No, not quite. Unclear how Steam handles Windows on Mac because while in Crossover the HW is shown as Apple Silicon the OS is shown as Windows. I've done the survey one time in my entire life when I was given the opportunity not long ago both in macOS and Crossover and the survey showed my OS in Crossover as Windows 10. The survey registers the HW and the OS you’re running and in Crossover that’s Windows when you use Steam because the Wine bottles use Windows.
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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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No, not quite. Unclear how Steam handles Windows on Mac because while in Crossover the HW is shown as Apple Silicon the OS is shown as Windows. I've done the survey one time in my entire life when I was given the opportunity not long ago both in macOS and Crossover and the survey showed my OS in Crossover as Windows 10. The survey registers the HW and the OS you’re running and in Crossover that’s Windows when you use Steam because the Wine bottles use Windows.
A more accurate way would be to show the percentage of Mac vs PC since the HW registers as Mac. As it is now all Mac gamers using Crossover/Parallels or other Windows solutions are not registered as macOS users.
That's how technology works. It only makes sense that a modern Mac is more capable than one from 5 years ago. The same way a modern Nvidia GPU is more capable than one from 5 years ago. But it needs to be utilized and that's where the problem is.
Take Path of Exile as an example, a game I've probably played most over the past few years because it's strategic, fun and can be played with friends online, be it for 10 minutes or 10 hours.
Now, one has to understand that PoE, despite being free, really isn't free. In order to really play it past the tutorial (Acts 1-10), one needs to pay about $100+ for stash tabs to make it playable at all as it's based on farming and crafting. The further you get through early, mid and late game, the worse this gets and if one is not playing SSF, stash tabs need to be bought to store gear for trade. While GGG are adding stuff league after league, they eventually decided to develop a DLC. When they realised that all the stash tabs (and skins) players already bought would be usable, they pushed that new DLC into a new game, PoE2. That way, they can sell stash tabs (and skins) again. And because they keep expanding leagues, large chunk of PoE is already running with the PoE2 engine, otherwise they could not have made the league changes. In order to not cut off Mac players the same way Valve did with CS, they had to port the engine over. That allows Mac players to keep playing PoE1 and also PoE2, which was never supposed to happen and only did, because they needed the update for PoE1.
Now the problem with this is, PoE is in the worst state it has ever been. Go beyond the tutorial and the game is pretty much unplayable with dips to 1 or 2 FPS. Impossible to get a Deadeye Lightning Arrow to level 90, because it's based on evasion and movement. It's better for a Archmage Ball Lightning Hierophant, because it's way more tanky and dropped frames don't lead to death. But it's absolutely no fun to play at such low frame rates and even switching gear in town has massive FPS drops. You really need to go to your hideout for equipment changes.
So even with the most capable hardware in Macs ever, in case of PoE isn't never performed worse. Granted, it's not a top performer on Windows either. But at least there's the option to just upgrade to a more powerful GPU. One can't upgrade to a M10 Max it would probably need to run this smoothly. And while that isn't the rule for all games, more care in form of optimization is needed from developers. And that's back to the initial situation, all the way back to the 90s and as you say... number of people playing games on Macs needs to go up massively. Chicken and egg problem.
Path of Exile runs through Rosetta2 though.
It was supposed to gain Aarch64 support before they wrapped the new update up as Path of Exile 2.
You can definitely play the game with less than $100 invested though but it is so convoluted you have no idea what you actually need to fit your play style.
It plays mostly around 60 FPS at 4K on the M2 Max (from my experience).
As soon as you're in early game and start crafting, that price goes up massively as you need to store items and want to sell/trade stuff in order to further finance crafting. On top of that, most people play multiple characters in a league and need to store items for each character. I'm personally on the conservative side, but tend to play around 3 different characters per league. Usually a starter build for farming initial currency, then a midgame one to complete till early endgame and then a high-end one, costing quite a bit to complete it. I did pay about $150 for tabs over the years and if I'd be heavily into trading, I'd need more.
It doesn't have native 4k, Mac version is locked to a single res, rest is scaling. You get the 60fps only when there's nothing going on. If there is, see it drop. It doesn't even matter on what system. You can do that on a M2 Ultra or M3 Max. Check the support forums and reddit, it's full of massive complains about the Mac version like this: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3523184
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3504111 (the guy posted a video and there's not much on screen dropping to single digit fps)
Add to that, they constantly break the game on Mac so it crashes at start up (last update did that again) until it was fixed a day later and many people have the issue that you can't update the game, which requires to uninstall and install from scratch again. Mac support from GGG is unbelievably bad at this point, was never worse.
Not that the Windows version is highly optimized, it's a performance hog as well. But at least there are ways around it.
Apple is continuing to invest in its strategy of one code base for AAA games and ship on iPhone, iPad, and mac.
| Game Porting Toolkit 2, allowing for more advanced games to Mac. Includes better Windows compatibility and new shader debugging tools. And allows games to move from Mac to iPad and iPhone more easily. |
I think consoles, phones, handhelds and desktop will achieve relative “relative” gaming parity in 3-5 years. The reasons are the following:
-ARM based SoC will rapidly get better. Assassins Creed and Resident Evil on the iPhone show a promising future.
-It goes without saving that ARM based SoC will be cheaper to manufacture and more efficient than X64 equivalent systems. My moment of reckoning was in 2021 when I had a 2020 MBP 16 inch but got an M1 MacBook for work. I tested the latter by playing four 4k YouTube videos in full screen on chrome as the same time. Swiped between them. Didn’t hear fan noise and the laptop didn‘t get hot. I briefly stared out the window and pondered about my existence and recalibrated my PoV on hardware. Once you go arm there’s no way back.
-The most popular games that people play are live service. They don’t require the best hardware and still look good on a 5 year old computer.
-Upscaling and frame generation bump performance and quality without the need for more powerful hardware that increase energy consumption and heat.
I personally look forward to a new Apple TV that I can play AAA titles on. Like a Series S but 1/6th of the size.
-ARM based SoC will rapidly get better. Assassins Creed and Resident Evil on the iPhone show a promising future.
-It goes without saving that ARM based SoC will be cheaper to manufacture and more efficient than X64 equivalent systems. My moment of reckoning was in 2021 when I had a 2020 MBP 16 inch but got an M1 MacBook for work. I tested the latter by playing four 4k YouTube videos in full screen on chrome as the same time. Swiped between them. Didn’t hear fan noise and the laptop didn‘t get hot. I briefly stared out the window and pondered about my existence and recalibrated my PoV on hardware. Once you go arm there’s no way back.
-The most popular games that people play are live service. They don’t require the best hardware and still look good on a 5 year old computer.
-Upscaling and frame generation bump performance and quality without the need for more powerful hardware that increase energy consumption and heat.
I personally look forward to a new Apple TV that I can play AAA titles on. Like a Series S but 1/6th of the size.
Another big boost is that ARM SoCs will likely force AAA makers to optimize for ARM instruction sets. Qualcomm is making a big splash with their Oryon SoCs. Nvidia, Mediatek, Samsung are all expected to join the Windows ARM race.
I mean the more important part being AVX2 support.
Ray tracing is "still not there" for gaming if it requires the highest end hardware to even deliver remotely playable performance.
I mean AVX2 is fine, but end users don't see a visual difference. There are some games where RT really does make a difference when on (Cyberpunk 2077 Overdrive, Desordre, Alan Wake 2, Minecraft RTX, Quake 2 RTX, Portal RTX)
At least on the PC side, it will probably take quite a few years (plus usage in gaming focused PC's) for this to be a thing (IMO). Things may go faster if Sony/MS use ARM in their consoles, but thus far that isn't the case.
