Apple's "gaming" revenue comes pretty much entirely from IAPs in iOS games. Most of it comes from a few whales that drop hundreds or thousands on gems or whatever. I don't think it really can be extended to Mac gaming. Mac gaming has more in common with PC/console gaming. When you compare the Steam HW survey to other sources of market share, Macs are significantly underrepresented suggesting less Mac users game than expected.
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In 3 years, 50% of all computers capable of playing AAA games will be Macs
- Thread starter senttoschool
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The issue is Apple's gaming revenue is 99.9% from mobile gaming, where there are no AAA games present. So far there is no proof that the mobile gaming success they are seeing will translate to macOS AAA space.
Unfortunately, this argument is not dissimilar to claiming that MacDonald has better food than a Michelin star restaurant based
People who eat at McDonalds are also likely to want to eat a Michelin star restaurant if they could.Unfortunately, this argument is not dissimilar to claiming that MacDonald has better food than a Michelin star restaurant based
Most people who eat regularly at McDonald’s don’t even know what a Michelin star is.
I don’t think macOS gaming will be catching up to iOS any time soon if ever.
While Apple does not provide the data necessary to make that determination, I would wager that the Mac/Steam userbase has a significantly higher percentage of AS users than the Mac userbase as a whole. There are a LOT of customers using Intel-based Macs that will not replace their machines until either they completely die or parts are no longer available for repairs. The other things to keep in mind with the Steam Survey is that it's an opt-in mechanism, so a lot of people probably just click the no button and go on. That can skew results to some degree.
Most people who regularly eat at McDonalds would consider an Michelin starred restaurant too expensive to dine at, and most likely either don't know about the star system or don't care about how many stars a place gets.
Where did you source those numbers from? They're less than half of what I've seen for global Mac shipments. E.g., take a look at this report from IDC:
Global PC Shipments Continue to Decline in the Second Quarter of 2023 Due to Weak Demand and Shifting Budgetary Priorities, According to IDC Tracker
IDC examines consumer markets by devices, applications, networks, and services to provide complete solutions for succeeding in these expanding markets.
www.idc.com
@Ethosik I figured this video would probably have you nodding your head
Not sure I understand the question? Do I have to watch the video to understand it? '
Not especially, basically the video is blaming the "freedom" of DX12 as why games are performing worse than their DX11 versions (where available). It seems like MS tied Ray Tracing and Mesh Shaders to DX12 and I am wondering if Apple tied those same features to the developer controlled memory model or if you could make a DX11-equivalent-in-Metal game with those features still.Not sure I understand the question? Do I have to watch the video to understand it? '
Manual memory and hazard management is optional in Metal, although for many more advanced applications manual controls should significantly improve performance, since driver-managed resources will incur more overhead. Spontaneously, it's hard for me to understand what the claim you mention might refer to, unless they are claiming that all developers are incompetent.
Probably the simplest explanation why DX12 renders are slower is because they often do more than DX11 renderers (e.g. using more advanced effects and algorithms).
I am not saying they are not claiming developers are incompetent, they did point out that games that give you the option of using dx11 and dx12 tend to have better performance in dx12 (Fortnite, The Witcher 3 were the two big examples).
Some folks think the dx12 renderer in Starfield is messed up compared to the dx11 renderer from Skiyrim (same game engine, honestly no clue what was changed to accommodate Starfield).
I was just curious if Apple allowed the advanced features using the driver managed mode (clearly dx12 doesn't). That seems like a big win for ease of implementing features and getting good performance without having to tweak things too much.
Glad more people are talking about this. As an example, to make FF7 Remake playable to me (where it’s not a micro stutter mess) I need to tell it (through command line arguments) to use the previous Direct X. That alone fixes all the issues.
Not sure what a Microsoft proprietary graphics API has to do with Apple Silicon? All this performance tweaking of Windows PCs won't come to the Mac. Macs are more like consoles in that they offer a consistent baseline performance. You won't be able to choose between Metal 2 and Metal 3. Once you've installed a macOS version on a specific M-series chip, all your graphics settings are fix.
The Xbox consoles also use DirectX 12. The PS5 has a similar API that gives devs more control over the GPU. This potentially means better effects and performance in the right hands but conversely can be terrible in the wrong ones.
Everything can be terrible in the wrong hands. With Metal and M-Series, both hardware and software are in Apple's hands and Cupertino can yield the maximum of graphics performance optimization. So we (likely) won't run into an issue, where the newest version of Metal uses up much more resources than the previous one. And Apple provides a "Game Porting Toolkit" to make the process as easy as possible. But ports from DirectX games will also not look dramatically better only because they now run on a Mac.
I feel like it is relevant. Look at the performance of The Medium. Apple even had them on "stage" to show off GPTK and how having the game run native would double the performance, but ultimately, even with getting help from Apple the game has fairly terrible performance. Maybe they should have spent even more time optimizing the game with Apples help.
It's en UE4 game. I don't think the engine is well optimised for macOS/Metal and there isn't much the game developers can do about it.
It's a custom Apple RT engine so it's unlikely it will do anything unless devs specifically develop time towards it.
I'd be more excited for Mesh Shaders in practice, but being limited to the M3 will mean meaningful takeup is a long way away.
With iPhone finally supporting mesh shaders (well in the Pro line) I am hoping developers will actually take advantage of it more now (especially since desktop has supported it for a while, well since M2). I think the RT thing will be interesting, really interested to see what it looks like in practice. 3DMark is already ready for the comparisons with the existing lineup.
No extra dev-time needed. Because of their own chip design, Apple can integrate power-efficient Raytracing into their next silicon and because of their own Metal API, the programming interface will act as an abstraction layer between the games and all possible hardware configurations. Every time a ported Mac game makes a call for Raytracing via Metal on an M3, it should simply run 8× faster.