sure it won't mean things will go the same way this time.
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This is what a lot of people in these gaming threads seem to ignore. It's always "AAA...but AAA games!!!!!". Not every single game on the planet needs to be AAA. The Nintendo Switch handles games very well, and doesn't get all AAA games either. Ever since I got into Macs 20+ years ago, it's always been this constant "talking down to Mac owners" mentality because it doesn't compete with the flagship NVIDIA GPU. Neither does the Switch!!!! The Switch doesn't even compete with Macs hardware, yet it gets more stuff!
It all comes down to marketshare. Wii U was a failure. Wii had more third party support than Wii U because the U version was not as popular. Nintendo Switch is insanely popular so it has good enough marketshare for developers to at least notice it and think about in most cases. Mac? Barely a blip in the gaming sphere in terms of marketshare. It gets ignored or is WAY WAY down the priority list (as is with the game I am making). Games target Xbox/Playstation first, then port to Windows in nearly 90% of the cases. Not because it's "so ungodly easy to develop on this and Mac is HORRIBLE to develop on", but because of marketshare.
The most popular GPU on Steam is not the 4090, or even the top 5 GPUs are even 40xx series last I checked. I think there is ONE 30xx maybe in the top 5 that is the 3060?
I'm not sure how you can bring games to the Mac without going after 'gamers' or the 'gaming market.' We have to let go of the notion that the only people who count as 'gamers' are the people who buy high-end graphics cards for tons of money to run games at the highest possible resolutions and frame rates. Let's instead say that gamers are people who regularly play video games, are generally aware which games exist and generally have an interest in playing a diverse set of games. These people might not even have a dedicated gaming PC, but they might have a console or a handheld.
Video gaming casuals for whom gaming is a hobby might not necessarily care about performance as much, but I think they do care about having games to choose from, which includes the back catalogue of existing games and having new titles relatively timely on your platform. These people do buy games and they are the majority, so there's plenty of money there. So if Apple wants to be successful, what they need is to make sure that a lot of games run smoothly not just on their most high-end hardware, but on the M1 MacBooks and Mac Minis a lot of people have. The college kid going away to college, as said above, is unlikely going to have a maxed out Macbook Pro.
You either go after the wider gaming market or you don't, but then you need to make sure that all of our hardware can actually run games (and I don't necessarily mean 4k with the highest possible specs). Making a push for people who buy maybe one game a year and are generally happy to buy whatever is available makes no sense if you want to make a dent because why would any developer, who isn't already, put in the work to make the game run on your platform?
If you like gaming and most games still don't run on the Mac, why would you invest in games there. You probably already have a PC or console anyway.
The Appple haters can laugh and go “no ray tracing blah blah”, but Apple has finally shown devs that its possible to port AAA games to mac and that mac users will play these games even if they don’t have full graphical parity with their PC counterparts. As for the ray tracing and the GPU being not equal to Nvidia and AMD, wait for it. M2 is only 2nd gen and hardware ray tracing is rumored to be coming with M3. We are in the early innings and the future of gaming on mac is bright. Also, with everything now on Apple silicon, the market is large when you consider the iphones, ipads, and Apple TVs out there.
My main question going forward is whether Apple here has broader aspirations and how this will affect distributors like Valve.
I have my doubts whether better gaming support will actually help Apple to move a lot more Macs, so I'm wondering whether they think that medium to long-term they can push game distribution into their App Store, maybe by offering some other benefits like better portability and cross-play on other Apple devices. That would be a very strong push, but at the same time video gamers, and not just high-end gamers at that, probably have their libraries on Steam and would be sceptical about moving to yet another platform.
I have my doubts whether better gaming support will actually help Apple to move a lot more Macs, so I'm wondering whether they think that medium to long-term they can push game distribution into their App Store, maybe by offering some other benefits like better portability and cross-play on other Apple devices. That would be a very strong push, but at the same time video gamers, and not just high-end gamers at that, probably have their libraries on Steam and would be sceptical about moving to yet another platform.
Thank you! I feel like I am alone talking about marketshare here. People just love to bash on Apple just because "it's not NVIDIA". I guarantee you, if Macs had 80-90% marketshare like Windows did and has, things would be VERY different. This is the ONLY reason I am targeting Windows after all for my game. Not because "it's horrible to develop on Macs", but because I get the best chance for an ROI for my game if I target a high marketshare platform than a small one. Even though my game currently runs on an old 2013 laptop with Integrated Intel graphics (think Terraria/Factorio/Stardew Valley level of requirements here).
There is really nothing Apple can do here. We will get SOME games, like Death Stranding, but Apple can not spend every penny they have. Even if they did, it would never be as popular or even reach parity with Windows and Consoles. It cannot happen.
Why would Apple's board be all for Apple to spend insane amount of money for buy gaming studios or pay devs to port to Macs? It will be going in to a very popular market. This is COMPLETELY different than TV streaming for example. The barrier to entry to watch Silo on Apple TV is very small compared to what it would be to play a Mac game. Apple has very large marketshare for things ABLE to watch Apple TV content, so even though it is a popular market with Netflix/Max/Disney/etc its not the same.
Yeah it brought back memories of Apple introducing Game Sprockets in the late 90s.It's funny, before OS X, Mac OS 9 and earlier used to prioritize the operating system for games. Now after 20 years they want to return to that? That took a while.
What's next are they gonna bring back skins for the operating system?
I think a lot of people over hype Ray Tracing and use that as a reason Macs don't have games. I have been hearing this CONSTANTLY for 20 years that Macs don't have games, even before Ray Tracing was a thing or popular enough to include it in hardware.
The Nintendo Switch doesn't have ray tracing either. The new one might with some rumors going around.
I think the main difference is that up until the M1, Apple’s most commonly sold laptops had poor integrated graphics. But now, even the MacBook Air is capable of decent gaming performance. And there is a world of PC gaming which isn’t AAA shooters, but is better than Apple Arcade.
Not at all. Some of us don't want or need multiple computers, but would like to do some gaming along with dev or office work. I don't want a serious gaming machine, but I do want flexibility and performance. Most of all is prefer to stay on Mac instead of looking for a different *nix environment as my main desktop.
Bring GTA V to Mac. I would like to try this game. Bring it to Vision Pro, full immersion.