As John Siracusa discussed on this week's ATP[0], it's incredible how much effort Apple puts into this considering the result. Apple built it's own little parallel gaming stack world that works really well on their hardware and the hardware is also amazing for the power envelopes it is wrapped in.
But then Apple doesn't ship devices with actually powerful GPUs, so it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise. And Apple also doesn't know how to keep relationships with the AAA developers, unlike Microsoft and other platform owners.
Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?
I think the on stage demo of the 4 year old Death Stranding running poorly on the newest Macs says it all.
> it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise
I don't think Apple is chasing the "dedicated gaming machine" crowd here. They want casual gamers to be able to load up a couple of games on the machine they're buying for non-gaming reasons. I'm exactly one of those people: I rarely play video games these days but when the pandemic hit I ended up installing Boot Camp to play COD:Warzone with friends. It was great (it performed... okay). I've since upgraded to a Silicon-based Mac so the door has closed on that. This toolkit is the means to reopen it. I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase.
> And Apple also doesn't know how to keep relationships with the AAA developers
The App Store would beg to differ. I agree that historically they haven't been great at relationships with game developers but they're clearly able to maintain relationships with third party developers when they have the incentive.
Mobile gaming and PC gaming are somewhat different markets. In particular, mobile game development companies don't have any choice but to work with Apple and Google, whereas AAA PC gaming companies have another outlet already.
I like Apple and I like their products but I think if you talk to any sizable mobile developer they'd be able to tell you stories about the difficulties of working with Apple.
Most of the "sizable" mobile developers are entangled in the PC/Console game developers if in no other place than on the broad sheet with one generating revenue to pay for the increasingly expensive other. King is a part of Activision Blizzard (and a part of the pending sale to Microsoft). Zynga is a part of Take-Two (Rockstar/2K). Riot is obviously Riot. A half-dozen others are arms of Tencent in one way or another, who in turn is heavily invested in Funcom and Epic and Riot and From Software and less invested but still invested in plenty more like Ubisoft. NetEase is a mobile developer and publisher that also develops (but so far generally doesn't publish) PC and console games and has been buying studios looking to deepen that.
The list goes on; everything videogames is deeply entangled financially. Therefore, the markets must be deeply entangled, too.
Sure. But it’s about the distribution platform, not the game company financials. Selling games that must be distributed on specific app stores is very different than selling games which are distributed through multiple channels; in the former case, your distributor has a much stronger effect on your ability to make money.
I have to wonder if that’s because a lot of the hot mobile gaming companies flew too close to the sun, could not maintain their explosive growth even as they pursued F2P microtransactions hell policies, and ended up getting bought by said PC/console game developers.
My theory reverses your theory's cause and effect: King was a reverse merger that was very nearly a takeover of Activision Blizzard at the time. Zynga was thought to be the same for Take-Two (which at the time was particularly bloodied by bankruptcy-related issues and in a position to be eaten). The EA and Popcap merger is another one that was questionably a reverse merger/near takeover, especially in the way it shook up the executive board at the time. (I forgot about Popcap in the above summary because as a brand to themselves they've quietly sort of disappeared from modern mobile trends, but their logo still often shows up in EA presentations.)
In general, "lowly" mobile gaming still has more active players spending more real-world money at any given time. It's very hard not looking at the bottom lines of some of these companies, especially today's weird Activision Blizzard and not see "the tail wagging the dog" and mobile games effectively sponsoring and/or subsidizing development costs on every other form factor of videogame. The biggest exceptions seem to be Sony and Microsoft themselves, and Microsoft dabbled in mobile gaming over the years, has a big mobile gaming contractor in Arkadium (using the Microsoft brand for Solitaire and Minesweeper, among others, and generating some revenue), and does own one of the largest mobile games of all time (Minecraft) though people often don't think of it as such.
I think it also shows up in executive leadership and how F2P microtransactions hell has been infesting "AAA" and "AA" PC/console development for years now.
From my outside perspective of the industry: "Mobile games" won. PC/console games are the weird, "too expensive" afterthought for most of the videogame industry, subsidized by and beholden to the mobile games. The "gamer culture" that doesn't see most of the mobile games space as interesting or important and doesn't see mobile game players as "gamers" (or worse sees them only as "filthy casuals") is the minority out of touch with market realities.
Admittedly, that's a somewhat extreme perspective and there are plenty of exceptions and gray area and further complications. But whether or not you agree with that perspective, my earlier point remains that overall mobile games and PC/console games are inextricably linked by market forces and treating them as separate markets, and especially treating the mobile games market as somehow inferior, misses a lot of the forest.
(That [currently] Cold War between Apple and Epic has very real stakes, including for PC/consoles, and isn't just a silly "mobile gaming" problem.)
> if you talk to any sizable mobile developer they'd be able to tell you stories about the difficulties of working with Apple
If you're a sizable game developer used to working with Sony or Nintendo, how much harder is it to work with Apple?
For pure mobile devs, how much harder is it to work with Apple vs. Google, and why? If it isn't worth it, why bother? Android seems to have larger market share. How much higher are Apple's platform fees vs. Google's?
My experience is somewhat dated so I can’t say if this is still the truth, but Apple used to refuse to tell the very large company I worked at whether or not their new game would be featured before the featuring page was updated. Getting onto the featured page was critical for initial success. And you just didn’t know what to plan for.
I don't think fees are a viable argument anymore. At least not at face value. Last I looked, Google, Apple and Valve all take 30% cuts. I believe Nintendo does too. Unless there are some backroom sweet heart deals at least with the major studios.
Well I’m not sure I’d draw a meaningful difference between Xbox and PC in this context, but at best you’d then just have two channels: Sony and Microsoft (Xbox/PC) so it’s no different than Apple and Google.
But specifically for computer channels there’s effectively just one: Windows PC.
>This toolkit is the means to reopen it. I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase.
I think there's a segment of Mac users who own Windows machines exclusively for gaming. I think the value in these capabilities isn't that people will buy Apple Silicon machine primarily as gaming machines, I think the value is in enabling someone in the Apple ecosystem who plays games occasionally to opt-out of owning a Windows machine.
Yeah, I would be thrilled if this eventually enabled even 50% of my existing Steam library to work on my M1 Mac. If we get a few new releases to be Mac native, that’s just icing on the cake.
But I don't think those who pulled the trigger on buying a whole PC in addition to Mac just to game are the audience here: those people clearly value PC gaming a lot, spending that kind of money and going through that much trouble having the necessary setup at home, taking space and time to build and maintain. Those who care that much won't be satisfied with the state of Mac gaming and continue owning those PCs.
It's for those who would like to play on Mac but currently don't play at all on anything because games they'd like to play don't work on the only performance computing device they have - that Mac.
The second category of people I'd like to add are those who were really on a fence between getting a Mac and a PC (probably laptop at this point, as laptops are sufficiently similar for such a fence to be realistic, desktop PC and desktop Mac are very different machines in comparison), could have gone either way, but would prefer a Mac slightly, but also wanted to play games - not enough to own 2 computers, but enough to begrudgingly choose a PC over a Mac just for that reason.
Those folks are likely to buy a Mac instead next time they buy a new computer, which is probably going to be years from now, for some - years from the point in time when gaming on Mac because actually accessible and good, not immediately on spot.
Hi, actual mac gamer here, I use Geforce Now to play games.
Got myself a founders edition account and while I would have liked to have access to all my weird little indie games, the major games I play is on it OldWorld, Generation Zero, Stellaris, Timberborn, Elite Dangerous, etc..
Apple is never going to be taken seriously by the PC gaming industry, there is to much old wounds from being burned by Apple. So the next best thing as a MAc Gamer is to go with a streaming game service and run parallells for weird little indie games.
the only reason they are opening up for gaming on the Mac platform now is the Apple Vision system.
There is no VR games for mac, VR Chat is not for mac.
To get Vision any traction they need to have Entertainment on it.
Or Porn. But Apple is staunchly anti-Porn.
But we all know that their new VR movie recording system is going to be used for porn more so than birthday parties.
"I think there's a segment of Mac users who own Windows machines exclusively for gaming. I think the value in these capabilities isn't that people will buy Apple Silicon machine primarily as gaming machines, I think the value is in enabling someone in the Apple ecosystem who plays games occasionally to opt-out of owning a Windows machine."
Although, as a casual gamer, I'd like to be able to run the games that I bought in the Apple App Store on my Mac. (e.g. "DeathSpank", a fun spoof of action RPGs, is 32-bit, so it's now unplayable.)
I've used crossover to play Skyrim on my M1 mac (and they just sent me an email saying Apple leveraged crossover code for their porting toolkit), so there might have been an option prior to this - if the performance is good enough for your game.
If you do want crossover, get a free trial, but wait for a discount. I think they discount around 30-40% near the end of the trial and during special sales.
> I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase.
Coincidentally you are in the market every couple of years for new Apple hardware because of planned obsolescence. Why? Because Apple designs proprietary metal that they are unwilling / unable to support every few years because they instead develop new hardware that completely breaks backwards compatibility. Then release updates to sandbag your older hardware when you still refuse to upgrade.
I just think it's funny that you'll buy three highly proprietary Mac computers every three years but you won't buy one industry standardized PC that does it all and can be upgraded. And Apple banks on you doing that and takes you to the cleaners every chance they can. And you still bag on PC's citing the economical sensibility of Apple.
Every couple of years? My MacBooks typically last a lot longer than that. I know some people do chase the latest releases but in my experience MacBooks remain plenty usable for years after purchase.
I won’t buy an industry standardized PC that can be upgraded because I need a laptop. PC laptops aren’t a whole lot more upgradable than Apple ones, it just comes with the territory.
> And you still bag on PCs
The defensiveness here is unwarranted. At no point did I “bag on” PCs. I simply stated that I am not in the market to buy a standalone PC just for playing games.
I really can’t understand this argument. Apple has the least planned obsolescence of any major manufacturer available.
The only upgradeable laptop you can buy is the Framework, which is more expensive than a baseline MBP. It also didn’t exist until a few years ago, so we don’t know if it has 10 years of longevity. What I do know is that my 2015 MBP still has hours of battery life even after being used daily for many years.
As far as software, 2017 MBPs can download Ventura, which will be supported until 2025, which seems like a long time to me.
The vast majority of PC laptops let you upgrade at least the SSD. Usually the WiFi card is socketed too and can be swapped out. And it's really not THAT hard to find laptops that still have socketed RAM if you care to.
Had you bought a ThinkPad T450 instead of your 2015 MBP, you could have upgraded the RAM, upgraded the SSD with a standard M.2 NVMe drive instead of having to hunt for a compatible one with an adapter (don't worry Apple closed that loophole in 2016, no more upgrades at all), easily replaced the battery if need be and still be running Windows 10 which is supported to at least 2025.
Apple's support is better on iOS devices than the incredibly low bar set by Android, but in the computer space they are incredibly unpredictable (will this model be supported 5 or 10 years? Who knows!) and not particularly good.
I suspect we might have to agree to disagree here, but the T450 and 2015 MBP make very different tradeoffs. I might be looking at the wrong model, but I see a 1600x900 screen (while my MBP had a 2560x1600 screen), and (admittedly high quality) plastic case vs aluminum. Immediately before the MBP I owned a Dell XPS laptop that stopped charging ~2 years into ownership.
Aren't the processors not upgradeable in either case? I really doubt you could happily use a Haswell i5 processor in 2023 without feeling limited.. even if just because software (the OS, websites, etc.) assume a higher performance floor.
Obviously there's tradeoffs. Your previous post mentioned that a 2017 MBP is still usable on Ventura and supported until 2025, is a 2017 14nm dual core i5 really a huge leap over a 2015 14nm dual core i5? Which would be more usable the one stuck at 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD and a bit faster CPU or the one upgraded with 16GB RAM (~$40), a $70 1TB SSD and a slower CPU?
> Apple built it's own little parallel gaming stack world that works really well on their hardware
I think saying "its own parallel gaming stack" probably gives them too much credit [1]. Yes - they put in significant effort, but their gaming stack is neither "parallel" to the rest of the world, nor "their own" in any real sense. They seem to have adapted the open source efforts of Codeweavers, Valve, Wine and the broader Linux community put in Proton and achieving Windows games compatibility on Linux with Vulkan. Adapting that for Metal is no small feat [2] but an investment a giant like Apple can easily make without much risks. Don't forget that Wine has always been developed for Linux and macOS (and the BSDs) in parallel too - it was right there for the taking.
[1]: I'm assuming this is a quote sourced from someone who just isn't aware of all the effort being made at the Linux side of thing in the last five years.
[2]: At a technical level Metal and Vulkan are actually similar enough, but there's just a lot of surface to cover and edge cases to get right.
Granted, Metal is to a degree useful for the casual iOS games where alone Apple probably makes more money than anyone else in the gaming industry.
>I'm assuming this is a quote sourced from someone who just isn't aware of all the effort being made at the Linux side of thing
The podcaster does acknowledge that as well, I just didn't quote that part. The whole "rant" has about 4 minutes. But thanks for providing context, it is important.
Ah perhaps I interpreted the quote in the wrong way then. At first it read to me as if Apple did their own bespoke compatibility work, but it's a comment about the mostly artificial Apple Silicon GPU / Metal stack that is only available on Apple devices.
Worth noting that Apple poured a lot of resources into making WebGPU happen. WebGPU is, in a great many ways, Metal but cross-platform. The way this pays off is if game developers start targeting WebGPU instead of Vulkan or DX12. That could happen since WebGPU is a meant to be a lot easier to code against than Vulkan. This effort to port DX12 can probably be seen as more of a hedge than anything else. They know that some publishers will stick to what they know for some time, but they wish for it to be easier to see the upside of a cross platform investment by publishers by delivering an easier win. If it doesn’t work perfectly but gets close, that still helps them a lot. Because Metal is no longer some parallel stack they’re promoting and wanting people to build Apple-exclusive games for, it’s a means to an end, and the end is WebGPU and cross-platform.
Does it really work well for other use cases? Obviously you can call it, but typically a web API has many more security issues to handle than a native API, so I'd expect there to be a lot of compromises a game developer wouldn't want to deal with.
Yes. The non-JS interfaces are Dawn (C++) and wgpu (Rust). The Bevy game engine uses wgpu and I think many others will do the same. You can't really generalise from "typical web APIs" in the way that you have.
Personally, I appreciate this effort, not for AAA games, because I never bought a MacBook expecting it to be able to...but for much more casual or lower poly games that are available on Steam for Windows users only, because it's too hard to port. There's tons of sub-AAA games that could easily be ported and enjoyed on a modern M1/M2 Mac.
Speaking only for myself, I use Macs to get work done. The lack of games is actually a plus, as I can get compulsive with games.
It's funny, when people denigrate the worst gaming platform in the world as a "toy computer."
People get Macs, that want to get work done. As noted previously, there's really nothing that can beat a well-built PC gaming rig.
I don't really think Apple has ever cared about the Mac as a gaming platform, and the low-key hype around these technologies shows that. These almost seem like "developer 20% projects," compared to the big stuff, like visionOS.
That said, I think that Apple wants iOS/iPadOS/visionOS to be gaming platforms, so they do dedicate a lot of resources to that.
Many console gamers aren't aware of how [well] games play on PC gaming rigs, or they don't care, and are happy to play games on Switch/PS4/PS5/Xbox.
Apple may very well be targeting mobile and console gamers rather than PC gamers with gaming rigs.
Personally I would definitely enjoy playing on a high-end gaming PC (especially as GPUs become easier to find at MSRP), but I already have a Mac and a PS5.
I wouldn't mind more of my Steam library working on macOS though.
I don’t know, you say that but there are plenty of triple A games in the App Store and Apple did put in the effort into getting their game subscription to work on their desktops.
Let’s be real, we might all be getting more work done as a result but that’s because Apple dropped the ball, hard. They came out with the metal api but refused to support any others, even letting open GL fester. The fact that they couldn’t keep Blizzard of all companies developing games for the mac is all you need to know.
I'm curious if Apple dropped the ball or if there is still something of an anti-gaming culture inside Apple since I know that the company was de facto anti-gaming in the late 90s going forward. In that era they actively killed off relationships with gaming companies, e.g. the game that eventually became Halo was originally a Macintosh exclusive. More recent things like the legal theatrics with Epic Games gives one a picture of a company that is still not necessarily super keen on fully embracing the gaming scene.
Halo was introduced by Steve Jobs at MacWorld as an upcoming Mac game. It was always called Halo.
“This is not QuickTime. Everything you’re about to see is being rendered in real time on a Macintosh using OpenGL.” [1]
Then Microsoft bought Bungie and made Halo an Xbox-exclusive launch title. [2]
> de facto anti-gaming in the late 90s going forward
In 1997, the Power Mac 6500 shipped with MechWarrior 2 and Descent 2.
Between 1999 and 2005, Bugdom, Nanosaur, Cro-Mag Rally and Otto Matic by Pangea as well as Deimos Rising shipped as built-in platform games on various iMacs and iBooks, the G4 Cube, and the eMac. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 came with one model of eMac. Nanosaur 2 and Marble Blast were bundled with later iMacs, iBooks, eMacs and the Mac mini. [3]
Oh, I'm so very sorry! I think there was a misunderstanding. I was actually talking about the development of the game and not its public announcement!
Here is the relevant part of the Wikipedia article:
"Days before the Macworld announcement, Blam! still had no permanent title; possible names included The Santa Machine, Solipsis, The Crystal Palace, Hard Vacuum, Star Maker, and Star Shield.[38] Bungie hired a branding firm that came up with the name Covenant, but Bungie artist Paul Russell suggested alternatives, including Halo. Though some did not like the name—likening it to something religious, or a women's shampoo—designer Marcus Lehto said, "it described enough about what our intent was for this universe in a way that created this sense of mystery."[28] On July 21, 1999, during the Macworld Conference & Expo, Jobs announced that Halo would be released for MacOS and Windows simultaneously.[36]"
> In that era they actively killed off relationships with gaming companies, e.g. the game that eventually became Halo was originally a Macintosh exclusive.
That was Microsoft's doing, not Apple's. Microsoft scooped up Bungie to make Halo an Xbox exclusive (at least initially). This purportedly angered Steve Jobs, who probably wasn't too into gaming himself but understood the appeal it might have to consumers.
That isn't the version of history I remember reading about Bungie, but I suppose there are probably differing viewpoints about it. In any case, I do know that John Carmack has said that Steve Jobs told him back then that he should stop working on games and work on operating systems instead, and that he generally did not like them.
> there are plenty of triple A games in the App Store
Mobile AAA games in the iOS App Store, or desktop AAA games in the Mac App Store? There are some AAAs that work on a desktop Mac (e.g. Resident Evil Village), but it's not the norm at all. As for mobile ... modern mobile games can die in a fire for all I care (as they're 95% gacha nonsense).
Ok, uninstall Steam then, I guess? Games do currently exist on Mac, both in the App store and on Steam. It's just that there's a big swath of games that haven't been ported to Apple Silicon in particular, due to difficulty. I grew up playing games on the Mac, so I'm not sure what your point is.
So why the challenging and abrasive approach? Did what I write offend you? I certainly didn’t mean to, and apologize for my tone.
I have no interest in picking fights online, especially in a professional venue, where folks that could have a significant impact on my career are watching how I interact with others.
Well HN has the ability to create arbitrary screen names to create pseudo anonymity. So there's that.
I guess what appears to be abrasive is just lacking tone. It's just me being mildly exasperated for effect. My point is to stress that the Mac has always been a general purpose computing device. Jobs may have chosen to optimize the Mac for productivity in the 90s, and that probably stemmed from the niches that were available to Apple in the Windows-dominated 90s and 00s (that he learned from running NeXT).
The lack of upgradeable components also held the Mac back in graphics technology which precluded it from premium games market. But the M1/M2 chips are game changers. But since they're newish and the Windows market is so established and ARM chips are different from traditional x86 based chips, it's tough to get devs to port for Mac. If they can provide tooling that automates it, it's a great win for Apple.
Unfortunately, that "pseudo" is rapidly dwindling. I know that there are already AI "decloakers," that look at writing style, and do a damn good job of finding folks, based on that.
I was a UseNet troll, back in my day. It was not my proudest moment.
One of the reasons that I deliberately make myself known, is that it forces me to watch my words, just like IRL.
My career is done. I am retired (not by choice), and continue to work, but at what I want, and the way that I want to do it. Basically, a dream come true. I am not particularly worried about upsetting folks for my career, but I also feel I have a great deal of atonement due, because of my past behavior.
I like the Apple ecosystem. I've been using it to be highly productive since 1986, and have been playing games on it forever. I remember Pathways Into Darkness[0], thirty years ago, which I thought was awesome.
That is interesting - I bought KOTOR 2 a couple years ago for my kid and ended up having to get a refund it because it didn't run at all (on intel). It just wedged when I clicked play. No response from Aspyr, so I'd assumed they abandoned their older games.
> It's funny, when people denigrate the worst gaming platform in the world as a "toy computer."
Unless you're developing iOS apps or MacOS apps, it's pretty terrible as a work platform too. I guess iWork is OK, but no one uses it, so it's not helpful for collaboration. Maybe people use it for media production? Doesn't the big rendering still happen on Linux though, and hasn't windows caught up?
Having said that, Mac laptops made passable web browser + video phone + dumb terminal in the intel days, and now they're excellent at those things and added "virtualization host" to that list.
I guess I've always thought of them more like glorified vt100s than like computers. They're certainly market leaders for that use case, though WSL is helping windows catch up.
I mean, you're kind of dead wrong? I've been using Macs for almost two decades at this point as a developer, and it's never kept me from getting work done. These days it's great having a powerful Mac, with the ability to use local machine learning models with relatively large amounts of VRAM (more than any consumer GPU, though inference won't be as fast as recent Nvidia cards). It's great at video editing, too.
Well, I write MacOS/iOS/WatchOS/iPadOS/visionOS stuff, so I'm dependent on it.
Like most tools, we get used to our main one, and can sometimes get a bit "sneery" about alternate ones.
The Mac is a particularly rich target, because the "snootiness" is actually a deliberate brand ploy by Apple, and pretty much "leads with the chin," so we have that.
I've never been "snooty" about Apple, but it's been my platform for over 30 years, so I'm used to it, and I get a lot done with my Mac.
Microsoft Office has always been sub-par on Mac, and I haven't worked at a company that uses it for collaboration for over a decade. (Sure, there's the occasional person that actually needs VB macros under Excel, or prefers powerpoint, but there's no reason for me to run it.)
I know you can use them for media production. Looking around, it sounds like they still own the low-end with iMovie, but it gets questionable as hardware requirements increase. I guess it's a viable platform for that.
I know a lot of CAD software is missing MacOS ports, so they seem to have lost that market.
Anyway, I'll continue to think of my laptop as a dumb terminal with a good hypervisor bolted on the side.
I know of quite a large company - the second largest employer in the US that have thousands of Macs and come with Office. Do you really think that no one has been using Office for Mac and Microsoft has been selling it for 35 years?
It is hard to switch away from mainframes too, but I haven’t heard of a company that was founded in the last ten years that is a Microsoft Office shop.
Most places I have worked don’t use office suites. Instead of formatting stuff for 8.5x11” PDFs or printouts, things go into wikis/gdocs/etc, markdown files in git, python or splunk dashboards or whatever instead of excel; stuff is shared on slack, not office/google drive, etc, etc.
Sure, you can get access to an office suite at these companies, but people certainly raise an eyebrow when emailed a docx or told to click this office online link to run word in their browser.
In the link you pasted, the studies are limiting the market in strange ways. Like what is a “workstream collaboration tool” (teams, and whatever google workspaces is. I’ve never used either, despite using google docs periodically).
So, if the question is “which wordperfect clone is winning”, then word is a plausible answer. If the question is “what percentage of all documents are created in each tool”, there’s no way office (excluding outlook) + gdocs + iwork sum up to a majority at most companies.
> Most places I have worked don’t use office suites. Instead of formatting stuff for 8.5x11” PDFs or printouts, things go into wikis/gdocs/etc, markdown files in git, python or splunk dashboards or whatever instead of excel; stuff is shared on slack, not office/google drive, etc, etc.
Yes because most of corporate America is doing work in Markdown.
Have you ever thought that your workplace may not be representative of the wider world?
> the question is “what percentage of all documents are created in each tool”, there’s no way office (excluding outlook) + gdocs + iwork sum up to a majority at most companies.
In my university, only non computer science students used macs. At my work, I wasn't given a choice and was given a macbook because "we all use macbooks" which really just meant "we all work on the terminal", which mac is not good at, not anymore when we have WSL to compare it against.
These GPUs aren’t too bad. Theoretically, M2 Max peaks at 14.4 teraflops, and 400 GB/s memory bandwidth. M2 Ultra is too new, but Apple says it’s GPU is 30% faster (probably 18.7 teraflops then?), and that it has 800 GB/s memory bandwidth.
The numbers for M2 Ultra are comparable to some powerful GPUs. The theoretical TFlops number is close to Radeon 6900 XT and GeForce 3070, theoretical memory bandwidth is close to Radeon 7900 XT and GeForce 4080.
However, good point on the pricing. Apparently, Mac Pro starts at $7k, which is way too expensive for most gamers.
Apple's best GPU is close to a mid-range previous gen nvidia GPU?
I'm sure it'll run a 4 year old game on medium settings great! But that's kind of the point, that it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry.
Who's supposed to be impressed by getting middling performance on Death Stranding 4 years after it came out? Literal definition of "also ran".
That's neat and impressive, but that's all they have. They don't have a high end. For $3000 you can get a top end gaming PC. There's no amount of money you can spend on a Mac to equal that.
I think you're missing the point that parent (and Siracusa) made - Apple invests a signficant into the software and graphics stack, only to fumble it at the last minute by not having high-end graphics hardware, and caring enough to court "triple A" game developers to their platforms, despite them creating and maintaining Metal and this 20k-line WINE patch.
There's this weird mismatch of Apple dedicating a non-trival amount of time in their keynote to "Mac Gaming" as if it's supposed to be impressive to finally play a 4 year old game on a Mac because they don't ship high-end graphics devices.
Apple silicon wins on performance per watt but not in performance outright and suddenly everyone cares about power consumption. Whichever spec everyone's favorite fruit company excels at gets put on a pedestal.
The PC industry is no longer driven by desktops; laptops have taken over long ago. There is a gaming PC crowd, but that is a small captured audience who wants performance, wattage be damned.
Apple is selling around 80% laptops versus desktops, and the rest of the industry is something like 77%. The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race doesn't mean it should automatically be entered into the desktop GPU race, where it is not winning.
I would take a guess that Apple is shipping (far) more TFlops of GPU power than Nvidia or anyone else in the mobile GPU market. Few people are buying laptops with 80-150w TDP GPUs, as those start to stretch the definition of both 'laptop' and 'battery powered'. Big gaming laptops with an hour of battery life are more akin to the luggables of yore.
That's fair. Nvidia has issues scaling their full systems down to laptop spec, and Apple almost has the opposite problem. They're both impressive in their own right, but right now Nvidia has both the performance and performance-per-watt crown in this space. The disparity in 3D applications (like gaming and Blender[0]) so ugly it's not even close.
And in all fairness - Apple's products might not need more GPU power. Cyberpunk and Elden Ring appear to be CPU-bottlenecked, if people are comfortable upscaling they could get a pretty comfortable Retina experience. The 2D optimization and media accelerators are a good focus for mobile hardware. For more demanding applications though, it looks like Apple's current approach is not scaling well.
Yeah I'm really curious what Apple's next-gen GPU (with raytracing and a bunch of other stuff) brings to fix some of these shortcomings. It was supposed to show up on last year's iPhone 14 followed presumably by inclusion in the M-series, and the 3nm process was supposed to be shipping this year, but everything got set back a year. In Mac-land the M2 wound up just being an overclocked M1, so we're left waiting for M3 to bring us a more competitive GPU.
The other half of the story is a lot of software (inc Blender, looking at these crazy results) just isn't well optimized and Apple is still struggling to win over developers in certain sectors of the market. Nvidia's decade+ investment in the software side has paid off so incredibly well for them, it's basically made the company.
shockingly, I think there might be more than one person on the internet and these people might have varying opinions
but yea you can say the same thing about tons of brands. Last summer all the AMD fans were talking about 1€/kWh electricity and saying they were going to buy whatever dGPU was most efficient... when that turned out to be Ada by a country mile, everybody pivoted to whining about price and bought RDNA2 GPUs with half of the perf/w.
During RDNA2 everyone insisted that a 10% perf/w advantage for AMD was a buying point, back during the Vega years they insisted that a 2x perf/w disadvantage didn't matter. Rinse and repeat.
I generally think power matters when it rises to the level of a tangible difference... 200W difference between 4070 and 6950XT means the latter is really a non-starter even if it's 10% faster (at a 5% higher price), especially considering the big-picture featureset (DLSS improves both perf and perf/w). And really it matters more in laptops. You're right that Mac Studio/Mac Pro are not really a place where it hugely matters, but, in a laptop, the next-best thing would be a Ryzen 6800U which is about GTX 1630 performance, so 3060 performance in the same envelope is a big step upwards!
And really this "big differences matter, small ones don't" applies to most stuff in general. 5% this way or the other, who cares. That kind of thing is often less important than general UX/quality/features, I'll take a laptop that's 5% slower but way longer battery life or better screen/trackpad/whatever. When things start rising to the level of 25% or 30% difference in some spec, or in price... yeah that's immediately noticeable.
But yea I generally agree that desktops like Studio or outright workstations like Mac Pro are dGPU territory and people are generally not looking for a super efficient iGPU with 3060 performance. On the other hand, being able to talk to 192GB of VRAM is definitely novel, especially with large AI models being the talk of the town this year (and accessible to even the most casual of artists/developers), and the unified APU approach with uniform memory/zero-paging has other advantages for development too. AMD had a lot of this stuff hammered out 10 years ago, supposedly, and then... just never did anything with it, other than sell it to consoles. It's great for PS5 and Xbox, why can't I buy a PC laptop with 96GB of unified/uniform memory with 3060-level performance in a 25W envelope?
Really I think a lot of the people who have bought Macbooks recently are not "traditional" apple customers. The MBP and even MBA are legitimately really nice laptops with a good screen, good keyboard, good trackpad, good sound, etc. I have said before that I really think a lot of MBP customers would be interested in a "Macbook Tough" toughbook if they ever did that, although of course that's the most un-Jony Ives product possible.
There is a clear demand for a high-quality AMD-based non-GPU ultrabook using a 6800U or 7040U or whatever. Framework is the first company to even try, and they're using crappy 13" hardware on the upcoming AMD model while the market clearly wants more like a 15" or 16" (and their 16" will not have AMD boards). Why didn't anybody else do it first? Apple is catching on because they're filling a market niche that everyone else is ignoring, and they're not even really exactly filling it squarely, they just happen to be vaguely closer than the rest of the market.
And now that the nerd crowd has the hardware... the software is following. It's the same reason that CUDA has taken off while AMD's GPGPU programme has spun its wheels for 15 years, and the same reason AMD has good Linux drivers now. Give the nerds the hardware and innovation will follow - when they tinker they'll be tinkering with your platform.
Big missed opportunity for AMD, yet again. Or Intel, but, they're so far behind on APUs/integration that I think disappointment is basically the baseline expectation at this point. AMD had all the pieces, and yet again just chose not to do anything with them.
The most popular GPUs in use TODAY are 1650, 1060, 3060, 2060.
If Apple can get the M2 Macbook Air to run like one of these, it essentially makes the most popular laptop also the equivalent to the most popular gaming rig.
Two days ago we could speculate that maybe the $6000+ Mac Pro would bring better graphics performance, but now we know it's a $7000 Mac Studio with PCIe slots. And as far as we know you can't put a GPU in those slots.
Not that it would've been in my price range anyway, but it could've indicated that thunderbolt eGPU support would make a return.
Lack of that is a weird omission if Apple is trying to act like they have a gaming platform.
However, I imagine that they'd still like to sell more games in the Mac App Store (in addition to iOS ports, iPad games that can run on Apple Silicon, and Apple Arcade subscriptions) and this might help.
It might also make it easier to port games to Apple Arcade.
This is wildly false, see https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/143ugg4/comment/j... as a real world example of a gaming PC you can buy right now for $2,600 which is the top of the crop and an absolutely wild gaming machine that's vastly better at gaming than $5,000 M2 Ultra Mac Studio even if the comparisons are done only in games that actually work and work well on the Mac.
If you were after a comparable experience with the fastest Macs on Earth you could configure a PC that's another $1,000 cheaper than that ($1,600).
Actually you can get NVidia's top consumer GPU today, the RTX 4090, for $1500-1600. Go back one generation and you can get a RTX 3090 for $750 which still packs a punch.
So it's quite possible to build a well-performing gaming PC for sub-$2000 with RTX 3090 which is still significantly more performant than Apple's latest Mac, in terms of GPU throughput.
I snapped myself a gaming PC for $1300 at last year's Thanksgiving sales, came with a AMD Ryzen, RTX 3080 (10 GB VRAM model) and 32 GB DDR4 RAM, no way I could have gotten a Mac with that performance for anything close in terms of price.
Yea, that’s true as of today in the US. There’s no way you could get such a deal where I live (Norway) due to our weak currency, and it used to be the other way around just a few years ago
Great, you can keep playing your old ass game at low frame rates. Enjoy your power savings... the game still runs like crap and the GPU still isn't that great.
Game enthusiasts can be so weird. Do y'all even have fun playing games, or do you just keep buying hardware and optimizing settings until they run at 120fps, declare victory, and move on to the next AAA game?
I don't think I have worried about game frame rate since the days of Quake 1. I set my graphics settings to "Medium" and then spend the rest of my time actually enjoying my old ass games.
Its exactly why PC/console gamers (generally, not talking about GP) make terrible customers and Apple is right to not play with fire by courting them too closely - they're loud, cheap, immature, mercurial, and demanding, and being associated with them is probably a net negative for brand. Let them stew in forums arguing over red vs green, tinkering with and breaking the warranty of their PC parts, being disloyal to the brand they loved 5 minutes ago, etc.
Better strategy is to make sure the door isn't closed on gaming for those that want to use their expensive Macs to occasionally play (protect the downside), rather than swing the door open enthusiastically for gamers to rush in.
Re: worrying about fun vs tinkering, I'm reminded of the 4 quadrants of hobbies. What we see on forums are generally gamers interested in gear & discussing, not 'doing the hobby'. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html
Yes, gamers have standards and thats why GPU performance on the PC does not suck and why it is relatively affordable. A tough market to be in for sure, everyone wishes they could just be Apple.
In many genres of game, frame rate makes a huge difference in the ability to control the game and catch what's happening. Framerate is probably the worst thing you could have picked to mock when you're making an argument about enjoyment. Especially when citing an FPS.
The M2 Max is closer to the 3060 than it is to the 3060 Ti, let alone 3070. And those numbers are quite possibly overly optimistic; workloads essentially never reach peak tflop, and I would not be surprised if practical workloads are better matched to nvidia's architecture than apple's, if only through sheer industry momentum (But that could go either way).
While the perf/watt is impressive, apple is also using 4 times the number of transistors on TSMC's latest process - and the comparison here is samsungs 8nm, I believe. It's not really all that impressive that that huge silicon investment has some results...
It's a tantalizing hint at what might be possible, but as it stands, I'm not really all that impressed, personally.
I didn't say 3070, that was from the parent "who is impressed by 3070 performance [in a 25W envelope]"? And the answer is a lot of people.
I actually added the 3060 bit myself lol, because yeah, that seems to be more like where it actually lands, more like desktop 3060.
edit: also desktop vs mobile is a factor here too... mobile 3070 is not the same thing as desktop 3070, and coming in at desktop 3070 would actually be fairly impressive. Mobile 3060, much less so.
Sure, no quibbles on that front. Comparisons like this are always best taken with a lot of salt anyhow; they're so different. And it's not like tflops are the great predictor of gaming performance.
Positively: as a device, having such a solid iGPU is pretty much exactly what I've always wanted in this kind of device. Having performance that's PS5 ballpark clearly is enough for a hell of a lot of things. Who really wants something much faster at the cost of much worse battery life?
But the air of incredibly ground-breaking technical greatness that apple manages to weave around its silicon seems a tad overdone. Given the amount of silicon, the process node, and the target tuning - this kind of result seems competitive with rather than outclassing their rivals.
I feel like you've got a chip on your shoulder about this for some reason
I've got a gaming desktop and also a MacBook Pro. If the next time I go on a trip, I'm able to play some games in my hotel room on (gasp) medium settings, with a device I already own, that I probably was already going to bring with me, that's a positive thing!
I also have a gaming desktop and a Macbook Pro, but I wish I didn't have to have a gaming desktop because I much prefer Macs and MacOS and I wish Apple was interested in competing. Then, they dedicate a segment to 'gaming on mac' to brag about porting a 4 year old game to the Mac.
>it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry
Apple seems to be doing okay. I mean, a magnitude more people game on iPhones than game on PCs.
Apple is trying to support ancillary gaming for users who chose their platform for other reasons. That's it. They aren't targeting the 1200 watt, 12-fan 4090 PCMR sorts. And that's okay.
Do they need to most powerfull gaming hardware? Maybe just the fact that it might get reasonable to play most games on a macbook is enough to get people who also want to game to buy a macbook instead of a windows laptop. And maybe this is enough to get developers to consider mac.
They do not need to compete with nvidea for the top of the line
Yeah, high end enthusiast hardware is in fact pretty niche, and I say this as someone with a 5950X/3080Ti tower. The vast majority of people playing games are doing so on pretty old/average hardware, a bar which is met and exceeded by several M-series Macs.
High-end hardware is niche, but the state of AAA game performance these days ... ugh. I can't even get a stable 60fps on Jedi Survivor with my 5800x/3080 Ti rig, even with lower settings. How bad is it on something like a 1060?
I paid a ton of money for my top of the line M2 Max because I build large rust systems that are high bandwidth and low latency and it’s as good as it gets for that. I also like to play games, but I don’t need the cutting edge. I would rather eat glass than buy a windows bing advertisement device and find another footprint in my home to install it just so I can get a higher frame rate than my eye can see. In fact, my strategy for gaming over the last 20 years has been to buy games 3 years old and devices that run them at their top end. No bugs, tons of reviews to guide my purchases, tons of mods, full DLC sets, always on sale. As long as I don’t sit around feeling envy looking at what’s cutting edge, following the 3 year wave front gives me precisely the experience folks had 3 years ago - but better. I’ll have their current experience in 3 years, so long as I don’t die, without all the bleeding edge problems.
So, great. Apple lets me stay away from bard directed bing advertising and OS level spy ware on my desktop, simplify my computing footprint in my household, and provides me games from a few years ago. Seems like a win win.
Source: I am someone who paid significantly more money for a Max M2 Max
No corporation gets to take a moral high ground being amoral entities. But windows is pervasively spammy now - the start menu hosting ads was bad enough, but now it’s the task bar too. I’m trying to remember when I saw a cross sell in apples stuff - my memory is only when I’m in something like the TV app or the wallet, or some place where the cross sell is contextually relevant.
The more Microsoft and Google tilt towards becoming persistent privacy threats and advertising companies, the more apple will see it as a differentiator as a hardware company with software services to be the opposite. I’m good with that dynamic, but I think it’s useful to acknowledge that’s the case. Pretending windows isn’t a persistent adware spyware bundle doesn’t help the situation.
I think you'd be surprised. I just checked, and my desktop gaming GPU is only 31% faster than that nvidia, and I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro M2 Max.
I bought the laptop and the video card because they are quiet and their price/performance is better than the high end stuff anyway.
I just tried running steam on the macbook, and was very disappointed. My Linux gaming desktop will live on for another few years, I guess.
edit: I think I got the GPU in ~ 2019, though it was released in 2015.
Rosetta translation + D3D12OnMetal (which developers aren't allowed to use to publish their games, so you'll have to do it on your own and work with a subpar version) will happily eat that 30% difference. Not to mention the massive changes that drivers bring, where Apple will never either want or be able to do as much work as Nvidia does.
The 30% faster hardware is running Linux. The main reason I'm disappointed with steam on MacOS is that only a third of my library works at all, and that the stuff that does run is hit or miss, performance wise (especially the indie / casual games, which this hardware should laugh at).
Also, another 25% of my library actually was ported to MacOS, but it is 32 bit only, so it won't run on an M2. (Also, typing that sentence was painful.)
I guess if I want to run the vast majority of the MacOS software that I have ever purchased on an M2, my best bet is to install Asahi, and use the Windows ports under proton. Lame.
Steam has mislabeled many of the older Mac games as being incompatible. Several of them will work just fine. It's worth double checking on one of the Mac gaming wikis if you want a particular game.
Have no idea why the mislabeling happened. Maybe Steam is working solely off dates despite many games being 64 bit before the 32 bit cutoff.
The latest consoles are also running mid range cards from a few years ago and are doing just fine. They are running games at medium at lower FPS/resolution than PC so games will mostly continue to target and work well on medium hardware. High end PC gaming is the exception, not the norm.
The Mac audience is not trivial and has deep pockets so as long as porting games is fairly easy the it's an obvious choice.
Sure? It's definitely never going to deliver you anything other than a gaming/video experience though. It also doesn't come with a battery or a display in case we're doing an apples to apples comparison of the Xbox Series S with an M1 MacBook Pro.
>Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?
iOS gaming is the biggest and most profitable in the world. In fact, iOS is bigger than PS5, Xbox, and PC gaming.
iOS uses Metal. Apple Silicon is mostly just a scaled up iPhone SoC. Macs basically get most things funded by iOS.
The Game Porting Toolkit is the first Mac-only gaming tool Apple made in a long time. It shows that Apple wants AAA games on Macs.
>But then Apple doesn't ship devices with actually powerful GPUs, so it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise.
But Apple does ship powerful GPUs. In fact, the M2 Max is probably the most or second most powerful GPU on laptops. But games aren't optimized for Metal nor ARM, so they run slower than Nvidia laptop GPUs.
1. Playing games is one of the reasons to prefer a Windows laptop instead of a Mac.
2. The AR/VR headsets will need games to be successful, so they need to be more attractive to the gaming industry.
3. iPads are more powerful now. They support game controllers very well, and you can plug it into a big screen to play. However, most of the iPad games (except Divinity Original Sin 2) are scaled versions of iPhone games... game studios are not interested in porting games to the iPad.
While the porting kit announcement is about Macs, I think that the strategy is to make the whole Apple Silicon platform attractive for gaming.
The toolkit is not part of Apple platform apparently. It is a development tool that can be used to evaluate porting no more no less. I see no changes in the platform itself.
Including things in the platform is a double-edged sword; the platform has different compatibility policy from windows, and old games typically do not get updated with mandated platform changes (such as a requirement for 64-bit).
Swift developer were upset by concurrency because the language’s deep integration with the platform meant the best features were (for a while) only accessible for apps targeting the latest platform versions exclusively.
Microtransaction ridden mobile gacha games where Apple takes 30% aren't exactly the target when you translate D3D12 to Metal for your desktop platform where Apple takes nothing. In practice, it is doomed to be a solution that plays the games you bought on steam 5 years ago, or run games like cyberpunk on medium 900p on your multiple-thousand dollar machine.
Apple gaming will not take off until game devs target Apple's devices, and Apple burned those bridges a long time ago.
> But Apple does ship powerful GPUs. In fact, the M2 Max is probably the most or second most powerful GPU on laptops. But games aren't optimized for Metal nor ARM, so they run slower than Nvidia laptop GPUs.
The most powerful iGPU likely. It still won't come anywhere close to high-end dedicated laptop GPUs in the vast majority of benchmarks regardless of how much optimization you throw at it - that's just falling for marketing / hype.
>The most powerful iGPU likely. It still won't come anywhere close to high-end dedicated laptop GPUs in the vast majority of benchmarks regardless of how much optimization you throw at it - that's just falling for marketing / hype.
In applications that actually use Metal natively, Apple Silicon GPUs do compare favorably to Nvidia laptop GPUs while using drastically less power.
So no. It isn't just hype/marketing.
Even if you look at the raw technical specs of the M2 Max GPU, it's comparable to Nvidia laptop GPUs - with the exception of ray tracing.
>In applications that actually use Metal natively, Apple Silicon GPUs do compare favorably to Nvidia laptop GPUs while using drastically less power.
Is that really the case?
I'm not being facetious here, I'd really like to see more useful datapoints.
There aren't many benchmark comparisons out there that strive for actual useful comparison, especially outside synthetic stuff with questionable applicability like 3dMark.
And for the "drastically less power" claim...it really doesn't help that most benchmarks are with decked-out "Gamer" machines using the highest available TDP configuration, despite most GPUs having their sweet spot significantly below - especially Ada Lovelace seem to scale down really well (from what I've gathered, still 60-70% performance at 60W compared to 150W with 4080 Mobile, for example).
>Even if you look at the raw technical specs of the M2 Max GPU, it's comparable to Nvidia laptop GPUs - with the exception of ray tracing.
The specs put it roughly between GA106-GA104/AD107-AD106 respectively, and I'd expect it to land there in the general, adequately optimized case.
> Is that really the case? I'm not being facetious here, I'd really like to see more useful datapoints. There aren't many benchmark comparisons out there that strive for actual useful comparison, especially outside synthetic stuff with questionable applicability like 3dMark.
Yeah, on synthetic benchmarks a higher-end MacBook Pro GPU compares favorably with recent Nvidia laptop cards (say, 4070 or so). But in games that drops off dramatically ... more like a 3050 or 3060 at best.
> Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?
I imagine Apple may be testing the waters. They're a trillion-dollar company, with many customers who play games, and they want to see if they can expand Mac gaming beyond iOS ports.
Consider that there are a large number of games which could run fine on this sort of technology (including much of my Steam game library that currently only runs on Windows) as well as existing macOS ports whose performance can be improved.
For example Final Fantasy XIV already runs on a Crossover/WINE type middleware layer, but at about half the frame rate of the Windows version on comparable hardware. Metal conversion is likely to greatly improve the frame rate, improving the experience for FFXIV players on macOS. If it helps Square Enix deliver a better FFXIV experience on Mac, perhaps they will be more likely to consider Mac ports of some newer games that are currently slated for Windows or consoles.
Moreover it's worth noting that Apple did claim that the M1 had comparable raw GPU performance to the PS5 (and Macs also use fast flash storage like the PS5.) So as the M-series evolves (and the PS5 ages) it may become more feasible to port PS5 games to Mac with decent performance. Solid ports of console games could greatly improve the Mac gaming landscape.
Also we don't know Apple's product plans. It's likely that they have some GPU improvements in the works. Unified memory architecture may also pay off as more games adopt ray-tracing and procedural textures and geometry.
Don't you think that Apple could tackle the performance issues in GPUs in the following years?
The core issue here, business wise, is the price tag. People of all social classes use gaming consoles and it is difficult to think Apple can be relevant in this market even if they tackle all other issues.
Nevermind the low end (it will always be an uphill battle to compete with the consoles on price), the issue is that Apple doesn't even cater to the high end.
Google has twice tried and failed to make Vulkan a thing - first on Android, where nobody cares to target it, even on the Quest, and the GPUs suck anyway; and second on Stadia, which besides the up front product development cost, it was 3-20x worse performance compared to DirectX for the games that were ports anyway.
But I'd rather have Vulkan around and succeed, even if it sucks today. Because having only DirectX, or only DirectX and middlewares for the Switch, iOS and PlayStation, is worse.
> But then Apple doesn't ship devices with actually powerful GPUs, so it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise.
It is still expensive to have to use Windows just so you can game. Or put all the effort into dual booting Linux.
Most people just use a Macbook and then get an Xbox/Ps5/Switch/Quest2.
For games I can't use on those you can get Shadow PC which let's you play any Windows game ever using better GPUs than I could afford (or more accurately would care to spend) otherwise.
The high-end gaming market is infintessimal when compared to the casual gaming market. Apple knows this and they are perfectly positioned for high-quality casual games.
I think this is an example of how ideas about what people really consider important are skewed by marketing. The gaming market is HUGE. How big is the premium, chasing-that-last-quarter-percent-by-spending-twice-the-money market comparatively?
I thought this was very insightful on his part - yeah this all sounds great, but so what? The Mac Pro is an empty box besides for Apple Silicon and a few fans. What are you going to put in there exactly?
Keep in mind, it's getting 15fps at 1440x900. It's not saying that Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 is a great experience. It's merely pointing out that it's technically possible (which is a massive achievement).
I mean, for the work I do that’s probably true. My work is 99% CPU/RAM/disk dependent.
GPU obviously not, but maybe that claim would hold water at some arbitrary wattage limit.
My takeaway is that the GPU “doesn’t completely suck” and that Apple are dedicating continuing resources to making their platform actually usable, which I was worried about. I mean, it seems difficult just to intentionally use the Apple Neural Engine, and impossible to explicitly use it, which makes testing aggravating. Any continued focus on improving developer experience for the coprocessors (GPU, ANE, R1, etc) is a good signal.
Yeah I don't think laptops should be sold at all with 512GB -- I think that's as absurd of a product as a laptop with 128GB. Personally I spec out 2TB and judge price value based on that.
So the speed issue doesn't affect me personally. I just wish they wouldn't sell that model and then it wouldn't affect anyone.
Given that Baldur's Gate runs at Ultra 1080p60+ on a 3050Ti mobile, that's about what you can expect from a low end gaming laptop - and that GPU runs at 35-50W on most of those
No. There does not exist an M1 Ultra laptop of any kind. Nor an M2 Ultra laptop for that matter. The only machines with Mn Ultra are the Mac Studio and Mac Pro.
Yes. The MBP with an M1 Max will, at max performance, use enough power that it would discharge it's battery in less than an hour. I think Apple throttles it on battery, though.
They've been straight up lying about the M series chips performance from day one. They will show insane graphs of the M chips beating top end desktop parts with an asterisk that explains the very specific BS benchmark they used that clearly favors their chip but won't generalize and then public benchmarks never even come close.
I do not understand. The picture you link clearly does not cut off that way: if it were the case, the curves would be about to cross at the cut, or maybe I am missing something?
It's an impressive turnout, but I wouldn't ignore the power of modern low-end APUs. Here's a 3-generation-old, entry level Ryzen laptop playing the game for comparison: https://youtu.be/Aqgm0zcV7Kw
"this well" is more or less equivalent to a older Ryzen 3's native performance. Apple is really banking on developers recompiling for ARM to reduce overhead here.
13 inch ultra lights? I very much doubt that. You are basically relegated to igpus. I could see Ryzen 7840u beating the M1. But 3 years ago the best there was was the Ryzen 5800u.
M1 has 8 GPU cores, M1 Pro has 16, M1 Max has 32 cores. Apple says the GPU of M1 Max is four times as fast as M1. So 30FPS Ultra on 1080p should be possible?
This is not the M1. You can’t configure a MacBook Pro 16 inch (stated in the tweet) with anything other than an M1 Pro / M1 Max, or M2 Pro / M2 Max on the latest models.
Wine + DXVK disagrees. Graphics API emulation doesn't necessarily provide worse performance, in fact DXVK often wins against raw DirectX 9/10 and sometimes even DirectX 11. VKD3D performance is pretty awesome.
Not sure how much of the bottleneck here is because of Rosetta though (i.e. cpu-bound) although I suspect not much really.
I think it's a network effect thing as much as anything else. If it's good enough to get people playing games on their macs at all (even if at relatively sub-par settings), that builds the market, shows there are people willing to spend money on games to play them on their macs.
Then at that point games developers might be more inclined to give the platform explicit support.
Otherwise it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation: people aren't playing games on their macs because the library isn't there, the library isn't there because no developers will support a platform where there aren't gamers and so on.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Think about how many Steam Decks have been sold. Game devs are already actively targeting the Deck. If porting games to Mac can be made easier, we all need to actively encourage it. Unfortunately, the only way we get Apple to give us more game dev tools is by porting the games.
I have a Steam Deck and a Mac. I would love to play half the games from my Deck on my laptop.
Do you find this is a good solution for playing Steam games?
I have an older PC, and I'm thinking about replacing it with a macbook air and a steam deck. Does the steam deck feel more limiting than just having a windows PC with steam?
only get a steam deck if you're really interested in portable playing. You can build a better desktop from old parts. The steamdeck is an interesting device that's doing a lot for gaming via proton, but that makes tradeoffs for battery life and portability. If you're not interested in the portability just get a desktop. If you're interested in the portability but need a large screen, get a laptop. If you want a sega game gear form factor that can run steam games get a steam deck.
Yeah, but that's the first attempt. The game porting toolkit is designed to shorten the time it takes to launch the game on macOS for the first time by allowing you to take the ready Windows version and just running it directly on macOS with translation. A finished macOS port would have additional work after this step.
"Technically possible" is a non statement. Of course its technically possible. The question is how much money is Apple willing to throw at making games run well on their gpu.
Imagine all these games on an Apple TV… I’m assuming at some point those will also start using M chips. Excited to see if apple can enter the console market.
So, you need to spend $3k to get playable framerates, which are possible with a 3060 laptop, maybe even a 3050ti, as they can do 1080p, this just seems to be 900p.
The point is that you'll be able to play games on the machine you already have. Yes, a PC with GPU is going to be better and people that are really into gaming will probably always opt for that. But there's a big casual market out there too.
Actually you can play these games with Xbox Series S at 1440p easily. I wonder if people would just simply buy a game console (if they don't already have one) for the more demanding titles. Most people don't need a processor that is nearly as powerful as M1 Max, and I doubt anyone is going to spend extra money on a computer just for its GPU that doesn't even play games as well as a $300 console.
>Actually you can play these games with Xbox Series S at 1440p easily.
The Xbox Series S version of Cyberpunk runs at 30 FPS with a dynamic resolution between 2304x1296 and 2560x1440 on quality mode and at 60 FPS with a dynamic resolution between 1410x800 and 1920x1080 on performance mode. If you were to run it with a fixed resolution of 1440p, then you'd definitely not be averaging 30 FPS.
There are options if you just want to play the game, yes, but Apple did the work here, and met developers the wrong half way IMO. If you just want to play with higher settings and fps on the computer you have, less emulation is better, as impressive as it might be. A Vulkan driver would be less emulation and more performance all around I think. Also, $300 can buy a lot of games if games can be made to run well with minimal work.
The last thing I still use my windows machine for is the occasional gaming session. I'd love to be able to be rid of it forever. This seems like a positive step in that direction.
This is the entry level M1. 15fps at 1400x900 isn't great (or even playable), but it's very impressive that it runs at all without any changes, let alone on ultra settings.
Yes, thank you. I mean, let's have a bit of context.
I'm Mac based (well, my computing is, I'm still biological ;) ) and I took an interest in what's happening in the AI space. Knowing that RAM and CPU would be bottlenecks but that there would be open source ways to run stuff, I got a Mac Studio, which is M1 Ultra and 128G of RAM, which then becomes also GPU RAM because on M1 the architecture is like that.
So I'm able to do AI stuff up to the heavy-lifting stuff (still steadily downloading LLaMA data on my old DSL, but I've got everything but 65B and have run 7B, 13B and 30B without issue, and of course I'm having no trouble running Stable Diffusion stuff)
If a basic laptop with just an M1 and laptop amounts of RAM can do 15 fps at 1400x900, my 20-core M1 Ultra with 128G of RAM ought to do at least that at 3840x1600 on my big ol' curved monitor. And at that point it starts acting like the PC gamer experience, except at no point did I set out to make a gamer-specific system. The whole thing was put together to serve very much other purposes, and retains usefulness for those purposes.
I'm sure I can tolerate pleb tier 30 fps or not being on Ultra settings or something, to get performance that's very similar to decent gaming rigs on games designed for Windows PCs, on a machine I got to serve entirely other purposes.
A lot of us with the financial means to buy a Mac Studio are also old and are "PatientGamers" and fire up games like Skyrim from time-to-time and don't chase after the latest AAA titles. Even 10-15 years ago I used to a have a $200 limit on graphics cards and roughly $100 limit on CPUs and would wait to play games on highest resolution until it was a few years later and I went through a hardware refresh cycle, always staying about 2 years behind. I've never bought a $1000 GPU for a gaming rig.
At the same time I find this interesting that Apple is clearly starting to notice the PC gaming market. Makes me wonder if they're going to start a more serious push soon, and if we might see some changes and repair the relationship that Apple has with AAA studios.
[Edit: And another thought is that with virtual iPhone saturation in the US market, Apple may be facing the economic reality that in order to grow they need to enter into other markets like gaming, and this may as well be a necessary part of the long-term Vision Pro strategy]
> This is the entry level M1. 15fps at 1400x900 isn't great (or even playable), but it's very impressive that it runs at all without any changes, let alone on ultra settings.
And running non-natively through Codeweavers patch and through Rosetta.
The people shaming this couldn't have any idea what they're looking at.
It runs bad! I could spend less on a PC and get a better frame rate!
Of course it runs bad, it's miracle-like that it runs at all or has a frame rate, let alone a rate that is based on high performance settings.
The entire thing is hacked together through tenuous layer upon layer of emulation - no part of this is designed for the hardware it's running on. It should not be this fast, it should be spitting out a low-res, low-detail frame once every 30 seconds, if at all.
This is not the M1. You can’t configure a MacBook Pro 16 inch (stated in the tweet) with anything other than an M1 Pro / M1 Max, or M2 Pro / M2 Max on the latest models.
It’s the 13” MBP. If you look at the metal overlay in the corner it shows the product name of the processor, and in this case, it’s the base M1 with 16GB of memory.
The 13” M1 MacBook Pro does not have the pro or Mac chip. Not sure that’s what is being used here, but your assumption that this combination isn’t possible is false.
I knew about the 13" M2 MBP (although it seems very easy to forget somehow), but maybe due to marketing materials I encountered, I'd incorrectly thought that product line started with the M2 not the M1.
This is total speculation on my part, but I do wonder why Apple have suddenly got this out the door to developers right at the same moment their headset is announced. They’ve never seemed very interested in this section of the games market before.
I wonder if this could be the first building block of allowing existing modern 3D games to play in some kind of new semi immersive way inside. I’m imagining playing an FPS on a huge wrap around screen with some adjustable depth perception. That could potentially open up a huge market.
Some background: Currently PCVR is basically 100% Windows. It's possible to stream VR games from a PC to a standalone headset (ie: with the Quest AirLink) but it depends on network conditions. For example, if both computer and headset are connected via WiFi, and neither has line of sight to the router, performance is likely to be questionable, at best. In theory a computer could use it's own WiFi chipset to make a direct connection, but there's also a WiFi 6 dongle that allows for a direct link between computer and headset.
With that said: Apple already has devices that talk to each other, laptops with high-speed WiFi chips, and now they're making a VR headset. So they have all the parts for a really slick PCVR (er, MacVR?) experience, except the games.
So I 100% don't think the timing is coincidental. They're almost certainly targeting PCVR, although I don't know what they will do with motion controllers. That said, there's still nearly a year until launch, so maybe they haven't shown us everything (or maybe it's not ready).
Edit: should also add that this might be really important for VR gaming because we don't know how much compute is available for apps. However, the dual-chip design implies that a single M2 was not enough for visionOS, which does not bode well.
It is also their first Vision generation, and it is spec:ed more closely to a Mac Pro than anything else really. Which makes me think of this as a devkit to see what devs are going to do with it.
100% agree with you on targeting PCVR Gaming, which is why I am a bit pissed off that they just dragged in wine as an abstraction layer. It means they are not really committing to working with gaming companies, they just want the fruits of their labour and can at any time just yeet that layer out of the OS.
They could have come with Wine at the same time they did Rosetta 2 but they chose not to. Had they done that, then I would have been less suspicious of their motives.
I think more than gaming porn is the current killer use of 360 VR tech. More on that later.
I’ve always believed VRs biggest use case in the end is work, but resolution and integration to the surrounding environment has been lacking. Have a 360 3D environment to work in, assuming resolution is high enough to read text, opens a lot of possibilities up. Ive done a fair amount of POC with various devices over the years and I stand by that. The gesture recognition of the new apple devices leads more in that direction IMO. For instance, it should be able to key (harhar) off a virtual keyboard being typed on. (Haptics will be an issue!)
I’d note also that VR has been successful in high end manufacturing design as well for these reasons.
I think gaming is what proves a tech and motivates people to engage. On the shadier side, porn even more so. But these technologies wend their ways into all aspects of our lives after being proven out in the game / porn use cases.
This is an actually interesting use of the headset. Price tag at this state to high for most users -- but imagine it dropped down to something reasonable. Throw in your favorite game and the immersive experience would be pretty slick.
You are definitely correct -- they are opening the door for gaming on that system though they are doing it quietly not to get competition up in arms.
I will wager the headset will drop slightly in price but new skus will be offered that cover a price range. Apple products have always been too high for most users - yet they seem fairly successful as a company by chasing the top half of the market only. I don’t see them making burner VR headsets ever, I think they’ll stick at the ultra high end with some high to mid market lower ends that eschew things like showing yours eyes etc.
Man if Apple somehow could have their own Windows emulation layer similar to Valve's Steamdeck developments - I could see myself returning to the Mac. It would be so amazing. The Mac would become truly a gaming platform, regardless if it costs twice the price of an equivalent PC - since people who appreciate Apple's hardware and software will see its value.
Having said that there's still the issue of upgrades. But again, I have to replace pretty much my entire PC every 5 years (new CPU needs a new mobo, needs new RAMs etc). So hmm.
edit: as an aside an interesting question.. I wonder if Valve's efforts, having incentivized developers to make their games more Steamdeck compatible - and hence more "predictable" in terms of how they access Windows APIs - would also make it easier for Apple to translate the games - even if the target is different.
I mean, this is a Windows emulation layer. It's just designed for game developers to be able to quickly see what a rough version of their macOS port would look like. Like, does translating your game automatically yield you 40 FPS, or 4 FPS? Valve's emulation layer on the other hand is designed for end users to be able to run games without a native port.
Right but it's open source apparenty, and there's already efforts to create GUI etc to make this easier for end users.
Even if it doesn't run Cyberpunk at full speed, you'll have a huge catalog of indie games on Steam and older games that will run at full framerate without requiring any ports.
True, the main gotcha here I suppose is that Rosetta is also on top - since we're looking at Apple's ARM CPUs. Rosetta can translate and store the code so it doesn't have to do it every run.
Yeah, Apple could build their own nvk-like for Metal driver at this point if they cared about any GPU other than their own. Nvk/mesa itself might enable Linux gaming on Mac pros with 3rd party cards.. one day.
From what I gather, Game Porting Toolkit is two things - a fork of Wine, and their own adaptation/extension of open source projects for DirectX compatibility. Some observations:
Windows compatibility:
* Windows platform compatibility is achieved with a slightly patched version of Codeweavers' Wine fork - virtually all of the hard work of Windows compatibility has been achieved by the Wine developers and Codeweavers and was already available open source before today.
* Interestingly, Apple is distributing this thing as a Homebrew library. Has Apple ever done this before? [1]
DirectX compatibility:
* In addition, outside of the core Wine based stuff, there's a framework called
D3DMetal.framework. This is a DirectX 9-12 compatibility layer akin to DXVK used in Proton as a compatibility layer from DirectX 9-11 to Vulkan. This is what seems to be the game changer here compared to before. Before today, running DirectX on macOS was possible but lost a lot of performance and compatibility needing to go through Apple's old OpenGL support or a third party Vulkan intermediary layer in MoltenVK. This is direct (heh) first party Direct3D to Metal translation.
* Actually, it's more than "akin to DXVK". The D3DMetal.framework contains copyright attribution to DXVK as required under their MIT license. It's quite likely Apple ported a lot of DXVK to Metal. It's worth noting that DXVK itself doesn't support Direct3D 12 though, Proton uses another LGPL2.1 licensed library called VKD3D for that.
* However, D3DMetal.framework is very much not open source itself. Its license is actually very restrictive, seemingly only permitting use for game development/QA use cases. [2]
* The restrictive license seems to make it harder for someone like Valve to use this akin to how they use Proton on Linux in a sanctioned way. Apple seems intent on preventing developers from dumping their games on macOS with just their compatibility layer. It definitely won't stop hobbyists making better tools to continue run Windows games on Macs though.
* The fact that D3DMetal.framework appears to support DirectX 9 and 10 is interesting. No new commercial efforts use those anymore, so that's just there for what? Allowing homebrewers to run their 00s era Windows games?
[2]: It contains a license with the following language - "you are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, personal copyright license to (i) install, internally use, and test the Apple Software for the sole purpose of developing, testing, or evaluating video games for use on Apple-branded products".
It's sad that D3DMetal isn't open source. Worth noting that this stuff is exactly why people should strongly consider using a copyleft license. It's pretty annoying that nobody can build on top of Apple's work here or incorporate any improvements into DXVK, but that's the license the DXVK project chose.
I don't care much for it being open source or not, it's just a shame Apple is making attempts to limit its use cases through licensing [1]. It's on brand for Apple and totally expected, but still sad. It's not going to stop a bunch of homebrew efforts springing up around it, but it will likely be enough to stop third party app stores like Steam from opening up a huge game library on the Mac in a straightforward way like what happened with Proton.
[1] The license is probably actually meaningless in a lot of jurisdictions, but it still has a chilling effect for commercial parties using it. That's probably exactly what Apple intends.
Well, i'm pro copyleft but in this case i have to disagree. This way Apple could develop D3DMetal much faster, and attrbution is given. If DXVK where GPL3 it might have happened years later if ever.
Huh, why are you saying Apple could develop D3DMetal much faster because DXVK was MIT-licensed? Literally nothing would've changed up until now if DXVK had been GPL-licensed, the only difference is that now that they've made it publicly available, they'd have had to license D3DMetal under a GPL-compatible license. Where does the extra delay come in?
There's only so much developer time and management focus. "This will help us cement our monopoly on software distribution without being too obvious to regulators" is a good pitch.
PS. I'm sure the people who pitched it and their managers are all sufficiently skilled at lying and lying to themselves to not put it or even think in those terms.
You can ship macOS native games on Steam as well. People need to stop throwing conspiracy theories. Their main motivation is to make sure games are native to macOS so they can take advantage of system-native features, which Win32-translated games won't. Otherwise games running on Macs will always be kind of janky and run slower than Windows.
So now they are propping up an ecosystem on which open computing will always be a second rank citizen at best. I wonder if they are all happy about it in retrospect, wine got patches, DXVK gets to be a brick in the wall of Apple's garden (if Valve can't distribute it, it's useless to them in the grand scheme of things, normal people want a one click install).
Monetarily good for the devs who ended up on Apple payroll, another nail in the coffin for competition and open computing at the same time.
So... why is this not an end-user product like Proton on SteamOS?
Is this actually going to do anything for Mac gaming considering it's only meant for game developers for... testing? What kind of workflow is Apple envisioning here?
As far as I can tell (as not a game developer) from the introduction videos is that the game porting toolkit / Wine is designed to shorten the time it takes to get a first macOS version of your game running and to evaluate how well does it run. A (near) zero-effort rough draft of your potential macOS port.
