They've clearly given up on their computers being usable to produce the games or their gaming service.
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MP 7,1 Mac Pro 8.1 - WHAT IF...
- Thread starter maikerukun
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They've clearly given up on their computers being usable to produce the games or their gaming service.
They won’t do anything together with Epic about Unreal, due to the row/court case about Fortnite.
For the kind of games Apple has on their subscription service, using anything that generates Metal compatible code is more than enough
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They won’t do anything together with Epic about Unreal, due to the row/court case about Fortnite.
For the kind of games Apple has on their subscription service, Metal is more than enough
You understand that Unreal is the engine used for many, if not most of the games Apple pays companies to develop as exclusives for Apple Arcade, right?
No one develops games for "metal" they develop games for the game engines, for whom metal is a dumb pipe to the hardware.
After Epic court case, there was a massive exodus from using Unreal Engine amongst developers, due to uncertainty of Unreal Engine’s future on Apple platform. As I understand, Unreal Engine is not actively developed for Apple devices anymore by Epic. Developers moved on to other solutions, I hear a lot of them are using Unity, which seems to be not as good as Unreal.
And games are not developed “for game engines”, it’s other way round: various game engines (of which, Unreal is probably the most popular one) are being used to develop games to be able to run on various hardware architectures, like Xbox, PS5, PC Direct X and in case of Apple - for Metal.
So I’m sure that one does not need to use Unreal specifically, to generate Metal compatible game code, especially because games on Apple Arcade are (mostly) not very graphically intense.
Capcom has proven (with Apple’s blessing and help) that AAA game can be done for Metal without Unreal, they used their own in-house RE Engine to convert RE Village to Mac AS.
So, developers can use different tools, Apple knows that and they do not care about Unreal Engine, especially in light of Epic court case. That’s what I was trying to convey. Was I wrong?
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The problem is AMD's last generation hardware the 6900xt out performs any AS in metal. AS also has no ray tracing so for games in the OSX format is looking real sad.
maybe have 16TB be the max (raid 0) 4 blades (under apples spin of the fastest disk io of any workstion on the market)
Yes, so that means when Apple needs games for its subscription service, they're developed on Windows.
No, you have it backwards. Developers target the game engine, the game engine then deploys to the native technologies of whatever platform the developer chooses as an output option.
There is a lot of stuff done in Unreal that most folks wouldn't recognise as Unreal. Like I said, a number of the biggest headline games Apple has paid to produce and heavily marketed are made in Unreal.
In house engines are a dead end, they're a legacy paradigm as more and more stuff is done in general purpose engines like Unity, Unreal, Godot etc.
Say Apple don't care about Unreal all you like, but Apple are reliant on it to get content for their own services. No Unreal on macOS only means less games developed on macOS. No one is dumping Unreal so they can keep using macOS as a gamedev platform.
I get what you are saying, but this is Apple.
What you describe is how it used to be before Fortnite clash. After Epic court case, Unreal Engine can be “the bestest of them all”, but Apple doesn’t want it on MacOS/iOS.
The same way like they didn’t want to do anything with NVIDIA after they had a falling off, despite their dGPUs being subjectively the best.
That’s why they actively helped Capcom and why they push Unity as game developing tool for MacOS/iOS.
And I don’t agree with that, I’m just stating that it is what it is now.
And yes, you are 100% right that this will push game developers to move to Windows, especially for Unreal engine. Apple, again, is aware and they apparently don’t care.
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There absolutely is, because Apple made the Mac Pro a higher-end tower rather than the midrange workstation it had previously been with the 1,1-5,1. They could make a Mac Studio with more ports and slots and that's still a much more flexible computer than the Studio, albeit if it can't take PCIe GPUs that heavily limits its appeal to some of the people who bought those previous Mac Pros as the best option for their xMac wishes.
I'm not saying I think Apple will pivot and offer a $3K barebones SKU and allow people to modify it from there, it'll probably still be damn expensive, but the 2019 Mac Pro wasn't the only "valid" vision for that product. If they'd shipped something that only had a 1000W PSU and six PCIe slots and was smaller, it would have been closer to the 5,1 and plenty of people would have been happy with that too. Apple chose to aim more niche. Arguably if they're going to spend all this money on this product that thanks to Apple Silicon is going to be more niche, it makes sense to make it a broader-market product at the same time. There's plenty of people who are happy with a Studio, but I imagine there are plenty of Studio people who feel they want more flexibility too, even if they never actually use it, the same way people are piling in 24GB of RAM into MacBook Airs when it doesn't really make much financial sense versus the power profile of the machine.
Not sure why you’ve deleted it, those were all viable points I agree with 100%.
No, Apple is simply a "Blender Corporate Patron", much like AMD, Epic, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, & Unity, to name a few...
Now where Apple goes beyond that is having some of their software engineers work with Blender to implement Metal into Blender, which is a good thing...
I thought of specifying a 16TB SSD (two 8TB NAND blades), but that would most likely jack the pricing up another US$5K...?
One thing Apple could do is have four NAND blade slots, but only populate two from the factory, thereby allowing end users to populate the other two themselves down the road...
This, in conjunction with allowing OWC to make and sell Apple-certified NAND blades, could be a step towards "lower cost" deployment of the ASi Mac Pro...?
But you need DFU to restore (WIPE DATA) to make changes to the NAND blades and right now some configs only fill one slot.
And for the mac pro they don't sell an one stick upgrade kit from say 512 to 1TB
You will note I was talking about theoretical two & four slot Mac Pro systems, not current Mac Studio systems...
For Bob's sake, Apple are literally hiring Unreal-based studios to produce games using Unreal, that run in Unreal's iOS deployment engine at this very moment.
Arguably their biggest, most widely publicised Apple Arcade title in the last 12 months is Unreal based - the company that makes it has literally been going around to every games conference in their home country, and remotely overseas talking about how they use Unreal to make their games, and Apple's running up the marketing on another one from them that's just launched.
The Fortnite clash has nothing whatsoever to do with what is actually happening in the Gamedev world, which is that Unreal is the ascendant platform, and Macs are largely absent (despite having full UE5 support), because their graphics systems don't support all the headline features that Direct-X covers.
Sure, but that machine won't cover the Mac Pro's market - the feedback they received was pretty clear that the lack of user-replacable GPUs was the problem with the 6,1. No matter how much the appliancistas might try to spin it that people were really angry that they couldn't spend $9k+/year replacing the entire machine to get current graphics, customers wanted a slotbox, and customers who do anything serious graphics-related need a slotbox that can be on an annual GPU upgrade cycle, while the machine stays on a 4-5 year cycle.
Apple Silicon does not change that. It's just a different processor, not a new way of working, and so far the only places we've seen it deployed (apart from the Mac Mini) is where it was also used to increase the under-provisioned ram ceilings of the machines into which it was introduced.
And for low-hanging fruit, it seems to have been easy pickings.
None of those other "patrons" are paying the Blender Foundation in order to keep a product, that the Blender Foundation was in the process of shuttering, supported.
Hmmmm, okay, so who here needs a Mac Pro for anything more than heavy editing and music production workflows? In other words, how many people here need the Mac Pro for HEAVY and intense GPU BASED 3D animation, VFX, and Motion Graphics?
Obviously me, but I'm curious how many others here care about this, or, am I alone in that? If I'm alone, and we take this thread as a small sample base of what the Mac market looks like, then sure, it's not worth it for them I guess.
All of that said, how many people here are willing to pay $50k if Apple were to produce a Mac Pro that outperformed the latest and greatest PC with 2 RTX 4090's in it and the whole 9 yards?
Again, obviously me, but incurious how many others here would be willing to pay a very heavy premium if it means having the no questions asked simple as black and white king of both Apple and PC?
Obviously me, but I'm curious how many others here care about this, or, am I alone in that? If I'm alone, and we take this thread as a small sample base of what the Mac market looks like, then sure, it's not worth it for them I guess.
All of that said, how many people here are willing to pay $50k if Apple were to produce a Mac Pro that outperformed the latest and greatest PC with 2 RTX 4090's in it and the whole 9 yards?
Again, obviously me, but incurious how many others here would be willing to pay a very heavy premium if it means having the no questions asked simple as black and white king of both Apple and PC?
I wouldn't spend even $10k on a Mac if it meant I had to live with a hardware prediction Apple made today, for the next several years, until I bought a new one. Apple's track record in betting on the future simply isn't good enough.
I would get a mp solely for the purpose of having a great artist workstation for 3d mainly houdini and octane. (Sw is slightly sketchy today, but has recently improved) Today, in could get a mp2019 with 16 core cpu and two standard 6900xt for a total of slightly above 10k.(but it doesn’t support the sw I mentioned above) A new mp would have to be faster than that and beat the price. It also would need to be possible to swap for newer gpus down the line and expand ram and storage. I would not spend above 15k on a macpro. Since almost all sw I use runs fine or better on PC, I am seriously considering staying there for 3d and this is for me apples last chance to give me a sane system for what I do. Our render nodes using 8 3090 in server rack chassis doesn’t even cost 50k
Actually, pretty much every bit of news coverage out there on the topic would support my interpretation over yours. These two are among them:
Apple Will Launch A Pro iMac Later This Year And, No, It Won't Have A Touchscreen
“We have big plans for the iMac."
Apple Is 'Completely Rethinking' This Long-Forgotten Product
Apple fans will say it's about time
The iMac Pro was NOT created as a replacement to ANYTHING. It didn't replace ANYTHING. It was a stop-gap for those that were still fine with a Xeon Mac desktop you couldn't upgrade or expand at all beyond using Thunderbolt 3 while the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR were still in the oven. They pretty much spell this out in every article written about this media conference that was had.
funny thing is that the imac pro can actually be upgraded with up to four external gpus. Dropping egpus is the most vile and idiotic things apple has done in the last years. Otherwise it would have been a good easy for people to have a great laptop that when stationary have access to extra grunt. I still have two razer cores with 6900xt just sitting here that only works on my 2017 mbp that I have retired.
Apple doesn’t mind other developers using Unreal Engine (or Nvidia cards) or PCs to make games for iOS/MacOS because those games bring them money. I thought this was obvious to everyone, myself included. So not sure why you pointed it out?
In a context of AS Mac Pro, Apple would block Unreal Editor on Mac platform, if they could have their way. The only reason they didn’t terminate Epic’s Unreal related developer account (and they tried) is that the judge in Epic case specifically forbade them from doing so.
If you are still of different opinion, I guess we have to agree to disagree on this one.
This is borderline off topic anyway, so…
Every bit of news coverage is based on regurgitating the party line. The source for any report that the iMac Pro was created as a stopgap while any Mac Pro was still a planned extant product, is literally just Apple's management saying that to Gruber and the rest of their pet bloggers during their mea culpa propaganda event.
I pointed it out because the sports team level Epic Vs. Apple tribalism, and simplistic view of their legal disputes ignores the fact that Apple literally rely on Unreal for the delivery of content that they pay for.