In 3 years, 50% of all computers capable of playing AAA games will be Macs

[senttoschool]

Edit: October 30th, 2022: 43%

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/in-3-years-50-of-all-computers-capable-of-playing-aaa-games-will-be-macs.2275962/post-31684665

Edit: December 13th, 2021: 36%

Apple will sell about 27 million Macs in 2021. Assume that 80% are M1/M1Pro/M1Max Macs, then Apple will have sold 21 million Macs capable of playing AAA games.

According to IDC, the number of gaming computers (desktops and laptops) sold in 2021 is projected to be 47 million. Thus, Macs are 36% of computers sold capable of playing AAA titles in 2021.

Original Post below​

Tldr: Within 3 years, basic math suggests Macs will be 50% of all computers sold yearly capable of playing AAA games. It will finally make financial sense for AAA developers to port games to MacOS.

Before Apple Silicon:

• Apple will ship ~17.5m Macs this year, representing about 11-12% of total U.S. PC market and 7-9% of total worldwide.
• A very small percentage of those Macs can play any AAA games
• If 20% of Macs sold are Macbook Pros 16" or better with a 5300m+ GPU, then that means if developers port their AAA games to the Mac, they are increasing the game's audience by only 2% (0.20 * 0.11). That's a lot of work for a very small audience gain.
• Hence, AAA games rarely get ported to Macs

After Apple Silicon:

• The M1 is as fast as a 1050Ti in gaming
• The 1050ti is the second most common GPU according to the Steam Survey
• This means AAA developers have to make games playable on a 1050ti level GPU
• For CPU, the M1 is more than 2x faster than the most common Steam CPUs in both single-thread and multi-threaded benchmarks
• Cyberpunk is the most demanding AAA game this year and targets an RX 470 and an i5-3570K in minimum requirements. The M1 is nearly as fast as the RX 470 and more than 2x faster than the i5-3570K. (Note: This is not saying that Cyberpunk is playable on the M1. I'm only comparing its min requirements to the M1.)
• The M1 will be the slowest Mac chip Apple will ever make. Expect Apple Silicon chips to get much more powerful.
• Ming Chi Kuo predicts that Mac shipments will increase by 100% within 3 years due to Apple Silicon, which means Macs will ship 35m units in 2023.
• Every single one of the 35m Macs sold will be capable of playing AAA games from low to high settings
• For comparison, the total number of PC gaming computers sold is 35m in 2019
• All this means in 3 years, Macs will be 50% of all computers capable of playing AAA games sold each year
• For AAA developers, that means the Mac gaming market goes from ~2% right now to about 50% within 3 years

Tim Cook wants this. Read the attached email chain between Tim Cook and his lieutenants.

 

[jeanlain]

There are some approximations here. The US market is not the world market and an M1 GPU is not nearly as fast as a the RX 470. The RX 470 achieves almost 2X more FLOPS and texels/s.
The number of units sold is not the install base. Old Macs will remain used for many years.

In addition, I suspect that the proportion of people interested in AAA gaming is lower among Mac users than PC users, regardless of the specs of their PC. I don't have numbers to back that up though.

 

[senttoschool]

There are some approximations here. The US market is not the world market and an M1 GPU is not nearly as fast as a the RX 470. The RX 470 achieves almost 2X more FLOPS and texels/s.

In addition, I suspect that the proportion of people interested in AAA gaming is lower among Mac users than PC users, regardless of the specs of their PC. I don't have numbers to back that up though.

The worldwide number of gaming computers sold in 2020 is 35m according to IDC. Min-Chi Kuo projects 35m Macs in 2023. So it's 50% regardless.

Second, Tflops does not represent gaming performance well. AMD's new RDNA2 is far faster than their old GCN (RX 400 series) architecture at the same Tflops for example. And we've already seen benchmarks where the M1 is faster than AMD Radeon GPUs inside Macs in many benchmarks.

For example, in this test, the M1 is far faster than the 1050ti and Radeon RX 560: https://www.techradar.com/news/appl...outperform-some-amd-and-nvidia-graphics-cards

 

[jeanlain]

I personally think that MX Macs alone won't change much the AAA gaming landscape.
If Apple truly wants to change that (which remains to be seen), the need to do what others do:
- purchase major game studios, or at least partner with them
- release a game console.