They show that previously you'd have to take the Windows version, port the source code, port the HLSL shaders, implement graphics/audio/input/HDR and then you'd be able to get a first running version of your game that you could evaluate. And now with the Wine tool, you'd take the Windows version, run it through the Wine tool and then you'd have the first running version version of the game to evaluate. And you can then evaluate what parts of the games run good and which don't, is it utilising the GPU properly, and so on.
And if you decide that there's potential in the macOS version, you'd then start doing all of the stuff that was previously required to get the first running version.
Apparently it’s a emulator like Proton as used by Steam to run Windows games on Linux. It even uses Rosetta to run x86_64 core on ARM. But it’s not intended for end users. Instead it’s intended for developers to evaluate how their game would run on macOS so they can decide wether or not to port it.
Sure it uses Wine, but the Direct3D API is handled by the proprietary D3DMetal framework, which implements Direct3D on top of Metal. This is different than CodeWeaver's CrossOver approach, which uses Wine's DirectX-on-Vulkan implementation and then MoltenVK to run Vulkan on Metal.
So, it is not just Wine. It is Wine plus a large proprietary Apple Framework that has most of the Direct3D magic sauce.
Thanks for the info! I think a couple of us in this thread may be arguing cross purposes - I want to ensure that codeweavers gets credit for their open source contributions and you want to ensure technical accuracy. These are both good goals and don’t conflict with each other.
When people discuss Apple efforts in gaming, they tend to forget that this company owns second largest in the world, after Android, game platform. And with Vision, they could easily become the largest VR gaming platform in the world, even though this might not be the immediate focus upon release — but iPhone didn't have any games on release either.
Mentioning partnership with Unity in Vision announcement presentation is very significant. It is the most used game engine in the world (especially if you count by game installations) which dominates mobile market, and it has been developing VR/AR capabilities for many years now, even though it arguably doesn't have the same AAA graphics as Unreal.
apple is getting too much credit for this. they are essentially bootstrapping on the long-term efforts made at winehq.
i would like to know what value-add they have done besides making it work better at os level. i would be more impressed if they contributed to improving the translation itself like valve has done with the proton project and by contributing directly to the main project.
That is on an M1 laptop. No dedicated GPU, not even an M1 Max. Just plain M1. Of course, it's not running super fast on Ultra settings, but imagine how slow it would be on a comparable Intel laptop with onboard graphics eating through your battery. Especially considering it only costs $1,299, which is not a lot for this kind of performance. And then it's not even an x86 CPU, for which Cyberpunk was developed. So yes, it's fantastic.
If you want to set the bar that low for fantastic, be my guest. Fps per dollar, any metric I can think of is lousy. You've not convinced me. Was impressed by Rosetta, but not this game porting toolkit, for the record.
This not only does DX12 -> Metal, it also does X86 -> ARM, and still manages to give you decent performance if you lower the graphics settings, you can manage easily 30fps, wich is enough on a laptop, considering it runs with a battery
So for 2020 laptop chip, it's pretty great achievement I'd say!
I don't know of any project that does X86 -> ARM this well
Well if there are no changes made to the game whatsoever, then it has to be using Rosetta. Fantastic would be DXVK approximate levels of performance hit. This is far short of that.
Rosetta is a known quantity of approximately 20% of a drop. DXVK can do about a 20% performance drop in certain situations, and perform better than that in others.
This is at about 50% performance drop translating DX12 to Metal, on top of the drop from Rosetta.
50% drop of what? Where are you getting your baseline from? Because, as far as I know, there is no native macOS port of Cyberpunk 2077.
At 1440p, and if we take this [0] at face value, it would be 50% of the performance of a RX 6700 XT paired with a 5950X, both desktop parts, which I think is pretty good.
The m1 gpu is broadly equivalent to a gtx 1650 in a host of benchmarks. This is getting less than half the fps a gtx 1650 does at these settings, and I am being charitable.
I don't know why you are looking at 1440p (2560 x 1440) as the m1 here is running at 1440x900. While I'm there, that 6700 XT posts 50fps, half of which is 25fps, which would indeed be alright. However this is putting out less than 15fps most of the time.
> I don't know why you are looking at 1440p (2560 x 1440) as the m1 here is running at 1440x900.
Ah, you are right, I messed up with the resolution.
> The m1 gpu is broadly equivalent to a gtx 1650 in a host of benchmarks.
Which ones?
> This is getting less than half the fps a gtx 1650 does at these settings, and I am being charitable.
... without having to emulate both CPU architecture and graphics layer.
I mean, this is not really a debate. DXVK is not comparable, Wine does not do the same either. We are talking about translating both CPU instructions and graphic API calls in real time, good enough that a triple A game runs without any modification on a laptop with 16GB of shared memory.
Am I the only person wondering why they wouldn’t demo medium/high settings on a higher framerate?
Being able to run at ultra at all is quite cool, but wouldn’t it be much more interesting if you were able to run the game with 60fps at all? Is there something I’m missing?
This is my daily driver device and Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best video games I've ever played, so this has me very excited. Would love to take a break from code to play a few minutes of Cyberpunk 2077 on the same device I daily drive...
I truly wonder if Microsoft didn’t help with this port. Looking at the speed and quality of this port. It seems that Apple and Microsoft are working closer than ever. Maybe some execs of Microsoft asked for to be in this demo.
Well, I tried running it on my MBP M1 Max 64gb and whilst it works great (in low res, it does not go max on 4K with acceptable fps), it gets really hot. Just don’t game on a laptop.
I guess the video looks okay but the Twitter embed video quality is dog shit. Maybe post the video somewhere like YouTube instead that supports higher quality.
Because they’re running it at Ultra on the lowest end hardware configuration, with an x86_64 to arm64 translation, and a shader translation and a windows api wrapper.
For comparison, the M1 was routinely benchmarked in NVIDIA 1050 TI to 1070 territory depending on the benchmark. This is only a few fps behind native.
This actually makes me wonder if I should sell my Apple stocks, that they even put out something like this (even if only as an "evaluation tool" and based on CrossOvers GPL code) screams as an validation that there is enough developers ignoring Apple/Metal that they're actually starting to hurt from a lack of titles.
Sure, everyone doing Unity or Unreal will probably have the middleware take care of the biggest differences and Vulkan being too verbose has kept back the field, but given a choice Metal will still be an afterthought for those making custom engines.
One could hope for updated OpenGL/Vulkan support, but nobody is holding their breath anymore.
You're gonna sell your stocks in the most successful tech company of all time because they don't have enough video games? I think Apple has proven they can grow a company's value without games. But what we all want is a larger investment in games so the Mac becomes a competitive platform again.
Not to mention the headset... we'll see, but there is no reason to expect it won't be an insane commercial success by gen 3.
That's why I have stocks now (I bought them just before the first post-M1 xmas report because all I could hear about was them hitting out of the ballpark but the stock had hardly moved so I knew it to be undervalued), but past performance never guarantees future performance.
Games are a canary, Apple likes to lock in developers with their own API's and that works as long as you are the clear leader but once you're not it'll bite you. Apple mobile leadership since early iPhones attracted developers, but once the mobile market stagnated developers has looked elsewhere.
And the headset, I have a hard time seeing that people who buy Apple laptops,etc for their atheistic will put on these ski-goggles on a daily basis? And that's not even mentioning the pricepoint.
Apple had a runway after Jobs left the first time before things got bad, sure they know their history now and will do their darnedest not to repeat history but whilst Ive wasn't the right person to build professional machines, I can't wonder if he was still the type of person Apple needed for "personal devices" like the headset.
> But what we all want is a larger investment in games so the Mac becomes a competitive platform again.
As a Mac-only user, I really don’t care about games. I guess it’s cool if they work on it, but I wouldn’t want Apple diverting resources away from other areas to try and make it a gaming device.
Apple has video games, there are probably more people playing games on iPhone than ps5/Xbox combined. Many very popular Moba/eSports titles also work on Mac (LoL, all things blizzard, cs:go). The fact that there aren't many AAA games (that you can play on consoles anyway, not your laptop) is not a problem for Apple.
Its surprising how on one hand a huge effort is put into World of Warcraft running smoothly on macOS (they always implement all the new Metal features with every expansion and it was the first native Apple Silicon game) but completely abandoned macOS for new titles.
Of course they won’t drop a good chunk of their existing subscribers overnight; once the initial work is done, maintenance shouldn’t take a ton of resources, especially considering it’s still a cash cow. Likewise, they are sort of maintaining SC2 with these tiny balance patches, and it’s still working on macOS, but it’s clearly the last echo of the old company.
Right, the point is that it isn't the same kind of games that you play on mobile that interests people on a "computer".
Continuing from that the mere _existence_ of this _porting toolkit_ is an indication that they do feel the lack of AAA as problem at Apple right now, otherwise they would've continued their "Metal is the future and all other API's are deprecated".
They want to tell the world that the M1/M2/etc family is the best chipset in the world (or at least in contention), showing games like Cyberpunk running well enough on a basically cold laptop would've been a coup, but games didn't support it because even larger developers didn't feel like putting in the effort.
I think this response lacks the context of the current state of the video game industry. In my mind this is no different than nVidia providing white glove engineering support and optimizations for titles to run on their GPUS.
There is a reason nVidia has generally won the consumer GPU arms race over the years over AMD. They go out of their way to support studios and titles, compared to what AMD does imho.
It shows that Apple recognizes it needs to lower the barrier of entry for studios to considering targeting Macs. Because compared to the larger gaming market most studios have very little incentive to build and maintain this because Mac’s could account for 1-3% of your player base. Is that worth 1-5 ICs worth of time if you are a small studio. Probably not.
They also need to focus more on backwards compatibility. If Apple continually makes most of my library unplayable as they have done repeatedly (Classic, Rosetta 1, 32bit) then I wouldn't trust them with gaming. It seems moving forward PlayStation and Xbox are making it a priority, it already was on PC and I don't think Apple will ever have anything with the draw of Nintendo that could surmount that.
This is a huge draw in PC gaming. People love going back to old games and modding them or updating them to run better. Heck, didn't Portal (a 2007 game) just get an RTX update?
As for AMD v Nvidia, imho it's more often a matter of AMD drivers being buggy even if their hardware seems to be almost on par in terms of performance, also right now NVidia has ridden high on both blockchain and now AI trends thanks to CUDA being propietary.
And the third paragraph is my point, porting would've been trivial instead of requiring another engineer if they had supported more standard API's, but they refused and now they're hedging their bets on another manufacturers API. It's just such a roundabout way of saying that they feel the pain without going back and fixing the basics.
As John Siracusa discussed on this week's ATP[0], it's incredible how much effort Apple puts into this considering the result. Apple built it's own little parallel gaming stack world that works really well on their hardware and the hardware is also amazing for the power envelopes it is wrapped in.
But then Apple doesn't ship devices with actually powerful GPUs, so it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise. And Apple also doesn't know how to keep relationships with the AAA developers, unlike Microsoft and other platform owners.
Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?
I think the on stage demo of the 4 year old Death Stranding running poorly on the newest Macs says it all.
[0] https://atp.fm/538 @1:42:20
> it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise
I don't think Apple is chasing the "dedicated gaming machine" crowd here. They want casual gamers to be able to load up a couple of games on the machine they're buying for non-gaming reasons. I'm exactly one of those people: I rarely play video games these days but when the pandemic hit I ended up installing Boot Camp to play COD:Warzone with friends. It was great (it performed... okay). I've since upgraded to a Silicon-based Mac so the door has closed on that. This toolkit is the means to reopen it. I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase.
> And Apple also doesn't know how to keep relationships with the AAA developers
The App Store would beg to differ. I agree that historically they haven't been great at relationships with game developers but they're clearly able to maintain relationships with third party developers when they have the incentive.
Mobile gaming and PC gaming are somewhat different markets. In particular, mobile game development companies don't have any choice but to work with Apple and Google, whereas AAA PC gaming companies have another outlet already.
I like Apple and I like their products but I think if you talk to any sizable mobile developer they'd be able to tell you stories about the difficulties of working with Apple.
Most of the "sizable" mobile developers are entangled in the PC/Console game developers if in no other place than on the broad sheet with one generating revenue to pay for the increasingly expensive other. King is a part of Activision Blizzard (and a part of the pending sale to Microsoft). Zynga is a part of Take-Two (Rockstar/2K). Riot is obviously Riot. A half-dozen others are arms of Tencent in one way or another, who in turn is heavily invested in Funcom and Epic and Riot and From Software and less invested but still invested in plenty more like Ubisoft. NetEase is a mobile developer and publisher that also develops (but so far generally doesn't publish) PC and console games and has been buying studios looking to deepen that.
The list goes on; everything videogames is deeply entangled financially. Therefore, the markets must be deeply entangled, too.
Sure. But it’s about the distribution platform, not the game company financials. Selling games that must be distributed on specific app stores is very different than selling games which are distributed through multiple channels; in the former case, your distributor has a much stronger effect on your ability to make money.
I have to wonder if that’s because a lot of the hot mobile gaming companies flew too close to the sun, could not maintain their explosive growth even as they pursued F2P microtransactions hell policies, and ended up getting bought by said PC/console game developers.
My theory reverses your theory's cause and effect: King was a reverse merger that was very nearly a takeover of Activision Blizzard at the time. Zynga was thought to be the same for Take-Two (which at the time was particularly bloodied by bankruptcy-related issues and in a position to be eaten). The EA and Popcap merger is another one that was questionably a reverse merger/near takeover, especially in the way it shook up the executive board at the time. (I forgot about Popcap in the above summary because as a brand to themselves they've quietly sort of disappeared from modern mobile trends, but their logo still often shows up in EA presentations.)
In general, "lowly" mobile gaming still has more active players spending more real-world money at any given time. It's very hard not looking at the bottom lines of some of these companies, especially today's weird Activision Blizzard and not see "the tail wagging the dog" and mobile games effectively sponsoring and/or subsidizing development costs on every other form factor of videogame. The biggest exceptions seem to be Sony and Microsoft themselves, and Microsoft dabbled in mobile gaming over the years, has a big mobile gaming contractor in Arkadium (using the Microsoft brand for Solitaire and Minesweeper, among others, and generating some revenue), and does own one of the largest mobile games of all time (Minecraft) though people often don't think of it as such.
I think it also shows up in executive leadership and how F2P microtransactions hell has been infesting "AAA" and "AA" PC/console development for years now.
From my outside perspective of the industry: "Mobile games" won. PC/console games are the weird, "too expensive" afterthought for most of the videogame industry, subsidized by and beholden to the mobile games. The "gamer culture" that doesn't see most of the mobile games space as interesting or important and doesn't see mobile game players as "gamers" (or worse sees them only as "filthy casuals") is the minority out of touch with market realities.
Admittedly, that's a somewhat extreme perspective and there are plenty of exceptions and gray area and further complications. But whether or not you agree with that perspective, my earlier point remains that overall mobile games and PC/console games are inextricably linked by market forces and treating them as separate markets, and especially treating the mobile games market as somehow inferior, misses a lot of the forest.
(That [currently] Cold War between Apple and Epic has very real stakes, including for PC/consoles, and isn't just a silly "mobile gaming" problem.)
> if you talk to any sizable mobile developer they'd be able to tell you stories about the difficulties of working with Apple
If you're a sizable game developer used to working with Sony or Nintendo, how much harder is it to work with Apple?
For pure mobile devs, how much harder is it to work with Apple vs. Google, and why? If it isn't worth it, why bother? Android seems to have larger market share. How much higher are Apple's platform fees vs. Google's?
My experience is somewhat dated so I can’t say if this is still the truth, but Apple used to refuse to tell the very large company I worked at whether or not their new game would be featured before the featuring page was updated. Getting onto the featured page was critical for initial success. And you just didn’t know what to plan for.
I don't think fees are a viable argument anymore. At least not at face value. Last I looked, Google, Apple and Valve all take 30% cuts. I believe Nintendo does too. Unless there are some backroom sweet heart deals at least with the major studios.
Don't PC gaming companies have only one real outlet (Microsoft) to work with? Not to be confused with distribution channels such as Steam.
Are there still games that only come out on PC? I thought most big titles are released on Xbox and Playstation as well?
Not many. For example, Jagged Alliance 3 and the Total War series.
I'm a big fan of Zachtronics games (TIS-100, Shenzen I/O, etc) and they are also PC-only.
Positech Games (Democracy Series) are PC only.
Well I’m not sure I’d draw a meaningful difference between Xbox and PC in this context, but at best you’d then just have two channels: Sony and Microsoft (Xbox/PC) so it’s no different than Apple and Google.
But specifically for computer channels there’s effectively just one: Windows PC.
I think you nailed it.
>This toolkit is the means to reopen it. I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase.
I think there's a segment of Mac users who own Windows machines exclusively for gaming. I think the value in these capabilities isn't that people will buy Apple Silicon machine primarily as gaming machines, I think the value is in enabling someone in the Apple ecosystem who plays games occasionally to opt-out of owning a Windows machine.
Yeah, I would be thrilled if this eventually enabled even 50% of my existing Steam library to work on my M1 Mac. If we get a few new releases to be Mac native, that’s just icing on the cake.
