The final blow for real gaming on the Mac, or the beginning of a new era?

[iindigo]

But one other cool thing about the new unreal engine, as I understand it, is that the games ship today with the ability to scale to future hardware.

I think Sony had something like that planned for the PS3, but it didn't quite work out. The reason I think this is because most physical copies of PS3 games come with dramatically higher resolution versions of all textures on disc. They never get used on real PS3s, but the RPCS3 emulator can use them in conjunction with 4k rendering to make PS3 games look a lot less dated than they are. Obviously things like poly count remain unchanged, but it's still a big step up.

 

[blindpcguy]

one thing that could b awesome is the whole IOS apps/games working on mac being able to play all the dragon quests , final fantasys, list goes on for tons of classic games that are buy to play on IOS and for that matter sure on a arm mac you cant run bootcamp but you can still pay for a shadow . tech cloud gaming pc and stream it to your arm mac solutions are out there and i really hope the ios compatability really invigerates the mac gaming scene as currently i game on my mac pro in bootcamp but once the option is gone il just pay for a cloud pc and have my consoles

 

[Market_Shifter]

Found this video very interesting. Looks like ARM is the start to gaming on the Mac with the availabiluty of downloading Metal as a developer.

 

[jinnyman]

Well, after some thought, I still don't see any future in mac gaming.
The platform is almost dead in terms of gaming.
Usually low performance/price doesn't go well with gaming, and Mac is famous for that.
The mobile as gaming platform had future, but lack of controller and pay to win system pretty much ruined it.

Think about it. Consoles are much better, and if you want keyboard+mouse pc gaming, Mac will never beat custom made PC. Only sector it can aim is mobile+mac and I doubt that. On the move, not many people play games anyway. After work,school when you come back, who would want to turn on their arm Mac for gaming when PS5 is standing next to 70" TV?

 

[Zackmd1]

Well, after some thought, I still don't see any future in mac gaming.
The platform is almost dead in terms of gaming.
Usually low performance/price doesn't go well with gaming, and Mac is famous for that.
The mobile as gaming platform had future, but lack of controller and pay to win system pretty much ruined it.

Think about it. Consoles are much better, and if you want keyboard+mouse pc gaming, Mac will never beat custom made PC. Only sector it can aim is mobile+mac and I doubt that. On the move, not many people play games anyway. After work,school when you come back, who would want to turn on their arm Mac for gaming when PS5 is standing next to 70" TV?

I think the rest of the world disagrees with you....

Mobile games sparked 60% of 2019 global game revenue, study finds

Separate research found consumer spending on mobile games rose 8% to $210 million on Christmas Day.

www.mobilemarketer.com

If there is one thing you can count on developers doing is going where the money is.... Apple silicone IMO will be the key to making IOS/Mac gaming console quality. Like stated before, the A12x is on par with the current gen Xbox One S. Now with Apple releasing their Metal development tools on Windows, it should allow for much easier porting of AAA games over to IOS and Apple Silicone Macs. As you stated, Macs have traditionally been equipped with iGPUs that are terrible for gaming which is one of the reasons why you did not see Developers targeting MacOS. Now with Apple Silicone likely to bring a MASSIVE performance increase in the GPU department across the board of Macs, it suddenly becomes a more attractive platform to target. I think you will see AAA gaming take off with apple silicone macs and ios devices in the next few years.

 

[jinnyman]

I think the rest of the world disagrees with you....

Mobile games sparked 60% of 2019 global game revenue, study finds

Separate research found consumer spending on mobile games rose 8% to $210 million on Christmas Day.

www.mobilemarketer.com

If there is one thing you can count on developers doing is going where the money is.... Apple silicone IMO will be the key to making IOS/Mac gaming console quality. Like stated before, the A12x is on par with the current gen Xbox One S. Now with Apple releasing their Metal development tools on Windows, it should allow for much easier porting of AAA games over to IOS and Apple Silicone Macs. As you stated, Macs have traditionally been equipped with iGPUs that are terrible for gaming which is one of the reasons why you did not see Developers targeting MacOS. Now with Apple Silicone likely to bring a MASSIVE performance increase in the GPU department across the board of Macs, it suddenly becomes a more attractive platform to target. I think you will see AAA gaming take off with apple silicone macs and ios devices in the next few years.

I domt think we are saying the different thing. It’s just that almost all mobiles make revenue out of pay to win system. If you care about the mobile, when is the last time you saw AAA quality standalone game in ios app store ranking? All high revenue games are ‘free’ games with in app pay to win contents. Unless addicted to pay to win eco system, I don’t think I like Mac’s future in mobile games.

 

[Janichsan]

Found this video very interesting. Looks like ARM is the start to gaming on the Mac with the availabiluty of downloading Metal as a developer.

There's an awful lot of wishful thinking in this video. Also, a lot of his argumentation is based on the fundamental misunderstanding that there were an overlap between AAA and mobile games.

 

[leman]

Well, after some thought, I still don't see any future in mac gaming.
The platform is almost dead in terms of gaming.
Usually low performance/price doesn't go well with gaming, and Mac is famous for that.
The mobile as gaming platform had future, but lack of controller and pay to win system pretty much ruined it.

You are entirely correct about the present state. Currently, only few Macs have graphics that’s decent enough for gaming, and even then the poor drivers make the gaming performance unpredictable.

But ARM Macs will dramatically improve their gaming capability. Every Mac laptop will have the hardware equivalent of a lower end gaming PC paired with console-level software control. Basically, the slowest ARM Mac will come with performance better than 60-70% of all PCs on the market. I’d expect a MacBook Air to be somewhere in a ballpark of a PS4 or close to it for example.

 

[Danny82]

You are entirely correct about the present state. Currently, only few Macs have graphics that’s decent enough for gaming, and even then the poor drivers make the gaming performance unpredictable.

But ARM Macs will dramatically improve their gaming capability. Every Mac laptop will have the hardware equivalent of a lower end gaming PC paired with console-level software control. Basically, the slowest ARM Mac will come with performance better than 60-70% of all PCs on the market. I’d expect a MacBook Air to be somewhere in a ballpark of a PS4 or close to it for example.

Totally agree to this.. thought legacy game may be dead for ARM Mac.. but I do hope the future development of games, developers will make it easier to port between x86 and arm.. plus since big corporation will surely make games for x86, why not just port it over to arm mac and get additional 100mil mac user which apple claims.. those windows users will still be there and not run away, so why not earn from another platform too since it now has the power to run their games, just a matter of recompiling..

 

[Joe Dohn]

Found this video very interesting. Looks like ARM is the start to gaming on the Mac with the availabiluty of downloading Metal as a developer.

This guy tries very hard to defend Apple's decision. It's almost as if he's doing a sales pitch himself for them.

Either way, I think this sums up Apple's position very well: their reasoning is that the PC market is shrinking and the mobile market is growing, so they want to outnumber the PC market with the mobile market.

Here's the problem: with games, you can't just throw old gaming software away and replace it with a new one, because it's also a matter of sentimental value.

Explaining my argument in more detail, the PC market is convenient because of the following reasons.

• More economical: you can have your PC as sophisticated or as simple as you want – but more importantly, software like Steam allows you to unify your game library and play either AAA games or legacy games from 20 years ago in a single place. So, you only need one device when you would need a dozen with other platforms.
  
  
• Legacy gaming: gamers will be furious when they find out they can't play Skullgirls or Shovel Knight or (insert your legacy but not-so-old game here) when Apple deprecate whatever version of their API. Emulating x86 and a full OS on top of that through software is not feasible for now – and even if it somehow is for very old games, newer games will always suffer a significant performance hit.
  
  
• Unified gaming: it's not just a matter of cost savings, but convenience. Steam guarantees that all games in your library (and if not all, certainly something like 95%) will install and run with no hassle. Apple is guaranteeing is a shiny new platform, unless your game is ported, you'd need 2-3 devices to game. No thanks.

So, unless Apple can guarantee hardware x86 emulation, high-performance software emulation (e.g, AI-powered) or that they won't ever break compatibility with old games, I just don't see them having a convincing argument to lure PC gamers to Apple devices – and without a guarantee they won't break compatibility with ported games, I don't see them luring developers either.

I repeat: it's not just a matter of performance anymore. In the 90s, PCs had actually worse performance than Apple chips, which could do much more at a lower clock. However, Apple could simply not lure people without backwards compatibility and API stability. And, as chips grew more exponentially powerful, even a third-class laptop can probably play a high-quality 2D game without much difficulty, or a low-end 3D game. Higher performance is neat, but it's not everything. It wasn't back then, and it's even less of an issue now.

 

[leman]

So, unless Apple can guarantee hardware x86 emulation, high-performance software emulation (e.g, AI-powered) or that they won't ever break compatibility with old games, I just don't see them having a convincing argument to lure PC gamers to Apple devices – and without a guarantee they won't break compatibility with ported games, I don't see them luring developers either.

I think your post does an excellent job summing up the situation. But I also think you are forgetting one thing: any game that currently runs on Mac (via Steam or otherwise), will continue to run — via Rosetta 2. Newer games (e.g. using new Unity or Unreal engine) will be most likely published as ARM versions. Future games have the potential of using Apple APIs for new performance and efficiency gains.

The only thing that is lost is Windows gaming via Bootcamp.

 

[Joe Dohn]

I think your post does an excellent job summing up the situation. But I also think you are forgetting one thing: any game that currently runs on Mac (via Steam or otherwise), will continue to run — via Rosetta 2. Newer games (e.g. using new Unity or Unreal engine) will be most likely published as ARM versions. Future games have the potential of using Apple APIs for new performance and efficiency gains.

The only thing that is lost is Windows gaming via Bootcamp.

I'm not forgetting about that. Here's the problem: Rosetta 2 has an expiration date of about 2 to 5 years. Not only that, it only supports universal binaries. Any Steam game only supported on Windows is out (and we're talking about millions of games). And if Apple deprecates whatever API they're using now (e.g, Metal), if you don't change your code, you're out.

Like I said, games don't get outdated like productivity software does. With Office, as long as the new version does everything the old version does, you're good to go. Games do get outdated in the sense their graphics age, but you can't just replace your favorite RPG with a similar RPG. It's not the same game. For example, Square is remaking Final Fantasy 7 to current graphics, but many people still swear by the old, ugly polygon version because the story has been changed. Which is why I say there's both an economic and a sentimental value in the equation.

 

[leman]

I'm not forgetting about that. Here's the problem: Rosetta 2 has an expiration date of about 2 to 5 years. Not only that, it only supports universal binaries. Any Steam game only supported on Windows is out (and we're talking about millions of games). And if Apple deprecates whatever API they're using now (e.g, Metal), if you don't change your code, you're out.

If you ware using your Mac to play Windows games, yes, they are out for the time being. We don't really know how long Rosetta is going to be supported, maybe it will just stay here for legacy reasons. And even if Apple deprecates Rosetta, I am sure the open source community will make an alternative. The basic tools are all there (e.g. https://github.com/lifting-bits/mcsema)

Like I said, games don't get outdated like productivity software does. With Office, as long as the new version does everything the old version does, you're good to go. Games do get outdated in the sense their graphics age, but you can't just replace your favorite RPG with a similar RPG. It's not the same game. For example, Square is remaking Final Fantasy 7 to current graphics, but many people still swear by the old, ugly polygon version because the story has been changed. Which is why I say there's both an economic and a sentimental value in the equation.

You can run older games using WINE or some sort of emulation/virtualization. If there is demand, solutions will be found.

But overall, yes, the issues you discuss are there and they are real. When we are talking about support for past titles, yeah, it's going to be rough. However, there is hope that the situation will get much better with future titles.

 

[jinnyman]

You are entirely correct about the present state. Currently, only few Macs have graphics that’s decent enough for gaming, and even then the poor drivers make the gaming performance unpredictable.

But ARM Macs will dramatically improve their gaming capability. Every Mac laptop will have the hardware equivalent of a lower end gaming PC paired with console-level software control. Basically, the slowest ARM Mac will come with performance better than 60-70% of all PCs on the market. I’d expect a MacBook Air to be somewhere in a ballpark of a PS4 or close to it for example.

Performance will not solve the problem. iPad, for example, is already powerful enough to render graphic well, but what happened to ipad gaming? Yes Portnite, yes Battleground, but what other AAA games? iOS is already a really big market, but what happened to iOS gaming world? Have you seen the list of top revenue ios game apps? They are all 'free' games with in app purchase for pay to win stuff. Many people do enjoy that kind of games hence large revenue is made from mobile games, but I don't think we are referring those games as "real gaming" here. If future of Mac gaming is only ios like pay to win mobiles games running on Mac OS, then I can say it's ended. PC guys are already running android apps on Windows through virtualization.

The question we should ask is this : will Arm Mac encourage more porting of AAA titles than intel Mac? Actually I'm worried. If some third party vendors wishes to consider porting their games to Arm, they would rather make ios/ipad (which has much larger market) with some kind of mac friendly features added to it than Mac centric performance based games that can be only played on Mac. This is based on an assumption that Apple Silicon used in Mac will be better performing (with more power put in to it) than ios/ipad. Then those games will be looking like gimped graphic games and feels similar to those PC games developed primarily for consoles with awkward console like ui.

 

[PortoMavericks]

You are entirely correct about the present state. Currently, only few Macs have graphics that’s decent enough for gaming, and even then the poor drivers make the gaming performance unpredictable.

But ARM Macs will dramatically improve their gaming capability. Every Mac laptop will have the hardware equivalent of a lower end gaming PC paired with console-level software control. Basically, the slowest ARM Mac will come with performance better than 60-70% of all PCs on the market. I’d expect a MacBook Air to be somewhere in a ballpark of a PS4 or close to it for example.

The entry level will get a performance upgrade (Apple GPU vs Intel GPU).

Probably they'll lose on the high end (Radeon Vs Apple GPU). Two sides of the same coin.

 

[leman]

Probably they'll lose on the high end (Radeon Vs Apple GPU). Two sides of the same coin.

We'll see about that. Personally, I'm quite confident that reaching GTX 2060 levels of performance won't be a big issue for Apple. The question is about pushing it beyond that.

 

[diamond.g]

We'll see about that. Personally, I'm quite confident that reaching GTX 2060 levels of performance won't be a big issue for Apple. The question is about pushing it beyond that.

This is my expected level of performance and graphics when we talk about a RTX 2060

this video is over a year old mind you. I would also be curious about ram utilization for graphics.

 

[iindigo]

Also, a lot of his argumentation is based on the fundamental misunderstanding that there were an overlap between AAA and mobile games.

There's not much overlap currently, but there's no reason that has to continue to be true. Mobile gaming can be amazing — look at Nintendo Switch titles for example. The hardware is a great deal weaker than practically the entire current iPad+iPhone lineup, and yet it has some of the best games of any of the consoles.

It's a simple matter of will. All that really needs to happen is for Apple to collaborate with a few studios to get a round or two of AAA titles ported (and maybe even a few exclusives) to get the ball rolling. Whether that will happen is questionable (particularly with how they've handled Arcade) but far from impossible, especially if there's a push from the top to build a library of games that fully leverages the new hardware.

 

[leman]

This is my expected level of performance and graphics when we talk about a RTX 2060

[...]

this video is over a year old mind you. I would also be curious about ram utilization for graphics.

Something like that I suppose.

RAM utilization is a tricky topic. For example, many modern games maintain a bunch of auxiliary buffers textures to do their drawing, and with a 4K resolution + AA you might be looking at half a GB of VRAM just like that. Not to mention that you have to copy that memory back and forth multiple time per frame (which is why fast GPUs need all that ultra-fast RAM). But Apple GPUs in theory can avoid all that memory cost because they are tilers — they can keep all these buffers entirely in the chip cache. However, the game has to support these features explicitly.

So it depends on how the game is implemented. If you take, let's say, your DX12 or Vulkan engine and just port it one to one to Metal, it will run, but it won't use the hardware optimally. If you go the extra mile and reimplement your drawing code with Apple GPUs in mind, you can get dramatic performance and memory reduction improvements. When I say "RTX 2060 level", I mean games that are optimized for Apple GPUs. Now, if Apple manages to deliver a GPU that runs like 2060 for non-optimized games (which I kind of doubt) , then we are talking about RTX 2080 level to optimized ones

 

[Janichsan]

But I also think you are forgetting one thing: any game that currently runs on Mac (via Steam or otherwise), will continue to run — via Rosetta 2.

That's not necessarily given: Apple themselves said that Rosetta 2 will not have a 100% compatibility, so there might be games which do not run. Secondly, Rosetta 2 is optimised for Metal games, but there still are a lot of OpenGL based games. So far, we don't know how these will perform on ArMacs.

You can run older games using WINE or some sort of emulation/virtualization.

This option is no longer available on ArMacs.

 

[leman]

Secondly, Rosetta 2 is optimised for Metal games, but there still are a lot of OpenGL based games. So far, we don't know how these will perform on ArMacs.

I don't think Rosetta is specifically optimized to either. It's just translating the code and the calls. As long as the OpenGL framework is present on your machine it should not make any difference.

This option is no longer available on ArMacs.

If I remember correctly, we already had a rather fruitless discussion about this I still expect WINE to work just fine with Rosetta, but I suppose we will have to wait and see.

 

[oneMadRssn]

The Nintendo Switch runs an 8-core ARM-based CPU and (as typically strange for Nintendo) a 256-core Maxwell/CUDA GPU.

While the hardware will be very different, the Switch games are compiled to run on ARM. I wonder if any of those can be ported over to MacOS. Or, I wonder if someone will eventually make Switch VM for other ARM-based OSes.

 

[Janichsan]

I don't think Rosetta is specifically optimized to either.

They explained this in one of the WWDC sessions: Metal calls can effectively be passed through directly without any translation necessary.

I still expect WINE to work just fine with Rosetta, …

It won't.

 

[iindigo]

The Nintendo Switch runs an 8-core ARM-based CPU and (as typically strange for Nintendo) a 256-core Maxwell/CUDA GPU.

While the hardware will be very different, the Switch games are compiled to run on ARM. I wonder if any of those can be ported over to MacOS. Or, I wonder if someone will eventually make Switch VM for other ARM-based OSes.

A Nintendo Switch emulator already exists for x86 (though it's still in early development). I bet it wouldn't be too difficult to kick out the emulator portion to produce a build that runs natively on ARM machines.

 

[diamond.g]

There's not much overlap currently, but there's no reason that has to continue to be true. Mobile gaming can be amazing — look at Nintendo Switch titles for example. The hardware is a great deal weaker than practically the entire current iPad+iPhone lineup, and yet it has some of the best games of any of the consoles.

It's a simple matter of will. All that really needs to happen is for Apple to collaborate with a few studios to get a round or two of AAA titles ported (and maybe even a few exclusives) to get the ball rolling. Whether that will happen is questionable (particularly with how they've handled Arcade) but far from impossible, especially if there's a push from the top to build a library of games that fully leverages the new hardware.

IMO, Apple can’t say our hardware is as powerful as X then have nothing that proves that point graphically. Nintendo stopped talking about system power after N64.

Something like that I suppose.

RAM utilization is a tricky topic. For example, many modern games maintain a bunch of auxiliary buffers textures to do their drawing, and with a 4K resolution + AA you might be looking at half a GB of VRAM just like that. Not to mention that you have to copy that memory back and forth multiple time per frame (which is why fast GPUs need all that ultra-fast RAM). But Apple GPUs in theory can avoid all that memory cost because they are tilers — they can keep all these buffers entirely in the chip cache. However, the game has to support these features explicitly.

So it depends on how the game is implemented. If you take, let's say, your DX12 or Vulkan engine and just port it one to one to Metal, it will run, but it won't use the hardware optimally. If you go the extra mile and reimplement your drawing code with Apple GPUs in mind, you can get dramatic performance and memory reduction improvements. When I say "RTX 2060 level", I mean games that are optimized for Apple GPUs. Now, if Apple manages to deliver a GPU that runs like 2060 for non-optimized games (which I kind of doubt) , then we are talking about RTX 2080 level to optimized ones

I see where you were going with that. You don’t think games that have 4K resolution textures would need lots of video ram?

ooh I would like to see the Unreal Engine 5 demo ran on Apple hardware. Just to see the differences in performance (if any).