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.
M1 Pro/Max's GPU performance for gaming is quite poor.
- Thread starter sunny5
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
The Mac has always had games native to the hardware (PPC, intel) and not requiring a runtime translation layer. All PPC games were native, the majority of intel Mac games were native (not using wine/cider), etc.
The use of Rosetta is expected at this stage, but in a couple of years most Mac games will be universal apps. Many may use moltenVK though.
Sorry, I should have phrased it a bit better. What I meant to say that virtually all games are low effort post factum ports. These are usually DX or Vulkan games that have been given to a porting studio who then would basically proceed to hammer the square peg into a round hole until it kind of fits. There are very few games developed with Mac compatibility in mind from the start. Frankly, Larian is the only sizable studio I know of that has first-class Mac support in their engine and even they hire outside experts for Metal support.
It wouldn’t start with macs either. Has to be a gaming console. Apple has to appeal to all its users. The nearly 2 billion apple accounts. And try to bring together a group that does want and spend on aaa games. Then you bring that group or steam like app to mac. But this is key.
Yep. Massive investment. Lots to do since they’d need original everything. Controllers. Their rumored apple glasses? Chat. Video. Recording. Game pass. Exclusives and starting catalog. Console itself.
Then maybe it trickles to mac. But I can’t see simply targeting macs for gaming without a console first or any kind of foundation.
I would say this idea seems more appealing than atv+. Gaming revenue is important to apple. This would check a lot of boxes to help with that. It’s strengthens the ecosystem. Who’s to say this isn’t already in the works? Takes time.
Yet Larian is using a porting house for the Mac version.
EDIT: ok, that may be what you mean by "outside experts".
Last edited:
Yes, but they hire them to port the engine, not the done game. That’s a big difference! This also means that Larian will have a state of the art engine that is optimized from the ground up for Apple Silicon, which will make building future games easier.
It’s very different from games like, say, Civilization, where Firaxis makes the Windows game and then gives the code to Aspye as says ok, now make it work on Mac, and Aspyr has to figure out how to walk around all the design decisions... and then the next patch the fun starts again.
If you design from the ground up considering all the target platforms, your overall work will be much easier and the final product will have much higher quality. For example, for my hobby game I am picking libraries and approaches that will work in the same way on x86 and ARM, from Mac to Linux to Windows. This starts with really low?level things like considering numerical compatibility and not using random number generators provided by standard libraries…
Different tactics for different realities.
In a very real way, x86, Bootcamp and Steam were Apple’s attempt at warding off bad press and trying not to lose gaming marketshare following the Intel transition. Developers felt less compelled to make native Mac versions of their games, because you could just boot into Windows natively via Bootcamp.
If I had to guess why this ARM transition, and why now? I think maybe Apple is feeling stronger than ever cash-wise, and gaming marketshare-wise (remember, iOS is still Apple, not just the Mac). If they get into a jam, they have a lot of money to buy a studio here or there.
What do you think about my speculation?
I thought that porting a game boiled down to porting the engine. Most games are designed to run on a variety of configs, including laptops, desktops and consoles.
And since AS Macs have UMA, I suppose there are less restrictions on the size of game assets.
Yeah, true… otoh, there are devices out there that could qualify as testbeds serving Microsoft in evaluating Arm in general.
I have a feeling a lot of companies are evaluating Arm; after all, Apple showcases with its M1 seies of chips what is possible
Like, for example, the Nvidia Jetson AGX. For now its only lacking NVMe boot… other than that its a pretty neat little computer
That's not a completely crazy, unheard of idea. Take a gander at this thing:
That's an Orange386 card that you would socket into a NuBus slot inside a 68K classic Mac, back in the day. It was essentially a self-contained 386 PC motherboard, which I also believe could feature a 387 floating point co-processor, to super charge it for those demanding mathematical workloads.
So no, your thinking isn't crazy, there is precedence. However, it's extraordinarly unlikely that we'd see such a thing in today's market. The demand isn't there, and even if the technical and driver issues got worked out, it would be much cheaper to simply purchase a companion PC. Still, I very much appreciate you thinking outside the box, since it has happened in the past.
Not so simple since the underlying OS is different with SteamOS on Linux and MacOS on BSD. Plus, graphics API translations are different with SteamOS doing DirectX to Vulkan while MacOS doing DirectX to Metal. And, x86-64 vs ARM architecture difference. More of major rewrite than port.
What irritates me is that this isn't the 1990s. There are dozens of solutions that could be used to integrate x86 applications into OS X (including Apple integrating Wine into their operating system, if they wanted, or a virtual machine with GPU paravirtualization).
You clearly have never been involved in AAA game development if you think a little more than a year is all it takes to develop a new game.
Maybe it is about time you open up the Switch eShop.
There is a huge number of AAA games there. Sure many of them are limited to 1080p and 60 frames. That does not make them any less AAA than a 4K 60 or lower spec but with ray tracing enabled game on series X or PC.
The argument here had zero to do with game specs. It is 100 on the developers who are:
1. Biased against Apple
2. Too lazy to port to Apple Silicon
3. Feel the return on investment is not there
Or a combination of the above.
Also the excuse of it being a new platform (ARM) is just that, a developer excuse. The WiiU was PPC and the Switch is Tegra ARM. The developers mostly jumped onto the Switch ship despite it being a new architecture.
Though one thing in Nintendo’s favour is the support and ease of developing for it is very well known. The Switch SDK plus teams dedicated to help out developers really helped the switch get the games. If Apple is serious about M series gaming, they need to make the development process (outright and porting) to be a far smoother and developer friendly process.
dont let sunny watch this...for him will be very depressing
Last edited:
