Looking at the page it sounds like it could be tricky to select the right Laptop for it to work and sounds like if you buy something with an RTX card it will not work.Buy a kick-@ss pc gaming laptop, and then turn it into a dual boot Windows 11 - Hackintosh with opencore.Monterey will still run on a ton of intel devices, and the next MacOS that comes after Monterey will probably still be able to run on arm and intel. So Hackintosh won't be squeezed out until sometime around 2025, and you can keep using an old MacOS anyway, even after they stop supporting it.
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Will the M1x MacBook pros be gaming worthy?
- Thread starter im_Jared
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Although there may well be a bright(er) future for gaming on Macs, we're nowhere near there yet. Have you considered just getting another console? The Xbox Series S and a Gamepass subscription gets you hassle-free access to a ton of games, and will probably cost less than many of the BTO options on the new MBP!
Get a series x and a Mac if you want the best of both worlds. But if you’re stuck on really wanting a portable gaming machine, the razer blade 14 is a very powerful gaming machine. My wife had a blade 15 with an rtx 3060 and it runs warzone between 110-120fps. It’s her main work computer but also her gaming rig, she loves it.
Some of them designed for intel Macs may or may not make it to M1 or may only make it to a later generation with some later version of Metal. That's why I urge caution here. I don't think it's a bad machine, but if gaming is the main focus, I would want to see more games running natively. This is also an unusual year for PCs in the sense that graphics cards have been grossly inflated. That won't hold forever.
I would never say Apple deserves ALL the blame, but they deserve a pretty big chunk of it.
If you ever followed the discussions on Blizzard's developers' blog sites, when Overwatch was in development? You'd see how they planned on releasing it for Mac initially, just like they'd done with all their previous titles. But the fact it was a 3D shooter and therefore was so much more demanding with having good 3D performance made it unworkable. Apple's OpenGL support had been used successfully for older 3D shooter titles like Quake - but Apple really didn't maintain those libraries to keep them in parity with the latest OpenGL code for other Unix OS's. And when they announced Metal as the solution? It meant developers had to learn how it worked and then invest time to master coding in it. If it was just a "Mac version of Direct 3D" that Windows used and was therefore easy to port, it would have seen mass adoption.
That’s a rather naive way to describe these things. Truth is, OpenGL is fairly terrible for shooters since it has long diverged from how hardware actually works and is unable to deliver competitive performance. With OpenGL, you end up coding a different path for different hardware if you want high performance, and debugging is a nightmare. Metal is a very simple and straightforward API, much simpler than DX12 or Vulkan, so learning it is not a problem. The real problem - at least for Overwatch - was the lack of financial incentive for investing into a Mac port. Only few expensive Mac models at that time had fast enough GPUs to enable acceptable performance, so Blizzard decided not to bother. Disappointing, but reasonable.
New Macs have tremendous gaming potential, which is so far untapped, but some early experiments are encouraging. The few M1-optimized ports (including Baldurs Gates 3, Metro Last Light and the new Myst Remake that was released today)
Show what this hardware can do.
😬 It looks like Bioshock from ~15 years ago, so probably not a good choice to show of hardware.
Probably not, but folks were asking where M1-optimized games are, and well, some studios are apparently putting in the effort.
P.S. Wait, Bioshock was 15 years ago??! Damn I’m getting old 😳
The 16" MacBook Pro should have twice the CPU power (twice the Firestorm cores) and up to four times the GPU power.
That was actually Apple directing developers down a path through Metal and x86-64 so that creating a universal binary would basically be a switch in Xcode.
Of course for a game there would be more to it - but the additional development time to produce a universal binary while developing a Mac Intel game shouldn't be too onerous provided 3rd party libraries were available.
... and growing actually.
A lot of more agnostic Win users - who aren't critically embedded in Win subsystems - are switching over having realized the price/performance/efficiency advantages.
There are Wintel offerings which can beat M1 single core speeds, but those do so by boosting clocks (which increases heat exponentially), then cooling the chips (more inefficiency) to keep 'em from burning up. Most of the offerings which beat the M1 multicore do so by layering on cores - the M1 only has four Firestorms - but unless you're dealing with a heavily multithreaded environment (like transcoding) or multiprocessing (like file serving) the M1 will feel quite a bit snappier due to its single core speed.
The M1x will feature twice the Firestorm cores, and up to four times the GPU cores.
Chances are good that they weren't coded under Catalyst and had begun development prior to the introduction of Apple Silicon.
Market dynamics are changing though - remember that the first Apple Silicon models weren't released until November of last year, so despite the fact that sales are good the M1 population is composed of Mac upgraders and Wintel switchers and their total population hasn't reached a really large population yet.
If trends continue, that too will change.
There aren't really that many titles taking good advantage of ray tracing yet (despite that being the GPU manufacturer's current hype point), and I have no experience so can't compare the Metal API vs. the DirectX API. (Is the DirectX API actually better, or are there simply more game developers used to using it?)
I would suspect the device population pool is somewhat compatible though - there's a boatload of iPhones and iPads and now M1 Macs and really most PCs aren't gaming PCs - so that population is often exaggerated.
I've heard there are more dollars in mobile games than PC/Console games, though I've never done a rigorous study on the issue.
Yeah, it's all a numbers game.
Developers will go where the numbers and dollars are 😋.
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Apple Marketing: What an odd way of describing our next Apple TV!
I’m still concerned that Proton will lead to the deaths of native Linux ports. Which if so would essentially give Valve a monopoly over gaming on Linux.
You clearing ignoring the fact that PC/Consoles are leading the game market and it won't gonna change just because the hardware of AS Mac is better. The market share of gaming is actually decreasing since some games are no longer supports Mac and Steam stats already proves that less than 3% of players are Mac users. So far, Mac is not providing anything better than PC/Consoles in terms of platform. Simply, gamers aren't interested in Mac.
It will be worse than Intel Mac for sure.
But the hardware of the AS Mac isn't better. It sure is impressive for the power consumption, but it's still not better looking at performance alone. It's on a level of a $200 GPU (chip shortage aside). And yes, the next version will be better, but it won't be the same price. It might compare to a $300-350 Nvidia GPU, but when you have to pay $2k to $2.5k for the whole system, that puts things into perspective. Better option to build a gaming PC + a MBA which should come in cheaper. Or buy a Razer gaming PC for the same price, but get better GPU performance. Time will tell.
Macs didn't really take off as gaming machines when they ran on Intel chips, so there is no reason to think developers would suddenly want to develop on the M1 for a tiny market. What's the smartest move is to buy a gaming PC/laptop and then a Macbook Air/Pro on the side. Intel MBPs game decently on Windows, but the performance is still worse when you play on macOS. The only PC games I play that aren't on console are Starcraft and Heroes of the Storm, and I doubt either of those will make it to M1 macs.
Yep. The majority of folks seems to want instant gratification in the form of their favorite Windows game running on their favorite OS. Which boils down to Microsoft and Nvidia dictating the game and everyone else playing catch up. I don’t see how gamers benefit long-term from such a model.
Apple decided to take the hard road and focus on their hardware and software first of all. I think it’s a reasonable gamble that might just have a big pay out in the long run.
Because the majority of Intel Macs have weak GPUs. And because OpenGL is awful.
The Mac market might be tiny compared to the PC market, but don’t forget that 80% of all PCs are cheap office boxes with GPUs 4 times slower than the M1 Air. And while Intel iGPUs are getting better this reality won’t change any time soon - the bulk of their sales will still be i3 and Atom models with cut-down GPUs. If you look at PCs capable of gaming, Mac market share won’t be so tiny as Apple Silicon models become more ubiquitous. Market projections I’ve seen estimate gaming-capable PC sales at somewhere around 40-60 million units in 2025. Apple sold around 20 million Macs last year. If they keep the with Apple Silicon models, that’s 20 millions Macs with gaming performance equivalent or better than an entry-level gaming laptop. Sounds to me like a reasonable market to go after.
Inflation has been pretty bad on those. The bulk of your costs if you're building would be gpu + cpu + motherboard. If you buy a $200 board and $300 cpu, you would be at $900 with that card minus case, drive, power supply, extras (eg additional coolers and things). That isn't particularly bad, because Apple charges a high markup to go beyond their normal 8GB ram 256GB ssd configuration, which is far from ideal if purchased for gaming, 8GB being as low as you want to go and 256GB being low for a system drive, unless you offload games to another drive.