The post quoted did indeed nail it IMO.
But I don't think those who pulled the trigger on buying a whole PC in addition to Mac just to game are the audience here: those people clearly value PC gaming a lot, spending that kind of money and going through that much trouble having the necessary setup at home, taking space and time to build and maintain. Those who care that much won't be satisfied with the state of Mac gaming and continue owning those PCs.
It's for those who would like to play on Mac but currently don't play at all on anything because games they'd like to play don't work on the only performance computing device they have - that Mac.
The second category of people I'd like to add are those who were really on a fence between getting a Mac and a PC (probably laptop at this point, as laptops are sufficiently similar for such a fence to be realistic, desktop PC and desktop Mac are very different machines in comparison), could have gone either way, but would prefer a Mac slightly, but also wanted to play games - not enough to own 2 computers, but enough to begrudgingly choose a PC over a Mac just for that reason.
Those folks are likely to buy a Mac instead next time they buy a new computer, which is probably going to be years from now, for some - years from the point in time when gaming on Mac because actually accessible and good, not immediately on spot.
Hi, actual mac gamer here, I use Geforce Now to play games. Got myself a founders edition account and while I would have liked to have access to all my weird little indie games, the major games I play is on it OldWorld, Generation Zero, Stellaris, Timberborn, Elite Dangerous, etc..
Apple is never going to be taken seriously by the PC gaming industry, there is to much old wounds from being burned by Apple. So the next best thing as a MAc Gamer is to go with a streaming game service and run parallells for weird little indie games.
the only reason they are opening up for gaming on the Mac platform now is the Apple Vision system.
There is no VR games for mac, VR Chat is not for mac. To get Vision any traction they need to have Entertainment on it. Or Porn. But Apple is staunchly anti-Porn.
But we all know that their new VR movie recording system is going to be used for porn more so than birthday parties.
"I think there's a segment of Mac users who own Windows machines exclusively for gaming. I think the value in these capabilities isn't that people will buy Apple Silicon machine primarily as gaming machines, I think the value is in enabling someone in the Apple ecosystem who plays games occasionally to opt-out of owning a Windows machine."
: raises hand :
Although, as a casual gamer, I'd like to be able to run the games that I bought in the Apple App Store on my Mac. (e.g. "DeathSpank", a fun spoof of action RPGs, is 32-bit, so it's now unplayable.)
I've used crossover to play Skyrim on my M1 mac (and they just sent me an email saying Apple leveraged crossover code for their porting toolkit), so there might have been an option prior to this - if the performance is good enough for your game.
If you do want crossover, get a free trial, but wait for a discount. I think they discount around 30-40% near the end of the trial and during special sales.
> I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase.
Coincidentally you are in the market every couple of years for new Apple hardware because of planned obsolescence. Why? Because Apple designs proprietary metal that they are unwilling / unable to support every few years because they instead develop new hardware that completely breaks backwards compatibility. Then release updates to sandbag your older hardware when you still refuse to upgrade.
I just think it's funny that you'll buy three highly proprietary Mac computers every three years but you won't buy one industry standardized PC that does it all and can be upgraded. And Apple banks on you doing that and takes you to the cleaners every chance they can. And you still bag on PC's citing the economical sensibility of Apple.
Every couple of years? My MacBooks typically last a lot longer than that. I know some people do chase the latest releases but in my experience MacBooks remain plenty usable for years after purchase.
I won’t buy an industry standardized PC that can be upgraded because I need a laptop. PC laptops aren’t a whole lot more upgradable than Apple ones, it just comes with the territory.
> And you still bag on PCs
The defensiveness here is unwarranted. At no point did I “bag on” PCs. I simply stated that I am not in the market to buy a standalone PC just for playing games.
I really can’t understand this argument. Apple has the least planned obsolescence of any major manufacturer available.
The only upgradeable laptop you can buy is the Framework, which is more expensive than a baseline MBP. It also didn’t exist until a few years ago, so we don’t know if it has 10 years of longevity. What I do know is that my 2015 MBP still has hours of battery life even after being used daily for many years.
As far as software, 2017 MBPs can download Ventura, which will be supported until 2025, which seems like a long time to me.
The vast majority of PC laptops let you upgrade at least the SSD. Usually the WiFi card is socketed too and can be swapped out. And it's really not THAT hard to find laptops that still have socketed RAM if you care to.
Had you bought a ThinkPad T450 instead of your 2015 MBP, you could have upgraded the RAM, upgraded the SSD with a standard M.2 NVMe drive instead of having to hunt for a compatible one with an adapter (don't worry Apple closed that loophole in 2016, no more upgrades at all), easily replaced the battery if need be and still be running Windows 10 which is supported to at least 2025.
Apple's support is better on iOS devices than the incredibly low bar set by Android, but in the computer space they are incredibly unpredictable (will this model be supported 5 or 10 years? Who knows!) and not particularly good.
I suspect we might have to agree to disagree here, but the T450 and 2015 MBP make very different tradeoffs. I might be looking at the wrong model, but I see a 1600x900 screen (while my MBP had a 2560x1600 screen), and (admittedly high quality) plastic case vs aluminum. Immediately before the MBP I owned a Dell XPS laptop that stopped charging ~2 years into ownership.
Aren't the processors not upgradeable in either case? I really doubt you could happily use a Haswell i5 processor in 2023 without feeling limited.. even if just because software (the OS, websites, etc.) assume a higher performance floor.
Obviously there's tradeoffs. Your previous post mentioned that a 2017 MBP is still usable on Ventura and supported until 2025, is a 2017 14nm dual core i5 really a huge leap over a 2015 14nm dual core i5? Which would be more usable the one stuck at 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD and a bit faster CPU or the one upgraded with 16GB RAM (~$40), a $70 1TB SSD and a slower CPU?
> Apple built it's own little parallel gaming stack world that works really well on their hardware
I think saying "its own parallel gaming stack" probably gives them too much credit [1]. Yes - they put in significant effort, but their gaming stack is neither "parallel" to the rest of the world, nor "their own" in any real sense. They seem to have adapted the open source efforts of Codeweavers, Valve, Wine and the broader Linux community put in Proton and achieving Windows games compatibility on Linux with Vulkan. Adapting that for Metal is no small feat [2] but an investment a giant like Apple can easily make without much risks. Don't forget that Wine has always been developed for Linux and macOS (and the BSDs) in parallel too - it was right there for the taking.
[1]: I'm assuming this is a quote sourced from someone who just isn't aware of all the effort being made at the Linux side of thing in the last five years.
[2]: At a technical level Metal and Vulkan are actually similar enough, but there's just a lot of surface to cover and edge cases to get right.
Metal itself is the parallel stack, no?
Granted, Metal is to a degree useful for the casual iOS games where alone Apple probably makes more money than anyone else in the gaming industry.
>I'm assuming this is a quote sourced from someone who just isn't aware of all the effort being made at the Linux side of thing
The podcaster does acknowledge that as well, I just didn't quote that part. The whole "rant" has about 4 minutes. But thanks for providing context, it is important.
> Metal itself is the parallel stack, no?
Ah perhaps I interpreted the quote in the wrong way then. At first it read to me as if Apple did their own bespoke compatibility work, but it's a comment about the mostly artificial Apple Silicon GPU / Metal stack that is only available on Apple devices.
Worth noting that Apple poured a lot of resources into making WebGPU happen. WebGPU is, in a great many ways, Metal but cross-platform. The way this pays off is if game developers start targeting WebGPU instead of Vulkan or DX12. That could happen since WebGPU is a meant to be a lot easier to code against than Vulkan. This effort to port DX12 can probably be seen as more of a hedge than anything else. They know that some publishers will stick to what they know for some time, but they wish for it to be easier to see the upside of a cross platform investment by publishers by delivering an easier win. If it doesn’t work perfectly but gets close, that still helps them a lot. Because Metal is no longer some parallel stack they’re promoting and wanting people to build Apple-exclusive games for, it’s a means to an end, and the end is WebGPU and cross-platform.
Game developers are not going to start mass adopting a JavaScript API.
WebGPU is not JavaScript only: https://eliemichel.github.io/LearnWebGPU/
Does it really work well for other use cases? Obviously you can call it, but typically a web API has many more security issues to handle than a native API, so I'd expect there to be a lot of compromises a game developer wouldn't want to deal with.
Yes. The non-JS interfaces are Dawn (C++) and wgpu (Rust). The Bevy game engine uses wgpu and I think many others will do the same. You can't really generalise from "typical web APIs" in the way that you have.
Wine/Proton is great. I still hit the "oh I need to set this env var" from time to time (mostly due to my Nvidia card). But, it's fantastic.
When you use Bottles to wrap it for ease of use/setup, you catch a glimpse of a future where no program is tied to Windows anymore.
Hope the same can happen with MacOS! And vice-versa.
Personally, I appreciate this effort, not for AAA games, because I never bought a MacBook expecting it to be able to...but for much more casual or lower poly games that are available on Steam for Windows users only, because it's too hard to port. There's tons of sub-AAA games that could easily be ported and enjoyed on a modern M1/M2 Mac.
Speaking only for myself, I use Macs to get work done. The lack of games is actually a plus, as I can get compulsive with games.
It's funny, when people denigrate the worst gaming platform in the world as a "toy computer."
People get Macs, that want to get work done. As noted previously, there's really nothing that can beat a well-built PC gaming rig.
I don't really think Apple has ever cared about the Mac as a gaming platform, and the low-key hype around these technologies shows that. These almost seem like "developer 20% projects," compared to the big stuff, like visionOS.
That said, I think that Apple wants iOS/iPadOS/visionOS to be gaming platforms, so they do dedicate a lot of resources to that.
> It's funny, when people denigrate the worst gaming platform in the world as a "toy computer."
When did toys become a bad thing?
"Worst gaming platform in the world" may be something of an exaggeration - Apple Arcade isn't bad, and Macs can also run many iPad games.
Good point, but many Mac users are not aware of just How. Damn. Good. games play on gaming rigs. It's like being in a movie.
Many console gamers aren't aware of how [well] games play on PC gaming rigs, or they don't care, and are happy to play games on Switch/PS4/PS5/Xbox.
Apple may very well be targeting mobile and console gamers rather than PC gamers with gaming rigs.
Personally I would definitely enjoy playing on a high-end gaming PC (especially as GPUs become easier to find at MSRP), but I already have a Mac and a PS5.
I wouldn't mind more of my Steam library working on macOS though.
I don’t know, you say that but there are plenty of triple A games in the App Store and Apple did put in the effort into getting their game subscription to work on their desktops.
Let’s be real, we might all be getting more work done as a result but that’s because Apple dropped the ball, hard. They came out with the metal api but refused to support any others, even letting open GL fester. The fact that they couldn’t keep Blizzard of all companies developing games for the mac is all you need to know.
I'm curious if Apple dropped the ball or if there is still something of an anti-gaming culture inside Apple since I know that the company was de facto anti-gaming in the late 90s going forward. In that era they actively killed off relationships with gaming companies, e.g. the game that eventually became Halo was originally a Macintosh exclusive. More recent things like the legal theatrics with Epic Games gives one a picture of a company that is still not necessarily super keen on fully embracing the gaming scene.
>eventually became Halo
Halo was introduced by Steve Jobs at MacWorld as an upcoming Mac game. It was always called Halo.
“This is not QuickTime. Everything you’re about to see is being rendered in real time on a Macintosh using OpenGL.” [1]
Then Microsoft bought Bungie and made Halo an Xbox-exclusive launch title. [2]
> de facto anti-gaming in the late 90s going forward
In 1997, the Power Mac 6500 shipped with MechWarrior 2 and Descent 2.
Between 1999 and 2005, Bugdom, Nanosaur, Cro-Mag Rally and Otto Matic by Pangea as well as Deimos Rising shipped as built-in platform games on various iMacs and iBooks, the G4 Cube, and the eMac. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 came with one model of eMac. Nanosaur 2 and Marble Blast were bundled with later iMacs, iBooks, eMacs and the Mac mini. [3]
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxdgo1rFcxU
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie#:~:text=Microsoft%20a....
[3] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/405405/what-third-...
> It was always called Halo.
Oh, I'm so very sorry! I think there was a misunderstanding. I was actually talking about the development of the game and not its public announcement!
Here is the relevant part of the Wikipedia article:
"Days before the Macworld announcement, Blam! still had no permanent title; possible names included The Santa Machine, Solipsis, The Crystal Palace, Hard Vacuum, Star Maker, and Star Shield.[38] Bungie hired a branding firm that came up with the name Covenant, but Bungie artist Paul Russell suggested alternatives, including Halo. Though some did not like the name—likening it to something religious, or a women's shampoo—designer Marcus Lehto said, "it described enough about what our intent was for this universe in a way that created this sense of mystery."[28] On July 21, 1999, during the Macworld Conference & Expo, Jobs announced that Halo would be released for MacOS and Windows simultaneously.[36]"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo:_Combat_Evolved
> In that era they actively killed off relationships with gaming companies, e.g. the game that eventually became Halo was originally a Macintosh exclusive.
That was Microsoft's doing, not Apple's. Microsoft scooped up Bungie to make Halo an Xbox exclusive (at least initially). This purportedly angered Steve Jobs, who probably wasn't too into gaming himself but understood the appeal it might have to consumers.
That isn't the version of history I remember reading about Bungie, but I suppose there are probably differing viewpoints about it. In any case, I do know that John Carmack has said that Steve Jobs told him back then that he should stop working on games and work on operating systems instead, and that he generally did not like them.
> there are plenty of triple A games in the App Store
Mobile AAA games in the iOS App Store, or desktop AAA games in the Mac App Store? There are some AAAs that work on a desktop Mac (e.g. Resident Evil Village), but it's not the norm at all. As for mobile ... modern mobile games can die in a fire for all I care (as they're 95% gacha nonsense).
I misspoke. A handful of triple A games. Most of which don't perform so well even on high end intel machines due to thermal throttling.
> I use Macs to get work done
Ok, uninstall Steam then, I guess? Games do currently exist on Mac, both in the App store and on Steam. It's just that there's a big swath of games that haven't been ported to Apple Silicon in particular, due to difficulty. I grew up playing games on the Mac, so I'm not sure what your point is.
So why the challenging and abrasive approach? Did what I write offend you? I certainly didn’t mean to, and apologize for my tone.
I have no interest in picking fights online, especially in a professional venue, where folks that could have a significant impact on my career are watching how I interact with others.
Well HN has the ability to create arbitrary screen names to create pseudo anonymity. So there's that.
I guess what appears to be abrasive is just lacking tone. It's just me being mildly exasperated for effect. My point is to stress that the Mac has always been a general purpose computing device. Jobs may have chosen to optimize the Mac for productivity in the 90s, and that probably stemmed from the niches that were available to Apple in the Windows-dominated 90s and 00s (that he learned from running NeXT).
The lack of upgradeable components also held the Mac back in graphics technology which precluded it from premium games market. But the M1/M2 chips are game changers. But since they're newish and the Windows market is so established and ARM chips are different from traditional x86 based chips, it's tough to get devs to port for Mac. If they can provide tooling that automates it, it's a great win for Apple.
> pseudo anonymity
Unfortunately, that "pseudo" is rapidly dwindling. I know that there are already AI "decloakers," that look at writing style, and do a damn good job of finding folks, based on that.
I was a UseNet troll, back in my day. It was not my proudest moment.
One of the reasons that I deliberately make myself known, is that it forces me to watch my words, just like IRL.
My career is done. I am retired (not by choice), and continue to work, but at what I want, and the way that I want to do it. Basically, a dream come true. I am not particularly worried about upsetting folks for my career, but I also feel I have a great deal of atonement due, because of my past behavior.
I like the Apple ecosystem. I've been using it to be highly productive since 1986, and have been playing games on it forever. I remember Pathways Into Darkness[0], thirty years ago, which I thought was awesome.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathways_into_Darkness
For a large number of customers, Macs play games just fine (you can get SimCity 4 for Silicon, heh).
It's not the top of the line, but it covers a decent swath, even without doing emulation or translation.
SimCity 4 was released in 2003.
Yep. The surprising thing is that Asypr bothered updating a 20 year old game for Apple Silicon. https://support.aspyr.com/hc/en-us/articles/12168615035405-H...
That is interesting - I bought KOTOR 2 a couple years ago for my kid and ended up having to get a refund it because it didn't run at all (on intel). It just wedged when I clicked play. No response from Aspyr, so I'd assumed they abandoned their older games.
I think they did it because they still sell SC4 via the App Store, but I'm not sure. Maybe someone there is just a huge SC4 fan.
> It's funny, when people denigrate the worst gaming platform in the world as a "toy computer."
Unless you're developing iOS apps or MacOS apps, it's pretty terrible as a work platform too. I guess iWork is OK, but no one uses it, so it's not helpful for collaboration. Maybe people use it for media production? Doesn't the big rendering still happen on Linux though, and hasn't windows caught up?
