The GPU market is still ****ed up. I doubt you could build a much better system than what you can get as a laptop these days.
I know - but it depends where you live.
Gpu market is ****ed, but that is also true for laptops. Especially given the performance those computers are heavily overpriced.
One interesting factor is that a lot of the more OS agnostic Win users are buying Macs - it's hard to deny the price/performance/efficiency advantages of Apple Silicon.
To be fair, you have a couple things to consider here...
Actually, the Win x86 emulation comes from ARM Win.
Any ports will be universal binaries - nothing else makes sense.
That's the wild card - will enough Mac users start buying games now that the graphics subsystems are better, or will enough Win guys buy Macs who now want their gaming on Apple Silicon?
Developers are interested.
Apple is working some ray tracing stuff into their graphics subsystem, but again you're missing the point: macOS on ARM is basically the same environment hardware and framework-wise as iPhones and iPads.
People have got Win ARM running x86 games under Parallels now on M1 - M1x with 32 cores should have four times the gaming performance of M1 and a bunch more CPU power and memory (which is lacking on M1).
Hate to keep repeating myself, but a game engine ported to iOS/iPadOS Metal is 98% of the way to ARM macOS.
Currently, the x86 emulation is so poor and there is no guarantee if Windows 11 works better.
Not many games to play on macOS especially the latest one.
The OS market share for macOS is less than 16%. For gaming, it will be way less than that. Having a powerful hardware does not heavily affect the market share.
Not PC/Console. Mobile and PC/Console are separate market so dont
Still, ray tracing is not available yet while Nvidia is already using it. Also, Metal API isn't that great compared to Direct X.
And I hate to repeat that we are talking about PC/Console level of games, not mobile games. The OP clearly mentioned MBP for playing games. If he gonna play mobile games, then iPad is enough. Furthermore, there are NO AAA games from mobile. That's a huge difference from PC/Consoles.
Is it really worth it to buy a Mac just to install an alternative OS through a VM to play games when you can get much better performance with a native Windows machine?
A lot of wishful thinking. Ain't gonna happen about Bootcamp. There was a reason why Apple brought Bootcamp to Macs. They no longer need that function as it has served it's purpose. Apple is focused on Apple Arcade.
Power runs right down the drain without gaming support from developers. You're buying the wrong machine for the purpose you mentioned.
Not every pc owner wants to play games either though so you can’t subtract from the Mac market share without also subtracting from the pc market share (meaning that point is semi misleading), so it’s hard to know the true potential market share of gaming on Mac.
Even so, PC's market share is way larger than Mac. Steam stats shows that only 2.51% are Mac players.
Using the same chip doesn't mean expand the market. That's what people thought when Apple announced macOS Big Sur with mobile app support but in reality, it wasn't. The OS is totally different and even now, there arent any games ported to macOS natively and properly. Mac is such a small market even for iOS/iPadOS developers and that's why Apple complained that Mac's App Store had been dormant for a long time.
Gaming, along with most tasks, doesn’t utilize a lot of threads; it’s reliant mostly on single core performance. That’s why Intel has been king in gaming, out of the box, their CPUs have a higher default boost clock than AMD’s. Multi-core comes into play — pun intended — when you have streaming software, monitoring software, chat software, etc running while gaming.
It’s doable, but I can’t recall anyone credibly bragging about the performance of a virtual gaming machine. Nevertheless, again, apparently, doable if you’re willing to compromise — quick video find:
Based on Apple’s marketing, etc, I don’t believe Boot Camp will be implemented for Apple Silicon.
Agreed. If your computer can (easily) accommodate your various needs, it’s a huge benefit. Having both a Mac and Windows box may also be completely reasonable. However, a PC solely for gaming, especially with the current lack of value of GPUs, PSUs, etc, is a poor choice unless your preferred games are not on console and/or demand a more capable setup.
I think it’s possible. iOS offerings have shown there are developers willing to push out great games for Apple platforms. It’s going to take time to prove that for more of the top studios in a business sense for the Mac side. Additionally, when/if the developers creating games for iOS/iPadOS see an attractive change, it’s even less difficult now to port from iOS to macOS.
I said semi-misleading because that statement can be made by both parties, so only addressing how not everyone who owns a Mac wants to game, thus making the potential market share smaller, when the same can be said about PC users, makes it semi misleading. Key word is *potential*. That’s why I don’t care about steam stats in this specific convo. There could be plenty of Mac users (like myself) who would want to game on their Mac but don’t because of various reasons. I built a PC for that, but I would love to abandon windows if Mac gaming was better supported. I wouldn’t show up in a statistic like the ones you mentioned (just as one example). I know several colleagues who are in the same boat - they’d abandon their gaming rigs the second macs had better support and better GPU power.
you could look at it like that. And if one’s main purpose was/were to be gaming it would definitely be a restriction. equally, if gaming weren’t your main purpose or if the types of games you predominantly play aren’t very demadning running them unnatively (Parallels or Crossover) isn’t much of a restriction.
