What games? Are you sure you quoted the right post? I was talking to the only published marketing material on Nvidia Ampere, which does not mention games at all. There are some gaming benchmark leaks that suggest an improvement of ~ 25-30%, which is normal for a gen-to-gen increase. Certainly nothing like "3060 beating a 2080 by 2 times" like what you claim.
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The final blow for real gaming on the Mac, or the beginning of a new era?
- Thread starter Frankied22
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What games? Are you sure you quoted the right post? I was talking to the only published marketing material on Nvidia Ampere, which does not mention games at all. There are some gaming benchmark leaks that suggest an improvement of ~ 25-30%, which is normal for a gen-to-gen increase. Certainly nothing like "3060 beating a 2080 by 2 times" like what you claim.
"Games" as in trickery, or sleight of hand. Specifically, comparing FP16 speeds with FP32, or worse FP64.
Ah, I see what you mean. While there is no doubt that improved FP performance will favorably affect games, we also should keep in mind that drivers already use half precision where possible and that these dramatic speed ups are mentioned only fir tensor cores: so just a subset of most likely hand picked operations that apply to ML only. The leaked Time Spy benchmarks are much more realistic in contrast.
Yeah, that’s what I think. They haven’t updated the text with newer devices. As long as the app/game is 64 bit (which I’m pretty sure it is) things should be OK.
I agree. Every Apple Arcade game will be able to run on the ARM chips and for sure some other indie games from external sources, and really that's all I'd ever need. I haven't heard of a good new AAA game in years (the last one probably being GTA V or Planet Coaster (which itself is probably closer to being an indie game than being AAA)).
What? There are several. Horizon Zero Dawn that has been exclusive on the PS4 but is coming to Windows in August is one example:
Horizon Zero Dawn™ Complete Edition on Steam
Experience Aloy’s legendary quest to unravel the mysteries of a future Earth ruled by Machines. Use devastating tactical attacks against your prey and explore a majestic open world in this award-winning action RPG!
Borderlands 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, most UbiSoft games (Assassins Creed, Farcry, Tom Clancy games). There a a lot of AAA games that Mac users won't get to play unless they have a PC or a game console.
From Forbes " New Mac Book Pro leaked" article.
July 17 update: One of the issues in moving to ARM is third party applications. Tim Cook may have said that the transition will be complete in two years, but Apple’s own developer environment will help bridge the app gap. There’s a legion of iPhone developers that Apple could leverage to supercharge the app library on MacOS. Chaim Gartenberg looks at the potential:
"All of the apps that already run on iOS will work natively on the new Macs, meaning that there’ll be a huge amount of software ready to go on day one.
Bessey also speculates that bridging the platforms together could see a burst of new Mac apps that are universal across iOS, iPad, and macOS. Where developers may not have had an incentive to create a native Mac app before, the new ARM-based architecture means that it’ll be far easier to expand iPhone and iPad apps to the desktop platform.”
It’s clear from the last few updates of MacOS that Apple is bringing the iOS and iPadOS flavour to the desk-bound machines, but there is still a functionality gap between phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. That’s a gap that may be quickly bridged when the ARM devices go on sale and developers see their new market.
I bet you guys aren't real excited about using iOS/iPadOS apps and games to placate you all going the ARM route, just ridiculous IMHO from a gamers perspective.
July 17 update: One of the issues in moving to ARM is third party applications. Tim Cook may have said that the transition will be complete in two years, but Apple’s own developer environment will help bridge the app gap. There’s a legion of iPhone developers that Apple could leverage to supercharge the app library on MacOS. Chaim Gartenberg looks at the potential:
"All of the apps that already run on iOS will work natively on the new Macs, meaning that there’ll be a huge amount of software ready to go on day one.
Bessey also speculates that bridging the platforms together could see a burst of new Mac apps that are universal across iOS, iPad, and macOS. Where developers may not have had an incentive to create a native Mac app before, the new ARM-based architecture means that it’ll be far easier to expand iPhone and iPad apps to the desktop platform.”
It’s clear from the last few updates of MacOS that Apple is bringing the iOS and iPadOS flavour to the desk-bound machines, but there is still a functionality gap between phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. That’s a gap that may be quickly bridged when the ARM devices go on sale and developers see their new market.
I bet you guys aren't real excited about using iOS/iPadOS apps and games to placate you all going the ARM route, just ridiculous IMHO from a gamers perspective.
I bet you guys aren't real excited about using iOS/iPadOS apps and games to placate you all going the ARM route, just ridiculous IMHO from a gamers perspective.
What I am exited about is that all Macs will have decent baseline gaming performance and a unified programming interface with good developer tools. Apple Silicon Macs will make AAA games on Mac possible (for the first time in over a decade). Whether this actually means a new golden age for Mac gaming — we will need to wait and see.
A unified programing interface with good tools has been Apple's forte for awhile. It hasn't yielded ports of popular games. Switching to ARM to be fair is all hype without substance. I see it being a business profit decision rather then Apple actually marketing themselves to expand the traditional gaming applications. But since Apple is breaking ties to x86 (WINE, Bootcamp) this just means a totally disconnect unless they can acquire support from game companies.
Yes we need to wait and see. Hopefully apple's management reads some of these thoughts and actually works on providing real complex games via third parties that are far superior to Apple Arcade.
Perhaps Apple needs to buy into game companies so they can make sure games are being ported?
If there haven't been any AAA games on the Mac for over a decade, how was Apple able to demonstrate a fairly recent AAA game on the Mac when showing off the performance of Rosetta?
The example was "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" (timepoint 1:41:10 of WWDC keynote) from Feral Interactive
See https://tombraider.square-enix-games.com/en-us
This is a action/adventure type
Andreas Wendker VP Tools & Framwork Engineering - described it as a high end AAA game using our Metal API's.
He says it is running smooth via Rosetta 2 brought unmodified from the game store. The best part is this is running 1080P as a translated app through emulation, without discussing actual performance, like how many FPS is observed. What options are disabled to make the game more fluid. It retails for $55 on the App Store.
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I think Leman says that all Macs will be able to run modern games with decent performance, which is not the case today, mostly because of poor intel iGPUs.
https://support.feralinteractive.com/en/mac-linux-games/shadowofthetombraider/requirements/
- All 15” MacBook Pros released since Late 2016
- All 13” MacBook Pros released since 2016
- All Mac minis released since 2018
- All 21.5” iMacs released since 2017
- All 27” iMacs released since Late 2014
- All 27" iMac Pros released since Late 2017
- All Mac Pros released since Late 2013
The minimum is 2GB AMD Radeon R9 M290 or better, 1.5GB Intel Iris 540 or better, and you must have 10.15 installed
Modern Games is a moving target, though.
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I might have chosen an unlucky way to express myself. What I meant was: only Macs currently have hardware capable of competitive gaming performance. Also, making games with predictable, low latency performance has been very difficult on Macs due to buggy drivers and hardware differences. This is why there are for example virtually no first person shooter games on Mac. Apple Silikon will fix these problems.
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Not really. Metal only recently got “good” in that regard. And there is still the problem if different hardware that behaves in a different way. From the developers perspective, Apple Silicon Macs are essentially very similar to consoles. They will be easier to develop for as you can make more assumptions about the hardware and you dint need to do as much testing.
Unless Apple slows down hardware release cycles, I am not sure developers will really spend time extracting maximum performance and quality from Apple Silicon Macs (or what ever they would call the tv box). Think of the game quality when the PS4 first came out and now.
If a game is not currently available for macOS (and you have to rely on a VM or bootcamp to run it), I would not expect a developer to release an Apple Silicon version.
If a game is currently available for macOS but does not have a 64bit version ('sup, valve? How's the source engine looking?), I won't expect to be able to run it on Apple Silicon.
If a game is currently available for macOS, it MAY be ported or released to the new platform, assuming it's easy to port.
For esports on the Apple platform, I'm very nervous about what this means. I personally am holding off with the migration as I rely on having bootcamp available for when I run/compete in esports tournaments, otherwise it won't work and I'll need to switch to Windows
If a game is currently available for macOS but does not have a 64bit version ('sup, valve? How's the source engine looking?), I won't expect to be able to run it on Apple Silicon.
If a game is currently available for macOS, it MAY be ported or released to the new platform, assuming it's easy to port.
For esports on the Apple platform, I'm very nervous about what this means. I personally am holding off with the migration as I rely on having bootcamp available for when I run/compete in esports tournaments, otherwise it won't work and I'll need to switch to Windows
This is a dead cert as 64 bit apps don't currently run on Catalina and Big Sure will be minimum for Apple Silicon.
I feel like this argument happened already with the x86 switch. It didn't happen.
pff. All of Valve's real talent left awhile ago, the only ones left can't even manage to not **** up a Hearthstone ripoff. The only thing keeping Valve afloat is Steam being 80% of the digital market, they haven't even updated the window icons on their new (terrible) Discord-knockoff chat program. See for yourself, it's been over a year and still using Windows icons on Mac. Even Half-Life Alyx, which should've been the cause for enormous hype, being the first entry into the Half-Life series in over a decade, landed with a big "thud" and no one cared.
I'd believe Valve would update their old games to Source 2, but they'd only do it to force more lootboxes onto their players. That is, if they'd care enough to do so, which I don't believe for one minute.
- Former TF2 player/obsessive
x86 came with a built in cop-out for game devs: "We don't need to port out game, you can just install Windows." Thats unlikely to be the case this time. Even if it is, Rosetta is going to shave off too much performance for atop of the line game.
I'm not a gamer, but I thought the hardware issue with AAA games on Macs wasn't that lower-end Macs lacked dGPU's. Rather, I thought the hardware issue (in addition to cost) was that the higher-end dGPU Macs didn't offer what AAA gamers wanted/needed: the option to have the fastest gaming GPUs (e.g., Nvidia 2080Ti and other Nvidia flagship gaming products), and the fastest overclocked Intel "extreme" processors. Even when Macs came with NVIDIA GPUs, they never offered this sort of hardware, because Apple has generally wanted to limit TDP to keep its products thinner and quieter.
So are you thinking that AS will now offer that kind of hardware performance? If it does, I think that would help make the Mac an exciting platform for AAA game developers.