 

[jeanlain]

Second, Tflops does not represent gaming performance well. AMD's new RDNA2 is far faster than their old GCN (RX 400 series) architecture at the same Tflops for example. And we've already seen benchmarks where the M1 is faster than AMD Radeon GPUs inside Macs in many benchmarks.

On 3DMark wild life, the radeon rx 470 achieves 24000 on average. That's 30% better than the M1.
Not every AAA game has to be as demanding as Cybperpunk. But still. Apple doesn't do enough for AAA gaming IMO.
Let's see what they do with the next Apple TV and the rumoured in-house game controller.

 

[senttoschool]

I personally think that MX Macs alone won't change much the AAA gaming landscape.
If Apple truly wants to change that (which remains to be seen), the need to do what others do:
- purchase major game studios, or at least partner with them
- release a game console.

1. Apple is the largest gaming company right now in terms of gaming revenue. They've done so without making a single game. Developers go where users are, especially wealthy users.

2. Sure, it might be easy for Apple to make a game console in the near future. Just slap an M2 or M3 in an Apple TV and release an official Apple game controller.

 

[senttoschool]

On 3DMark wild life, the radeon rx 470 achieves 24000 on average. That's 30% better than the M1.
Not every AAA game has to be as demanding as Cybperpunk. But still. Apple doesn't do enough for AAA gaming IMO.
Let's see what they do with the next Apple TV and the rumoured in-house game controller.

We don't really have any graphics benchmark that is fully optimized for the M1 and has comparisons to an RX 470.

For benchmarks that I've seen, the M1 is quite a bit faster than the 1050 Ti and RX 560.

Another thing that the M1 has that the RX 470 doesn't is AI hardware. Nvidia is able to use their RTX AI (tensor) cores to upscale gaming resolutions using a deep learning technique called DLSS and boost performance by 30-50%. The RX 470 doesn't have this hardware but the M1 has the neural engine that could be used to perform similar upscaling.

Without apples-to-apples benchmarks, optimization, and most importantly, AAA games made for the M1, we really don't know how the M1 performs compared to Radeon and Nvidia. We can only guestimate.

Regardless, the M1 will be the slowest Apple Silicon for Macs and it's already faster than a huge portion of Steam PC gaming computers.

For AAA developers, it's going to be a no brainer to port their games over to ARM Macs if it's 50% of the gaming PCs sold each year. They can even make an iPhone/iPad game and upscale to the Mac or make a Mac game and downscale to the iPhone/iPad. Kill 3 birds with 1 stone. If Apple makes an Apple Console or put an M chip into the Apple TV, then developers can kill 4 birds with 1 stone.

 

[Gnattu]

1. Apple is the largest gaming company right now in terms of gaming revenue. They've done so without making a single game. Developers go where users are, especially wealthy users.

Different games have different audiences, the gaming revenue is not from Mac but from iOS, and mobile phone games have a very different player base from AAA titles, so as developers.

 

[onfire23]

The rx470 is 2x faster in Geekbench compute. It scores north of 40000 points. It is faster in 3dmark wildlife as well by 30-40%.

According to your link, Google had 14.6 billion revenue and apple had 22.2 billion. That makes Google the second largest gaming company by revenue. But mobile gaming is an entirely different market unrelated to desktop.

 

[leman]

I am not quite convinced about the performance comparisons you are making but I think your math is essentially correct. All Apple Silicon Macs are reasonably capable gaming machines (relative to the popular PC hardware out there), so I have little doubt that we will see more games being ported to Apple platform.

By the way, I have little doubt that Cyberpunk could run on M1 if properly implemented utilizing Apple's proprietary rendering technology. Around 40 fps at 1680x1050 at low settings should be possible.

 

[senttoschool]

Different games have different audiences, the gaming revenue is not from Mac but from iOS, and mobile phone games have a very different player base from AAA titles, so as developers.

Here are things we know:

1. The majority of gaming computers sold are actually laptops which mean most PC gamers are fine gaming on laptops. This bodes well for Mac gaming because most Macs sold are laptops.

2. Apple users are the wealthiest, and the most willing to spend money on software.

3. Even at roughly ~2% of total computers sold yearly capable of playing AAA-games, Activision Blizzard still ported WoW, Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, and HoTS to MacOS. Now imagine 50% instead of 2%.

Lastly, I own a Windows desktop PC to play some games. I would love to get rid of my Windows desktop PC if I can play AAA games on low to medium settings on a Macbook, which is very reasonable. Heck, I'm willing to bet that the Macbook Pro 16" with the M1X or M2X or M3X will be able to play most of the latest AAA games on high settings.

