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.
Counter-Strike 2 Lacks Mac Support, Update Breaks CS:GO for macOS
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Valve needs to set an example with their own games. They have pushed cross platform for ages and only recently started to make real progress with the Steam Deck.
I think in Valve’s mind crossplatform really means Linux and Windows. Or in the case of API’s, Vulkan.
Yes, and people claim "GPU performance sucks. M2 Ultra is barely better than RTX 3060ti." While M2 Ultra is no match for 4090 in gaming it is clearly faster than 3060 Ti. In this x86 game running through Rosetta it is 51% faster than 3060 Ti at 1440p and 32% faster at 4K. It is as fast as 4060 Ti at 1440p and faster at 4K.
In After Effects Pudgetbench it is faster than even 4090 which shows how much optimization matters.
Last edited:
Well I got Baldurs Gate 3 working nicely off Steam onto my M2 mini pro base model. The mini gets warm to the touch like my old 2018 Mac mini did regularly, but the fan still stay quiet. I've been shutting off all (or nearly all) apps before launching since I know this is going to push my hardware pretty hard. I can't play it at 5K and Ultra as the frame rate drops to low to be pleasant, but I set it at 2560 x 1440 and High settings and it runs smooth and looks good enough for a game where graphics are kind of ancillary.Yeah on intel it’s not problem at all.
And you can use a real gpu
Yeah, people still making jokes about Mac hardware's lack of a "real GPU" are really missing something. The games that run on macOS run pretty damn great on Apple silicon. The lack of a dedicated GPU isn't the issue with the state of Mac gaming, and hasn't been for a while.
I'm always interested to see what kinds of developers port games to the Mac, and the sentiment people have about Valve has always surprised me. People are implying that Valve "no longer supports the Mac," but that's not quite true. People cite the state of Steam on Mac, or the lack of ongoing 32-bit support for some titles, but those examples aren't common. They've generally been solid with their macOS releases for quite some time. As a Counter-Strike and Dota 2 player, I've been pretty content with Valve over the years.
Contrast that with Blizzard, who used to be the best at it. They included the Mac versions of games on the same disc as the Windows versions! Their trend of day-and-date macOS releases for games started in the beginning and only ended with Overwatch, and not a single new release has seen a macOS port since. It's quite a disappointment. Even their remasters for games that used to run on macOS didn't receive a port.
With Valve, Counter-Strike 2's rollout is a pretty big disappointment for everybody. CS:GO had a lot more features, game types, customization, and it ran on low-end systems. macOS gamers are lucky in one sense that they don't have to log in to see the game in an unfortunate state. I'm still not sure why the game was even rushed out like this for a surprise launch.
Regardless, it was a surprise launch, and macOS gamers didn't even get a warning. People were playing on the Mac, then the servers went down. After a surprise 26 GB update, they realized they couldn't play the game anymore. The patch notes didn't even mention that macOS support was removed. That's pretty ******.
I imagine Valve will remedy this, but they're also dealing with the negative feedback from the state of the game from all sides. Only time will tell.
I'm always interested to see what kinds of developers port games to the Mac, and the sentiment people have about Valve has always surprised me. People are implying that Valve "no longer supports the Mac," but that's not quite true. People cite the state of Steam on Mac, or the lack of ongoing 32-bit support for some titles, but those examples aren't common. They've generally been solid with their macOS releases for quite some time. As a Counter-Strike and Dota 2 player, I've been pretty content with Valve over the years.
Contrast that with Blizzard, who used to be the best at it. They included the Mac versions of games on the same disc as the Windows versions! Their trend of day-and-date macOS releases for games started in the beginning and only ended with Overwatch, and not a single new release has seen a macOS port since. It's quite a disappointment. Even their remasters for games that used to run on macOS didn't receive a port.
With Valve, Counter-Strike 2's rollout is a pretty big disappointment for everybody. CS:GO had a lot more features, game types, customization, and it ran on low-end systems. macOS gamers are lucky in one sense that they don't have to log in to see the game in an unfortunate state. I'm still not sure why the game was even rushed out like this for a surprise launch.
Regardless, it was a surprise launch, and macOS gamers didn't even get a warning. People were playing on the Mac, then the servers went down. After a surprise 26 GB update, they realized they couldn't play the game anymore. The patch notes didn't even mention that macOS support was removed. That's pretty ******.
I imagine Valve will remedy this, but they're also dealing with the negative feedback from the state of the game from all sides. Only time will tell.
At the same time, the share of Mac users on Steam has been on a steady decline. It's at 1.57% right now and has fallen behind Linux a while ago.