Having said that, Mac laptops made passable web browser + video phone + dumb terminal in the intel days, and now they're excellent at those things and added "virtualization host" to that list.
I guess I've always thought of them more like glorified vt100s than like computers. They're certainly market leaders for that use case, though WSL is helping windows catch up.
I mean, you're kind of dead wrong? I've been using Macs for almost two decades at this point as a developer, and it's never kept me from getting work done. These days it's great having a powerful Mac, with the ability to use local machine learning models with relatively large amounts of VRAM (more than any consumer GPU, though inference won't be as fast as recent Nvidia cards). It's great at video editing, too.
Well, I write MacOS/iOS/WatchOS/iPadOS/visionOS stuff, so I'm dependent on it.
Like most tools, we get used to our main one, and can sometimes get a bit "sneery" about alternate ones.
The Mac is a particularly rich target, because the "snootiness" is actually a deliberate brand ploy by Apple, and pretty much "leads with the chin," so we have that.
I've never been "snooty" about Apple, but it's been my platform for over 30 years, so I'm used to it, and I get a lot done with my Mac.
Don't tell IBM they are doing it wrong: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/301863-ibm-our-mac-usi...
> guess iWork is OK, but no one uses it, so it's not helpful for collaboration
You realize Microsoft Office has been on the Mac since the mid 80s right?
> Maybe people use it for media production?
Uhh yes?
Microsoft Office has always been sub-par on Mac, and I haven't worked at a company that uses it for collaboration for over a decade. (Sure, there's the occasional person that actually needs VB macros under Excel, or prefers powerpoint, but there's no reason for me to run it.)
I know you can use them for media production. Looking around, it sounds like they still own the low-end with iMovie, but it gets questionable as hardware requirements increase. I guess it's a viable platform for that.
I know a lot of CAD software is missing MacOS ports, so they seem to have lost that market.
Anyway, I'll continue to think of my laptop as a dumb terminal with a good hypervisor bolted on the side.
I know of quite a large company - the second largest employer in the US that have thousands of Macs and come with Office. Do you really think that no one has been using Office for Mac and Microsoft has been selling it for 35 years?
It is hard to switch away from mainframes too, but I haven’t heard of a company that was founded in the last ten years that is a Microsoft Office shop.
Well, maybe your anecdata may be in conflict with reported revenue numbers? Google Office is not taking the world by storm.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...
No it’s also not the year of the Linux desktop either
Most places I have worked don’t use office suites. Instead of formatting stuff for 8.5x11” PDFs or printouts, things go into wikis/gdocs/etc, markdown files in git, python or splunk dashboards or whatever instead of excel; stuff is shared on slack, not office/google drive, etc, etc.
Sure, you can get access to an office suite at these companies, but people certainly raise an eyebrow when emailed a docx or told to click this office online link to run word in their browser.
In the link you pasted, the studies are limiting the market in strange ways. Like what is a “workstream collaboration tool” (teams, and whatever google workspaces is. I’ve never used either, despite using google docs periodically).
So, if the question is “which wordperfect clone is winning”, then word is a plausible answer. If the question is “what percentage of all documents are created in each tool”, there’s no way office (excluding outlook) + gdocs + iwork sum up to a majority at most companies.
> Most places I have worked don’t use office suites. Instead of formatting stuff for 8.5x11” PDFs or printouts, things go into wikis/gdocs/etc, markdown files in git, python or splunk dashboards or whatever instead of excel; stuff is shared on slack, not office/google drive, etc, etc.
Yes because most of corporate America is doing work in Markdown.
Have you ever thought that your workplace may not be representative of the wider world?
> the question is “what percentage of all documents are created in each tool”, there’s no way office (excluding outlook) + gdocs + iwork sum up to a majority at most companies.
I’m sure you have a citation to back that up?
How do you explain the adoption of macs among programmers in general? Especially in universities, macs is all I can see.
In my university, only non computer science students used macs. At my work, I wasn't given a choice and was given a macbook because "we all use macbooks" which really just meant "we all work on the terminal", which mac is not good at, not anymore when we have WSL to compare it against.
[dead]
Everyone I know that uses one (myself included) uses it as a toy (== not production server grade) Unix machine and/or dumb terminal.
Wow, I thought this type of comment died on Slashdot 20 years ago.
These GPUs aren’t too bad. Theoretically, M2 Max peaks at 14.4 teraflops, and 400 GB/s memory bandwidth. M2 Ultra is too new, but Apple says it’s GPU is 30% faster (probably 18.7 teraflops then?), and that it has 800 GB/s memory bandwidth.
The numbers for M2 Ultra are comparable to some powerful GPUs. The theoretical TFlops number is close to Radeon 6900 XT and GeForce 3070, theoretical memory bandwidth is close to Radeon 7900 XT and GeForce 4080.
However, good point on the pricing. Apparently, Mac Pro starts at $7k, which is way too expensive for most gamers.
Apple's best GPU is close to a mid-range previous gen nvidia GPU?
I'm sure it'll run a 4 year old game on medium settings great! But that's kind of the point, that it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry.
Who's supposed to be impressed by getting middling performance on Death Stranding 4 years after it came out? Literal definition of "also ran".
> Who's supposed to be impressed by getting middling performance on Death Stranding 4 years after it came out? Literal definition of "also ran".
Plenty of people are impressed at 3060/3070 performance in a 25W system-power envelope.
You literally can't even run the memory chips for a 3070 in that power budget let alone the whole APU.
Like I'd love to see the AMD equivalent APU to that "also-ran 3070 performance" macbook, please link a laptop with what you think would be comparable.
That's neat and impressive, but that's all they have. They don't have a high end. For $3000 you can get a top end gaming PC. There's no amount of money you can spend on a Mac to equal that.
I think you're missing the point that parent (and Siracusa) made - Apple invests a signficant into the software and graphics stack, only to fumble it at the last minute by not having high-end graphics hardware, and caring enough to court "triple A" game developers to their platforms, despite them creating and maintaining Metal and this 20k-line WINE patch.
There's this weird mismatch of Apple dedicating a non-trival amount of time in their keynote to "Mac Gaming" as if it's supposed to be impressive to finally play a 4 year old game on a Mac because they don't ship high-end graphics devices.
Apple silicon wins on performance per watt but not in performance outright and suddenly everyone cares about power consumption. Whichever spec everyone's favorite fruit company excels at gets put on a pedestal.
The PC industry is no longer driven by desktops; laptops have taken over long ago. There is a gaming PC crowd, but that is a small captured audience who wants performance, wattage be damned.
Apple is selling around 80% laptops versus desktops, and the rest of the industry is something like 77%. The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race doesn't mean it should automatically be entered into the desktop GPU race, where it is not winning.
> The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race
Fact? Which Apple chips are outperforming the laptop 3070, much less the current-gen mobile 4090?
I would take a guess that Apple is shipping (far) more TFlops of GPU power than Nvidia or anyone else in the mobile GPU market. Few people are buying laptops with 80-150w TDP GPUs, as those start to stretch the definition of both 'laptop' and 'battery powered'. Big gaming laptops with an hour of battery life are more akin to the luggables of yore.
That's fair. Nvidia has issues scaling their full systems down to laptop spec, and Apple almost has the opposite problem. They're both impressive in their own right, but right now Nvidia has both the performance and performance-per-watt crown in this space. The disparity in 3D applications (like gaming and Blender[0]) so ugly it's not even close.
And in all fairness - Apple's products might not need more GPU power. Cyberpunk and Elden Ring appear to be CPU-bottlenecked, if people are comfortable upscaling they could get a pretty comfortable Retina experience. The 2D optimization and media accelerators are a good focus for mobile hardware. For more demanding applications though, it looks like Apple's current approach is not scaling well.
[0] https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query
Yeah I'm really curious what Apple's next-gen GPU (with raytracing and a bunch of other stuff) brings to fix some of these shortcomings. It was supposed to show up on last year's iPhone 14 followed presumably by inclusion in the M-series, and the 3nm process was supposed to be shipping this year, but everything got set back a year. In Mac-land the M2 wound up just being an overclocked M1, so we're left waiting for M3 to bring us a more competitive GPU.
The other half of the story is a lot of software (inc Blender, looking at these crazy results) just isn't well optimized and Apple is still struggling to win over developers in certain sectors of the market. Nvidia's decade+ investment in the software side has paid off so incredibly well for them, it's basically made the company.
shockingly, I think there might be more than one person on the internet and these people might have varying opinions
but yea you can say the same thing about tons of brands. Last summer all the AMD fans were talking about 1€/kWh electricity and saying they were going to buy whatever dGPU was most efficient... when that turned out to be Ada by a country mile, everybody pivoted to whining about price and bought RDNA2 GPUs with half of the perf/w.
During RDNA2 everyone insisted that a 10% perf/w advantage for AMD was a buying point, back during the Vega years they insisted that a 2x perf/w disadvantage didn't matter. Rinse and repeat.
I generally think power matters when it rises to the level of a tangible difference... 200W difference between 4070 and 6950XT means the latter is really a non-starter even if it's 10% faster (at a 5% higher price), especially considering the big-picture featureset (DLSS improves both perf and perf/w). And really it matters more in laptops. You're right that Mac Studio/Mac Pro are not really a place where it hugely matters, but, in a laptop, the next-best thing would be a Ryzen 6800U which is about GTX 1630 performance, so 3060 performance in the same envelope is a big step upwards!
And really this "big differences matter, small ones don't" applies to most stuff in general. 5% this way or the other, who cares. That kind of thing is often less important than general UX/quality/features, I'll take a laptop that's 5% slower but way longer battery life or better screen/trackpad/whatever. When things start rising to the level of 25% or 30% difference in some spec, or in price... yeah that's immediately noticeable.
But yea I generally agree that desktops like Studio or outright workstations like Mac Pro are dGPU territory and people are generally not looking for a super efficient iGPU with 3060 performance. On the other hand, being able to talk to 192GB of VRAM is definitely novel, especially with large AI models being the talk of the town this year (and accessible to even the most casual of artists/developers), and the unified APU approach with uniform memory/zero-paging has other advantages for development too. AMD had a lot of this stuff hammered out 10 years ago, supposedly, and then... just never did anything with it, other than sell it to consoles. It's great for PS5 and Xbox, why can't I buy a PC laptop with 96GB of unified/uniform memory with 3060-level performance in a 25W envelope?
Really I think a lot of the people who have bought Macbooks recently are not "traditional" apple customers. The MBP and even MBA are legitimately really nice laptops with a good screen, good keyboard, good trackpad, good sound, etc. I have said before that I really think a lot of MBP customers would be interested in a "Macbook Tough" toughbook if they ever did that, although of course that's the most un-Jony Ives product possible.
There is a clear demand for a high-quality AMD-based non-GPU ultrabook using a 6800U or 7040U or whatever. Framework is the first company to even try, and they're using crappy 13" hardware on the upcoming AMD model while the market clearly wants more like a 15" or 16" (and their 16" will not have AMD boards). Why didn't anybody else do it first? Apple is catching on because they're filling a market niche that everyone else is ignoring, and they're not even really exactly filling it squarely, they just happen to be vaguely closer than the rest of the market.
And now that the nerd crowd has the hardware... the software is following. It's the same reason that CUDA has taken off while AMD's GPGPU programme has spun its wheels for 15 years, and the same reason AMD has good Linux drivers now. Give the nerds the hardware and innovation will follow - when they tinker they'll be tinkering with your platform.
Big missed opportunity for AMD, yet again. Or Intel, but, they're so far behind on APUs/integration that I think disappointment is basically the baseline expectation at this point. AMD had all the pieces, and yet again just chose not to do anything with them.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/?sort=pct
The most popular GPUs in use TODAY are 1650, 1060, 3060, 2060.
If Apple can get the M2 Macbook Air to run like one of these, it essentially makes the most popular laptop also the equivalent to the most popular gaming rig.
Two days ago we could speculate that maybe the $6000+ Mac Pro would bring better graphics performance, but now we know it's a $7000 Mac Studio with PCIe slots. And as far as we know you can't put a GPU in those slots.
Not that it would've been in my price range anyway, but it could've indicated that thunderbolt eGPU support would make a return.
Lack of that is a weird omission if Apple is trying to act like they have a gaming platform.
> Lack of that is a weird omission if Apple is trying to act like they have a gaming platform.
Apple has a huge gaming platform, and it isn't the Mac.
https://www.ign.com/articles/apple-made-more-than-nintendo-s...
However, I imagine that they'd still like to sell more games in the Mac App Store (in addition to iOS ports, iPad games that can run on Apple Silicon, and Apple Arcade subscriptions) and this might help.
It might also make it easier to port games to Apple Arcade.
For $3000 you can get a top end GPU, not a whole gaming PC. Most gamers have mid-range GPUs like those in the M2 Max.
This is wildly false, see https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/143ugg4/comment/j... as a real world example of a gaming PC you can buy right now for $2,600 which is the top of the crop and an absolutely wild gaming machine that's vastly better at gaming than $5,000 M2 Ultra Mac Studio even if the comparisons are done only in games that actually work and work well on the Mac.
If you were after a comparable experience with the fastest Macs on Earth you could configure a PC that's another $1,000 cheaper than that ($1,600).
You’re right and my knowledge was outdated about the prices.
Actually you can get NVidia's top consumer GPU today, the RTX 4090, for $1500-1600. Go back one generation and you can get a RTX 3090 for $750 which still packs a punch.
So it's quite possible to build a well-performing gaming PC for sub-$2000 with RTX 3090 which is still significantly more performant than Apple's latest Mac, in terms of GPU throughput.
I snapped myself a gaming PC for $1300 at last year's Thanksgiving sales, came with a AMD Ryzen, RTX 3080 (10 GB VRAM model) and 32 GB DDR4 RAM, no way I could have gotten a Mac with that performance for anything close in terms of price.
Yea, that’s true as of today in the US. There’s no way you could get such a deal where I live (Norway) due to our weak currency, and it used to be the other way around just a few years ago
Great, you can keep playing your old ass game at low frame rates. Enjoy your power savings... the game still runs like crap and the GPU still isn't that great.
Game enthusiasts can be so weird. Do y'all even have fun playing games, or do you just keep buying hardware and optimizing settings until they run at 120fps, declare victory, and move on to the next AAA game?
I don't think I have worried about game frame rate since the days of Quake 1. I set my graphics settings to "Medium" and then spend the rest of my time actually enjoying my old ass games.
Its exactly why PC/console gamers (generally, not talking about GP) make terrible customers and Apple is right to not play with fire by courting them too closely - they're loud, cheap, immature, mercurial, and demanding, and being associated with them is probably a net negative for brand. Let them stew in forums arguing over red vs green, tinkering with and breaking the warranty of their PC parts, being disloyal to the brand they loved 5 minutes ago, etc.
Better strategy is to make sure the door isn't closed on gaming for those that want to use their expensive Macs to occasionally play (protect the downside), rather than swing the door open enthusiastically for gamers to rush in.
Re: worrying about fun vs tinkering, I'm reminded of the 4 quadrants of hobbies. What we see on forums are generally gamers interested in gear & discussing, not 'doing the hobby'. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html
Thank you for that link! Great article with a lot of truth to it.
Yes, gamers have standards and thats why GPU performance on the PC does not suck and why it is relatively affordable. A tough market to be in for sure, everyone wishes they could just be Apple.
In many genres of game, frame rate makes a huge difference in the ability to control the game and catch what's happening. Framerate is probably the worst thing you could have picked to mock when you're making an argument about enjoyment. Especially when citing an FPS.
The M2 Max is closer to the 3060 than it is to the 3060 Ti, let alone 3070. And those numbers are quite possibly overly optimistic; workloads essentially never reach peak tflop, and I would not be surprised if practical workloads are better matched to nvidia's architecture than apple's, if only through sheer industry momentum (But that could go either way).
While the perf/watt is impressive, apple is also using 4 times the number of transistors on TSMC's latest process - and the comparison here is samsungs 8nm, I believe. It's not really all that impressive that that huge silicon investment has some results...
It's a tantalizing hint at what might be possible, but as it stands, I'm not really all that impressed, personally.
I didn't say 3070, that was from the parent "who is impressed by 3070 performance [in a 25W envelope]"? And the answer is a lot of people.
I actually added the 3060 bit myself lol, because yeah, that seems to be more like where it actually lands, more like desktop 3060.
edit: also desktop vs mobile is a factor here too... mobile 3070 is not the same thing as desktop 3070, and coming in at desktop 3070 would actually be fairly impressive. Mobile 3060, much less so.
Sure, no quibbles on that front. Comparisons like this are always best taken with a lot of salt anyhow; they're so different. And it's not like tflops are the great predictor of gaming performance.
Positively: as a device, having such a solid iGPU is pretty much exactly what I've always wanted in this kind of device. Having performance that's PS5 ballpark clearly is enough for a hell of a lot of things. Who really wants something much faster at the cost of much worse battery life?
But the air of incredibly ground-breaking technical greatness that apple manages to weave around its silicon seems a tad overdone. Given the amount of silicon, the process node, and the target tuning - this kind of result seems competitive with rather than outclassing their rivals.