 

[senttoschool]

I am not quite convinced about the performance comparisons you are making but I think your math is essentially correct. All Apple Silicon Macs are reasonably capable gaming machines (relative to the popular PC hardware out there), so I have little doubt that we will see more games being ported to Apple platform.

By the way, I have little doubt that Cyberpunk could run on M1 if properly implemented utilizing Apple's proprietary rendering technology. Around 40 fps at 1680x1050 at low settings should be possible.

I believe that. Cyberpunk runs on the original Xbox One (albeit very poorly).

The M1 CPU is ~6.7x faster than the Xbox One CPU in single-thread performance according to Geekbench's fastest AMD Jaguar CPU score. The M1 GPU is 2x faster than the Xbox One GPU if you go by pure Tflops measurement.

 

[senttoschool]

The rx470 is 2x faster in Geekbench compute. It scores north of 40000 points. It is faster in 3dmark wildlife as well by 30-40%.

The RX 470, based on AMD's old GCN architecture, was notorious for being really good at compute tasks and equally bad at actual gaming.

For example, in Geekbench OpenCL Compute, the RX 470 is 9% better than the Nvidia 1060 6GB. But in actual gaming, the 1060 6GB is ~25% faster.

If you want to know why, AMD essentially optimized their GCN architecture for compute tasks and then tried to port it to the gaming market. GCN was made to try to catch Nvidia's CUDA compute dominance. It failed miserably in trying to catch CUDA and in gaming. It was good for crypto mining though.

Nowadays, AMD has corrected their mistake. They made RDNA for gaming and CDNA for compute. CNDA is still derived from GCN while RDNA is a brand new gaming-focused architecture.

 

[pmiles]

Apple computers have ALWAYS been capable of playing AAA games... the issue is that developers write exclusively with DirectX in mind. So even if you could prove that Macs had the fastest CPU and the most powerful GPU on the planet, you're still not going to convince developers to write for the Mac.

Hell when Apple transitioned to the INTEL chip, it and all PCs still had lots of games being writing with OpenGL. It was at that point in time when the potential for Apple being able to get the same games for the Mac as for the PC was a reality.

Guess what. It never happened. OpenGL depreciated. Apple switched to Metal. And the divide between Macs and PCs have never been greater than it is now from a developer's stand point.

It's not the GPU or the CPU... it's the underlying code being used. Microsoft will never abandon DirectX and Apple will never abandon Metal.

You want to play PC games... buy a PC. It's that simple. And that is exactly the mindset of the developers out there too.

 

[dmccloud]

There are some approximations here. The US market is not the world market and an M1 GPU is not nearly as fast as a the RX 470. The RX 470 achieves almost 2X more FLOPS and texels/s.
The number of units sold is not the install base. Old Macs will remain used for many years.

In addition, I suspect that the proportion of people interested in AAA gaming is lower among Mac users than PC users, regardless of the specs of their PC. I don't have numbers to back that up though.

But the M1 is only the entry level Apple Silicon. As Apple releases newer versions of the M Series SoCs, both computational and graphical performance should increase, which would likely mean that RX 470 gets left in the dust. But what senttoschool overloooks is that game developers would have to first jump on supporting the Mac and its M-series platform to make it an attractive option for AAA gamers.

3. Even at roughly ~2% of total computers sold yearly capable of playing AAA-games, Activision Blizzard still ported WoW, Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, and HoTS to MacOS. Now imagine 50% instead of 2%.

Only WoW has an M1-native version. Diablo III, SC2, and HoTS are all running via Rosetta. Same goes for Hearthstone and Warcraft III Reforged.

 

[senttoschool]

Apple computers have ALWAYS been capable of playing AAA games... the issue is that developers write exclusively with DirectX in mind. So even if you could prove that Macs had the fastest CPU and the most powerful GPU on the planet, you're still not going to convince developers to write for the Mac.

I think you missed the point.

Developers go where users go and where the money is. There are more developers making games on Metal than DirextX since mobile gaming is 3x bigger than PC gaming. If 50% of AAA-capable gaming computers sold yearly are Macs, developers would port games over even if they have to make the games in Adobe Flash. And yes, there were people who thought Adobe Flash was going to be a major platform in gaming, especially browser based gaming.