I think AAA developers see the writing on the wall. They have to support multiple platforms. ARM is not going away. It'll only get bigger and bigger.
That is probably true, but I wouldn't count out how lazy big publishers can be with respects to taking advantage of hardware (at least on PC side).
With the bigger places pushing live service games it will be interesting to see how quickly they come out with ARM native versions (if only to be able to stop using anticheat).
Correct. The transition to ARM will take time, probably more so for enterprise than consumer app. It will be interesting to see if ARM PCs can run the same arm based applications as iOS or Android devices.
Emulation and porting is easy. The devil is in optimisation and debugging.
Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition does.
I was looking on Reddit and someone got R&C:RA running on their Mac and it looked decent (at least in the still shot) I don't recall what they were getting frame rate wise. I imagine they were not using RT though (OMG the PC version with RT looks amazing). Looking forward to seeing all of the other Sony games that required AVX2 support working under crossover/whisky.
Most of Sony's first party games (Spider Man, Ratchet and Clank, Last of Us, Horizon: Forbidden West etc.) as an example. Also I believe Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves, Atomic Heart and Alan Wake 2 requires AVX2 support.
But the penalty for not supporting AVX2 is just slower performance (unless the application or game specifically calls for it).
This is how apple treats game devs: https://appleinsider.com/articles/2...pple-is-like-being-in-an-abusive-relationship
Why would anyone want to work with apple?
Why would anyone want to work with apple?
While I'm sure there can be problems with Apple this is a series of articles by the same writer called Neil Long at mobile gamer.biz with questionable sources. He also writes in both articles about Apple Arcade that "We have contacted Apple for comment on this report and will update this story if or when they respond." but since the first time back in Feb he hasn't updated the story with any news about a response from Apple.
Inside Apple Arcade: axed games, declining payouts, disillusioned studios – and an uncertain future - Mobilegamer.biz
Apple’s game subscription service seems to be on auto-pilot after the tech giant “cancelled a ******** of projects and pissed off a lot of people,” our sources say. And now there are whispers of another reboot.
mobilegamer.biz
Those Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil and Death Stranding ports have bombed - Mobilegamer.biz
Estimates suggest that fewer than 3,000 people have paid $49.99 to play Assassin’s Creed Mirage on iPhone. Other console ports like Resident Evil 4 and Death Stranding have flopped too.
mobilegamer.biz
Under 2,000 people have paid to play Resident Evil 7 on iOS, estimates say - Mobilegamer.biz
Appmagic estimates suggest that, rather unsurprisingly, the latest console game port to come to iOS has also flopped.
mobilegamer.biz
Inside Apple Arcade (again): late payments, stonewalled studios, terrible tech support and Vision Pro woes - Mobilegamer.biz
Vision Pro can’t handle “complex games” and working with Apple is like being in an “abusive relationship”, say our sources.
mobilegamer.biz
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Honestly, I'm somewhat doubtful about AppleInsider covering it as well, given some... interesting mistakes they've made, or deliberately left out, with regards to games coverage.
Things like saying RE4 came out in 2005, making it a near two decade old game, which... TECHNICALLY true, but the Gamecube version's not exactly the same as the modern rerelease.
And Sniper Elite 4 originally coming out in 2017. Again, technically true. But left out is the next-gen upgrade that came out for XBox Series X/S and PS5 in 2021.
It's splitting hairs, but it gets more ironic when you consider the owner of AppleInsider's a former physician. A job where those small details are pretty goddamn important.
Things like saying RE4 came out in 2005, making it a near two decade old game, which... TECHNICALLY true, but the Gamecube version's not exactly the same as the modern rerelease.
And Sniper Elite 4 originally coming out in 2017. Again, technically true. But left out is the next-gen upgrade that came out for XBox Series X/S and PS5 in 2021.
It's splitting hairs, but it gets more ironic when you consider the owner of AppleInsider's a former physician. A job where those small details are pretty goddamn important.