We'll see what Steam stats for Sep says but that's not completely true. The number of Mac users appears to have decreased as a percentage because the Linux number now includes Steam deck users. So if the total number of users have increased and the number of Mac users is the the same it shows a lower percentage. Another thing is that this is just Steam numbers. With more exclusive titles on App Store people could be switching or using App Store more for playing say Resident Evil Village, Lies of P or other titles.
The decline of the share of Mac users on Steam has begun long before the Steam Deck was released.
…which is completely irrelevant for Valve and their support for Mac, which is the topic we are discussing here.
And as much as Vavle may dislike the survey, it does at least let developers know or see that there is an audience playing games on macOS. Not sure if Apple has similar metrics for the Mac App Store.
Because CS:GO played quite well on Mac for many years…? You really don’t see why waves would be made if, suddenly, it doesn’t work anymore…?
With its “Scrooge McDuck” cash reserves, AAPL should foot the bill for Valve to write a clean AS, powerfully Metal-ized version of Steam.
But it wouldn’t be as simple as that.
Apple is a direct competitor of Valve and every game maker on its platform, and Valve and every Steam game maker is a direct competitor of Apple with its Apple Arcade platform. Negotiations would have to ensue.
But it’s hard not to observe how Apple has steadily been becoming less “Apple-y” over the years and more, almost totally profit driven. (JUST A CORP.!)
Maybe that accounts for why key Apple employees have been leaving the company and its magnificent spaceship campus reportedly in droves.
Apple’s Silicon Engineering team lead left Apple and rapaciously gutted Apple of key Silicon Engineering team Executives and talented engineers and proprietary IP for a new startup that was quickly bought by Qualcomm. Qualcomm is now imbued with unique Apple talent and IP. Great…
Key Apple employees used to be (almost) immune to poaching by Apple competitors offering them substantial financial incentives to leave Apple, but far more today are not so immune.
Back then, Apple executives and employees felt more like they were not merely working at a job that paid a salary, and more like they were playing a part in a righteous, honorable cause to change the world — for the better.
Now, it seems every aspect of the company is viewed through a financial lens, and if keeping competitors at bay from interfering with Apple Arcade profits denies Apple customers the benefits of open competition and choice, so be it. Suffer, I guess.
(I suspect an Apple employee or two who, perchance might be reading this, understands exactly what I’m talking about.)
When Steve Jobs left Apple to found Next, he recruited several CRUCIAL Apple employees to leave for his startup whose success was as uncertain as their newfound careers and paychecks. (Apple even sued!)
He lured them with a cause greater than themselves: the honor of being part of something big and historic — and, in the end, they were: Next and its employees’ “blood, sweat and tears” ultimately ended up saving Apple — an incontrovertible, immutable fact of history. They played starring roles in saving Apple and making Apple the most valuable company on earth and, arguably, the most consequential company on earth.
Even iOS is Darwin/macOS based. Its acquisition of Next proved downright existential to Apple and all its products.
With a few notable exceptions (where he would drive an employee crazy!), Steve Jobs was always able to inspire such loyalty at Apple (and Next). And, upon his return to Apple, did it yet again until his death.
Apple’s longtime “infamous” high profit margins were always justified by the fact that the products were of such high quality with such “invaluable” attention to detail AND that those large profits were plowed right back in to improving, innovating and inventing entirely new product categories that led the entire global industry and changed the world.
Today? Not so much.
The the poorly-branded “Apple Vision Pro” fuels promise, at least — if Apple can get the price within reach of mere mortals, do something about the encumbering battery arrangement, make it lighter or improve the headstrap to a point where both can be used just as shown in the stagey preview videos. And, behind the slick videos, is this product truly near completion, or is it in a raw, prototypical stage and will actually be released in late 2024 at the earliest or perhaps 2025?
Only Apple knows or only time will tell.
And, though poorly named, Apple Vision Pro IS an innovative NEW product, despite years of iterations of things like the un-comparable Meta Oculus. (Apple typically “Goes Big Or Goes Home.”)
Apple Vision Pro is a new, innovative and industry-changing first just as much as the first iPhone was to the entire mobile phone industry. It will upend the AR/VR headset/glasses/wearables market just as much as the iPhone forever changed the whole paradigm for mobile phones after its release into the marketplace.
And just like with the Mac and the iPhone, Apple Vision Pro competitors won’t be copying Meta or anyone else, they’ll be copying Apple (as usual [sigh]).
Even, recursively, Meta will.
Just as a reminder, the below attached image is of the first Samsung Galaxy phone, running Google’s Android, announced in 2009 — two years after the first iPhone.
Look at all familiar to another new phone of that “era”? 🤔
Last edited:
Do you know if they provided their dxdiag files so we can properly compare our systems to theirs? Without that the charts aren't that useful.Something is wrong with your setup. Nvidia themselves claim they get 543fps in the game with a 4090.