Porting a AAA game over to the Mac right now would increase the number of users by ~2% as explained in the original post. That's peanuts. No way AAA developers would ever spend the effort to port games over for 2%. But 50%?

In addition, Metal isn't really an obstacle. Every major studio has game engines running for iOS and iPadOS which means they have engines running for Metal. There are more Metal developers now than DirectX. There's also the extra added benefit of potentially making a game that could run on iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, and maybe a future Apple TV/Console using Metal.

 

[senttoschool]

Only WoW has an M1-native version. Diablo III, SC2, and HoTS are all running via Rosetta. Same goes for Hearthstone and Warcraft III Reforged.

Yes, I didn't say D3, SC2, and HoTS are optimized for the M1 - just that they were ported over to MacOS.

 

[Amenard]

You forgot to add the Apple tax in your equation.

PCs are cheaper and way more available globally. Then there's NVidia. While the M1 may compete with lower to mid range AMD offering, they're just not there yet when it comes to NVidia GPU.

 

[senttoschool]

You forgot to add the Apple tax in your equation.

PCs are cheaper and way more available globally. Then there's NVidia. While the M1 may compete with lower to mid range AMD offering, they're just not there yet when it comes to NVidia GPU.

1. Any gaming laptop is going to cost similar to a Macbook Air M1.

2. Most analysts, including Ming-Chi Kuo, expect an affordable Macbook SE.

2. 35m Macs sold/year are Ming-Chi Kuo projections, not mine.

3. Apple doesn't have to compete with an RTX 3090 (although Apple is rumored to be testing a 128-core GPU). Only a very small percentage of gamers have high-end GPUs. AAA developers don't target high-end GPUs. They target the most common GPUs which are low to mid-end.

 

[jeanlain]

1. Apple is the largest gaming company right now in terms of gaming revenue. They've done so without making a single game. Developers go where users are, especially wealthy users.

Are we talking about AAA games or not?

 

[senttoschool]

Are we talking about AAA games or not?

Yes, we are. I'm just pointing out that Apple did not need in-house studios to become the largest gaming company by gaming revenue, nor will they need that for AAA games on Macs.

 

[jeanlain]

1. The majority of gaming computers sold are actually laptops which mean most PC gamers are fine gaming on laptops. This bodes well for Mac gaming because most Macs sold are laptops.

That doesn't follow. I'm sure that the percentage of laptops among AAA gamers is lower than in the global population.

 

[leman]

Apple computers have ALWAYS been capable of playing AAA games...

Until now, Mac and PC used the same hardware. And no, Intel integrated graphics is not capable of playing AAA games. You had to get a 15" MBP for around $3000 to get the gaming capability of an entry-level ($1000-$1500) gaming laptop.

So even if you could prove that Macs had the fastest CPU and the most powerful GPU on the planet, you're still not going to convince developers to write for the Mac.

There are already a lot of games out there available for Mac, so there must be at least some money in the platform. With all Macs becoming dramatically more competent at gaming, I see no reason why the number of Mac games should not increase.

Hell when Apple transitioned to the INTEL chip, it and all PCs still had lots of games being writing with OpenGL. It was at that point in time when the potential for Apple being able to get the same games for the Mac as for the PC was a reality.

Of course it never happened. Why would a dev bother to make their game run on Mac if 80% of Macs came with low-end Intel integrated graphics that could do little beyond window composition? It was only very very recently that Intel iGPUs started become relatively competent.

Guess what. It never happened. OpenGL depreciated. Apple switched to Metal. And the divide between Macs and PCs have never been greater than it is now from a developer's stand point.

Quite funny that Apple switch to Metal was what made good macOS gaming possible. Total War series, Tomb Raider, Larian games, tons of indie games using Unity engine — all of them use Metal and they run great on the Mac.

Your mistake is that you see that there two different APIs and assume that it makes developer's job more difficult. I will tell you something surprising: it is much less work to develop a DX12 version for Windows and a Metal version for macOS than it was to develop an single OpenGL version that would run well on both. Simplicity of the API, performance and availability of good developer tools is much more important.

And of course, this is not an issue for the majority fo developers out there that use a gaming engine such as Unity, that will work everywhere out of the box. By the way, Unity already has support for Apple Silicon, so I imagine it's just a matter of time until we get a much of native games.

You want to play PC games... buy a PC. It's that simple. And that is exactly the mindset of the developers out there too.

The mindset of the developers is to sell as many games as possible. If targeting Mac users could increase your revenue by 30%, why wouldn't you do it?

You forgot to add the Apple tax in your equation.

PCs are cheaper and way more available globally.

That is only one side of the story. Sure, if the only thing you care about is gaming and you are on a budget, you can get yourself a cheap gaming laptop for the price of an MBA (or even cheaper). But those laptops are just no good if it comes to other things. They battery life is poor, the display is poor, the ergonomic is poor... if you are a "normal" user and you need a versatile computer, you are much more likely to get something like the Dell XPS 13 for the same price because they will do a much better job for you in class, at home or when you have to work on the go.

The thing is, with these new Macs, you can kind of get both for the same price. M1 laptops have better battery life than any sub-notebook out there, they have better CPU performance than most performance-oriented laptops, and they are better at gaming than regular multimedia laptops in the same class. And they have amazing build quality, excellent display and very good ergonomy.

I think the point of all this is that Apple Silicon potentially enables gaming to a whole class of users that might be interested in playing some games but could not justify purchasing gaming-oriented hardware.

Then there's NVidia. While the M1 may compete with lower to mid range AMD offering, they're just not there yet when it comes to NVidia GPU.

The M1 is a direct competitor to entry-level Nvidia dGPUs such as the MX450, and it can match the performance of a GTX 1650 in gaming benchmarks (I assume that games optimized for M1 will match or even outperform the 1650).

 

[Amenard]

Until now, Mac and PC used the same hardware. And no, Intel integrated graphics is not capable of playing AAA games. You had to get a 15" MBP for around $3000 to get the gaming capability of an entry-level ($1000-$1500) gaming laptop.



There are already a lot of games out there available for Mac, so there must be at least some money in the platform. With all Macs becoming dramatically more competent at gaming, I see no reason why the number of Mac games should not increase.



Of course it never happened. Why would a dev bother to make their game run on Mac if 80% of Macs came with low-end Intel integrated graphics that could do little beyond window composition? It was only very very recently that Intel iGPUs started become relatively competent.



Quite funny that Apple switch to Metal was what made good macOS gaming possible. Total War series, Tomb Raider, Larian games, tons of indie games using Unity engine — all of them use Metal and they run great on the Mac.

Your mistake is that you see that there two different APIs and assume that it makes developer's job more difficult. I will tell you something surprising: it is much less work to develop a DX12 version for Windows and a Metal version for macOS than it was to develop an single OpenGL version that would run well on both. Simplicity of the API, performance and availability of good developer tools is much more important.

And of course, this is not an issue for the majority fo developers out there that use a gaming engine such as Unity, that will work everywhere out of the box. By the way, Unity already has support for Apple Silicon, so I imagine it's just a matter of time until we get a much of native games.



The mindset of the developers is to sell as many games as possible. If targeting Mac users could increase your revenue by 30%, why wouldn't you do it?



That is only one side of the story. Sure, if the only thing you care about is gaming and you are on a budget, you can get yourself a cheap gaming laptop for the price of an MBA (or even cheaper). But those laptops are just no good if it comes to other things. They battery life is poor, the display is poor, the ergonomic is poor... if you are a "normal" user and you need a versatile computer, you are much more likely to get something like the Dell XPS 13 for the same price because they will do a much better job for you in class, at home or when you have to work on the go.

The thing is, with these new Macs, you can kind of get both for the same price. M1 laptops have better battery life than any sub-notebook out there, they have better CPU performance than most performance-oriented laptops, and they are better at gaming than regular multimedia laptops in the same class. And they have amazing build quality, excellent display and very good ergonomy.

I think the point of all this is that Apple Silicon potentially enables gaming to a whole class of users that might be interested in playing some games but could not justify purchasing gaming-oriented hardware.



The M1 is a direct competitor to entry-level Nvidia dGPUs such as the MX450, and it can match the performance of a GTX 1650 in gaming benchmarks (I assume that games optimized for M1 will match or even outperform the 1650).

I paid $325Cdn last year for a new Lenovo Ideapad with a ryzen 2500 and vega 8 with a 15 inch 1080p native display 16gig of ram an 512gig SSD. The Air cost nearly 4x that... As I said the Apple tax is real.

 

[senttoschool]

That doesn't follow. I'm sure that the percentage of laptops among AAA gamers is lower than in the global population.

I don't understand your point. Global population? Like 7.8 billion people?