Would dxdiag help if the game is using Vulkan?
I watched a GN video that showed being CPU limited at resolutions less than 4K with a 12700K and a 4090 (reflex was off).
This might be the best analysis of the current state of Apple I've ever seen. I remember a very long period where almost every Apple product was undeniably superior to the competition and this happened during a time that Apple was still the underdog. They won market share by making such innovative and consistently high quality products they became almost impossible to ignore. Apple spent years building up a loyal fan base with this strategy and now it seems they are just cashing in on their past reputation.
I'm sure from Steam's point of view there's no reason to invest in Mac game development. As the largest PC game distributor they could legitimize the Mac as a gaming platform but why would they do that? If Steam were able to grow a large enough gaming base on the Mac platform Apple would probably develop some proprietary method that required they either get a cut of each sale or worse, would require games be sold on the Mac App Store.
These numbers look dubious. I looked up a number of 4090 (@ 1440P & 4k) Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmarks and every one of them beat the supposed M2 Ultra numbers. (See https://www.theverge.com/23398201/nvidia-rtx-4090-review-test-benchmark for example).
The Mac Studio with an M2 Ultra is a $4,000+ computer so getting beat that hard by a $2,000 PC does not make the Mac stand out as a good choice for gaming.
Not true. The Mac user base have always hovered around 2-2.5%. Steam deck was released in 2022 so the decline didn’t begin before that. It was only in July that a sudden change happened and Linux overtook Mac and it was reported in the tech media. Here are the numbers for 2023. As you can see the numbers jump up and down each month:
(Dec 2022 2.48%)
Jan 2.61%
Feb 2.37%
March 1.41%
April 2.3%
May 2.39%
June 1.79%
July 1.84%
August 1.57%
Sep 1.43%
Not completely. Depends on how you look at it. If a company sees its customers are buying a new product more and more and abandoning the old product it’s only natural and should be in their interest to provide more support for the new product where the money is. If Valve is aware of the increasing number of Mac users with Apple Silicon, now over 67% and at the same time sees that the number of Mac users is declining it should try harder to attract those customers and make them stay in order to profit on their purchases instead of losing them to competitors. After all many developers still sell their games on Steam to Mac owners and there are hundreds of thousands of Mac gamers there. So it should be relevant to Valve how many customers they lose to competitors or how many Mac gamers use other gaming services.
It could also be that a billion dollar company like Valve simply doesn’t care and such numbers are completely irrelevant to them, as you say but they’ve shown other signs like when they updated Steam overlay (not the client) with ARM support two years ago so the publishers could sell ARM native ports to Mac gamers. So clearly they’re interested in the money but with minimal effort.
Competitors or not Valve is making money by selling its services to Mac gamers and game publishers, not to Apple. Therefore it should be in their best interest to offer the best Steam client and the best CS 2 and support. If Valve seeks revenge for some old beef with Apple it shouldn’t take it out on its own paying customers through bad support or deleting games they’ve payed for like CS GO. That’s just a stupid and harmful way of doing business and a great way to drive your customers away into the arms of your competitors.
Last edited:
Not sure what you mean. My numbers show exactly what you say, that 4090 beats M2 Ultra in gaming, but I was comparing M2 Ultra with 3060 Ti and posted those charts to show the performance of M2 Ultra in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The red graph represents 4090, not M2 Ultra. Maybe that's what you misinterpreted, thinking those numbers were for M2 Ultra.
I was also only questioning the claim about the performance, not the price. M2 Ultra is NOT barely faster than 3060 Ti, but much faster in gaming and even faster than 4090 in After Effects. Speaking of the price for a gaming PC with RTX 4090 I can only find computers for at least $3000. Still not as much as $4000 like M2 Ultra but not as cheap as you say. As always people don't buy Macs for gaming but Mac owners like to game too once they've purchased their Macs. If I wanted cheap gaming I would buy a $500 console, not a $3000 PC.
Last edited:
Really? 'cause when it completely failed on me for multiple games, across two different Intel-based Macs with fresh installs, and I went to forums to find a fix, I also found a lot people complaining about the very same issue.Yeah on intel it’s not problem at all.
And you can use a real gpu
For years.
And years.
There was a fix, but it involved such a convoluted array of esoteric geekdom that I thought, "Why am I bothering to fix Steam's issues when I can just... not?"
And so I lived happily ever after, with a console.
It's actually quite fitting for Apple given their update scheme: breaks a bunch of software and no way to go back.
Whoops, we added some widgets and a new clock font and now your Adobe suite doesn't work! Oh well.