I feel like you've got a chip on your shoulder about this for some reason
I've got a gaming desktop and also a MacBook Pro. If the next time I go on a trip, I'm able to play some games in my hotel room on (gasp) medium settings, with a device I already own, that I probably was already going to bring with me, that's a positive thing!
I also have a gaming desktop and a Macbook Pro, but I wish I didn't have to have a gaming desktop because I much prefer Macs and MacOS and I wish Apple was interested in competing. Then, they dedicate a segment to 'gaming on mac' to brag about porting a 4 year old game to the Mac.
They should’ve showcased a game that’s actually new and not just a port.
... to demonstrate their porting toolkit?
Sure, why not? Unreleased games need to be ported to macOS too.
>it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry
Apple seems to be doing okay. I mean, a magnitude more people game on iPhones than game on PCs.
Apple is trying to support ancillary gaming for users who chose their platform for other reasons. That's it. They aren't targeting the 1200 watt, 12-fan 4090 PCMR sorts. And that's okay.
Do they need to most powerfull gaming hardware? Maybe just the fact that it might get reasonable to play most games on a macbook is enough to get people who also want to game to buy a macbook instead of a windows laptop. And maybe this is enough to get developers to consider mac.
They do not need to compete with nvidea for the top of the line
Yeah, high end enthusiast hardware is in fact pretty niche, and I say this as someone with a 5950X/3080Ti tower. The vast majority of people playing games are doing so on pretty old/average hardware, a bar which is met and exceeded by several M-series Macs.
High-end hardware is niche, but the state of AAA game performance these days ... ugh. I can't even get a stable 60fps on Jedi Survivor with my 5800x/3080 Ti rig, even with lower settings. How bad is it on something like a 1060?
The most used GPU according to Steam survey is the 1650 -- a low-midrange card from 2019.
Yeah and those people aren't going to pay significantly more money for a Mac M2 Max.
I paid a ton of money for my top of the line M2 Max because I build large rust systems that are high bandwidth and low latency and it’s as good as it gets for that. I also like to play games, but I don’t need the cutting edge. I would rather eat glass than buy a windows bing advertisement device and find another footprint in my home to install it just so I can get a higher frame rate than my eye can see. In fact, my strategy for gaming over the last 20 years has been to buy games 3 years old and devices that run them at their top end. No bugs, tons of reviews to guide my purchases, tons of mods, full DLC sets, always on sale. As long as I don’t sit around feeling envy looking at what’s cutting edge, following the 3 year wave front gives me precisely the experience folks had 3 years ago - but better. I’ll have their current experience in 3 years, so long as I don’t die, without all the bleeding edge problems.
So, great. Apple lets me stay away from bard directed bing advertising and OS level spy ware on my desktop, simplify my computing footprint in my household, and provides me games from a few years ago. Seems like a win win.
Source: I am someone who paid significantly more money for a Max M2 Max
> Apple lets me stay away from bard directed bing advertising and OS level spy ware on my desktop
Apple doesn't get to take the moral high ground here either when they push credit card and other services ads in their OS.
No corporation gets to take a moral high ground being amoral entities. But windows is pervasively spammy now - the start menu hosting ads was bad enough, but now it’s the task bar too. I’m trying to remember when I saw a cross sell in apples stuff - my memory is only when I’m in something like the TV app or the wallet, or some place where the cross sell is contextually relevant.
The more Microsoft and Google tilt towards becoming persistent privacy threats and advertising companies, the more apple will see it as a differentiator as a hardware company with software services to be the opposite. I’m good with that dynamic, but I think it’s useful to acknowledge that’s the case. Pretending windows isn’t a persistent adware spyware bundle doesn’t help the situation.
I think you'd be surprised. I just checked, and my desktop gaming GPU is only 31% faster than that nvidia, and I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro M2 Max.
I bought the laptop and the video card because they are quiet and their price/performance is better than the high end stuff anyway.
I just tried running steam on the macbook, and was very disappointed. My Linux gaming desktop will live on for another few years, I guess.
edit: I think I got the GPU in ~ 2019, though it was released in 2015.
Rosetta translation + D3D12OnMetal (which developers aren't allowed to use to publish their games, so you'll have to do it on your own and work with a subpar version) will happily eat that 30% difference. Not to mention the massive changes that drivers bring, where Apple will never either want or be able to do as much work as Nvidia does.
The 30% faster hardware is running Linux. The main reason I'm disappointed with steam on MacOS is that only a third of my library works at all, and that the stuff that does run is hit or miss, performance wise (especially the indie / casual games, which this hardware should laugh at).
Also, another 25% of my library actually was ported to MacOS, but it is 32 bit only, so it won't run on an M2. (Also, typing that sentence was painful.)
I guess if I want to run the vast majority of the MacOS software that I have ever purchased on an M2, my best bet is to install Asahi, and use the Windows ports under proton. Lame.
Steam has mislabeled many of the older Mac games as being incompatible. Several of them will work just fine. It's worth double checking on one of the Mac gaming wikis if you want a particular game.
Have no idea why the mislabeling happened. Maybe Steam is working solely off dates despite many games being 64 bit before the 32 bit cutoff.
> I just tried running steam on the macbook, and was very disappointed. My Linux gaming desktop will live on for another few years, I guess.
I'd like to see more Steam games that work on the Mac. Perhaps this could help.
A Nvidia 1650 is significantly cheaper also!
Upgrading from full-spec M2 Max to M2 Ultra costs $1200. Nvidia 1650 launched at $190 (inflation adjusted, $159 2019 USD).
The latest consoles are also running mid range cards from a few years ago and are doing just fine. They are running games at medium at lower FPS/resolution than PC so games will mostly continue to target and work well on medium hardware. High end PC gaming is the exception, not the norm.
The Mac audience is not trivial and has deep pockets so as long as porting games is fairly easy the it's an obvious choice.
Apple's best [integrated] GPU is close to a mid-range previous gen [discrete] nvidia GPU [consuming 10x the power]?
-fixed that for you
I see, so in the world you propose we live in the Nintendo Switch must be a tremendous flop?
Practically speaking a $300 (often sold at $250) Xbox Series S would provide a much better gaming experience than this.
Sure? It's definitely never going to deliver you anything other than a gaming/video experience though. It also doesn't come with a battery or a display in case we're doing an apples to apples comparison of the Xbox Series S with an M1 MacBook Pro.
This video sample use base M1 chip.
>Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?
iOS gaming is the biggest and most profitable in the world. In fact, iOS is bigger than PS5, Xbox, and PC gaming.
iOS uses Metal. Apple Silicon is mostly just a scaled up iPhone SoC. Macs basically get most things funded by iOS.
The Game Porting Toolkit is the first Mac-only gaming tool Apple made in a long time. It shows that Apple wants AAA games on Macs.
>But then Apple doesn't ship devices with actually powerful GPUs, so it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise.
But Apple does ship powerful GPUs. In fact, the M2 Max is probably the most or second most powerful GPU on laptops. But games aren't optimized for Metal nor ARM, so they run slower than Nvidia laptop GPUs.
> It shows that Apple wants AAA games on Macs.
Why do you think that ? I am asking as someone who is working in gamedev.
Game industry got burned by some big company recently when multi year efforts were spent porting 3d stacks and the target platform got axed.
Some hypothetical reasons:
1. Playing games is one of the reasons to prefer a Windows laptop instead of a Mac. 2. The AR/VR headsets will need games to be successful, so they need to be more attractive to the gaming industry. 3. iPads are more powerful now. They support game controllers very well, and you can plug it into a big screen to play. However, most of the iPad games (except Divinity Original Sin 2) are scaled versions of iPhone games... game studios are not interested in porting games to the iPad.
While the porting kit announcement is about Macs, I think that the strategy is to make the whole Apple Silicon platform attractive for gaming.
Pretty spot on and exactly what I would have wrote.
>Why do you think that ? I am asking as someone who is working in gamedev.
They built Game Porting Toolkit.
The toolkit is not part of Apple platform apparently. It is a development tool that can be used to evaluate porting no more no less. I see no changes in the platform itself.
Including things in the platform is a double-edged sword; the platform has different compatibility policy from windows, and old games typically do not get updated with mandated platform changes (such as a requirement for 64-bit).
Swift developer were upset by concurrency because the language’s deep integration with the platform meant the best features were (for a while) only accessible for apps targeting the latest platform versions exclusively.
Microtransaction ridden mobile gacha games where Apple takes 30% aren't exactly the target when you translate D3D12 to Metal for your desktop platform where Apple takes nothing. In practice, it is doomed to be a solution that plays the games you bought on steam 5 years ago, or run games like cyberpunk on medium 900p on your multiple-thousand dollar machine.
Apple gaming will not take off until game devs target Apple's devices, and Apple burned those bridges a long time ago.
> But Apple does ship powerful GPUs. In fact, the M2 Max is probably the most or second most powerful GPU on laptops. But games aren't optimized for Metal nor ARM, so they run slower than Nvidia laptop GPUs.
The most powerful iGPU likely. It still won't come anywhere close to high-end dedicated laptop GPUs in the vast majority of benchmarks regardless of how much optimization you throw at it - that's just falling for marketing / hype.
>The most powerful iGPU likely. It still won't come anywhere close to high-end dedicated laptop GPUs in the vast majority of benchmarks regardless of how much optimization you throw at it - that's just falling for marketing / hype.
In applications that actually use Metal natively, Apple Silicon GPUs do compare favorably to Nvidia laptop GPUs while using drastically less power.
So no. It isn't just hype/marketing.
Even if you look at the raw technical specs of the M2 Max GPU, it's comparable to Nvidia laptop GPUs - with the exception of ray tracing.
>In applications that actually use Metal natively, Apple Silicon GPUs do compare favorably to Nvidia laptop GPUs while using drastically less power.
Is that really the case? I'm not being facetious here, I'd really like to see more useful datapoints. There aren't many benchmark comparisons out there that strive for actual useful comparison, especially outside synthetic stuff with questionable applicability like 3dMark.
And for the "drastically less power" claim...it really doesn't help that most benchmarks are with decked-out "Gamer" machines using the highest available TDP configuration, despite most GPUs having their sweet spot significantly below - especially Ada Lovelace seem to scale down really well (from what I've gathered, still 60-70% performance at 60W compared to 150W with 4080 Mobile, for example).
>Even if you look at the raw technical specs of the M2 Max GPU, it's comparable to Nvidia laptop GPUs - with the exception of ray tracing.
The specs put it roughly between GA106-GA104/AD107-AD106 respectively, and I'd expect it to land there in the general, adequately optimized case.
> Is that really the case? I'm not being facetious here, I'd really like to see more useful datapoints. There aren't many benchmark comparisons out there that strive for actual useful comparison, especially outside synthetic stuff with questionable applicability like 3dMark.
Yeah, on synthetic benchmarks a higher-end MacBook Pro GPU compares favorably with recent Nvidia laptop cards (say, 4070 or so). But in games that drops off dramatically ... more like a 3050 or 3060 at best.
M2 Max is very impressive given its power consumption, but it's not powerfull as in RTX 30 or 40 powerfull.
> iOS gaming is the biggest and most profitable in the world. In fact, iOS is bigger than PS5, Xbox, and PC gaming.
Cos of micro transactions. Apple doesn’t stand to profit from other peoples games like Diablo 4 as it’s not the gate keeper for transactions.
> Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?
I imagine Apple may be testing the waters. They're a trillion-dollar company, with many customers who play games, and they want to see if they can expand Mac gaming beyond iOS ports.
Consider that there are a large number of games which could run fine on this sort of technology (including much of my Steam game library that currently only runs on Windows) as well as existing macOS ports whose performance can be improved.
For example Final Fantasy XIV already runs on a Crossover/WINE type middleware layer, but at about half the frame rate of the Windows version on comparable hardware. Metal conversion is likely to greatly improve the frame rate, improving the experience for FFXIV players on macOS. If it helps Square Enix deliver a better FFXIV experience on Mac, perhaps they will be more likely to consider Mac ports of some newer games that are currently slated for Windows or consoles.
Moreover it's worth noting that Apple did claim that the M1 had comparable raw GPU performance to the PS5 (and Macs also use fast flash storage like the PS5.) So as the M-series evolves (and the PS5 ages) it may become more feasible to port PS5 games to Mac with decent performance. Solid ports of console games could greatly improve the Mac gaming landscape.
Also we don't know Apple's product plans. It's likely that they have some GPU improvements in the works. Unified memory architecture may also pay off as more games adopt ray-tracing and procedural textures and geometry.
Don't you think that Apple could tackle the performance issues in GPUs in the following years?
The core issue here, business wise, is the price tag. People of all social classes use gaming consoles and it is difficult to think Apple can be relevant in this market even if they tackle all other issues.
Nevermind the low end (it will always be an uphill battle to compete with the consoles on price), the issue is that Apple doesn't even cater to the high end.
Here's another POV:
> Like how does all this Vulkan, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?
Vulkan today sucks. Nobody writes Vulkan native engines. It's not optimized anywhere.
Google has twice tried and failed to make Vulkan a thing - first on Android, where nobody cares to target it, even on the Quest, and the GPUs suck anyway; and second on Stadia, which besides the up front product development cost, it was 3-20x worse performance compared to DirectX for the games that were ports anyway.
But I'd rather have Vulkan around and succeed, even if it sucks today. Because having only DirectX, or only DirectX and middlewares for the Switch, iOS and PlayStation, is worse.
> But then Apple doesn't ship devices with actually powerful GPUs, so it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise.
It is still expensive to have to use Windows just so you can game. Or put all the effort into dual booting Linux.
Most people just use a Macbook and then get an Xbox/Ps5/Switch/Quest2.
For games I can't use on those you can get Shadow PC which let's you play any Windows game ever using better GPUs than I could afford (or more accurately would care to spend) otherwise.
https://shadow.tech/
The high-end gaming market is infintessimal when compared to the casual gaming market. Apple knows this and they are perfectly positioned for high-quality casual games.
> how much effort Apple puts into this
how much did they actually put into it? as far as I know this is mostly just WINE with an Apple logo on it.
I think this is an example of how ideas about what people really consider important are skewed by marketing. The gaming market is HUGE. How big is the premium, chasing-that-last-quarter-percent-by-spending-twice-the-money market comparatively?
I thought this was very insightful on his part - yeah this all sounds great, but so what? The Mac Pro is an empty box besides for Apple Silicon and a few fans. What are you going to put in there exactly?
Audio, Video and networking I/O cards - exactly as they outlined in the keynote. Massive bandwidth - that's what the Pro tower unlocks.
> Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?
their Survivor bias of the “control the whole stack” philosophy.
Could it all be research for the new vr headset?
And every 2-3 years they throw-out whatever that huge investment was for a new incompatible project.
Keep in mind, it's getting 15fps at 1440x900. It's not saying that Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 is a great experience. It's merely pointing out that it's technically possible (which is a massive achievement).
I'm not sure - Apple's marketing claimed that the M1 was beating top end PC parts. This isn't even close.
CPU maybe, GPU definitely not. In the end, M1's GPU is still a mobile GPU with a few desktop features bolted on (like BCx compressed texture formats).
They put comparison of power against nVidia 3090 which made every Apple fan think it's comparable in performance too :D
That was for the M1 ultra, while TFA is on a standard M1.
Wasn't it the "fastest laptop ever"?
I mean, for the work I do that’s probably true. My work is 99% CPU/RAM/disk dependent.
GPU obviously not, but maybe that claim would hold water at some arbitrary wattage limit.
My takeaway is that the GPU “doesn’t completely suck” and that Apple are dedicating continuing resources to making their platform actually usable, which I was worried about. I mean, it seems difficult just to intentionally use the Apple Neural Engine, and impossible to explicitly use it, which makes testing aggravating. Any continued focus on improving developer experience for the coprocessors (GPU, ANE, R1, etc) is a good signal.
If it's disk dependent, then the m2 ssds are half as fast as the m1 ssds because it's single lane, unless you upgrade
Yeah I don't think laptops should be sold at all with 512GB -- I think that's as absurd of a product as a laptop with 128GB. Personally I spec out 2TB and judge price value based on that.
So the speed issue doesn't affect me personally. I just wish they wouldn't sell that model and then it wouldn't affect anyone.
Isn't it when anchored to energy consumption? Sure you can put a powerful GPU in a laptop and make it effectively anchored to wall plug...
That's already true of the M1 Max. At maximum power from CPU+GPU it will barely last an hour.
Edit: I wrote Ultra, but I meant Max.
That may be true, but in practice I get faaar better battery life out of my M1 Max than I would out of a laptop with a mobile 4090.
Do you do AAA gaming on your M1 Max? If not, then the GPU is irrelevant, because a laptop with a 4090 mobile is going to shut it down completely.
If you are indeed doing AAA gaming, then you wouldn't have sufficient battery life without plugging in, or you wouldn't have sufficient performance.
I'm not talking about AAA gaming here. I'm talking about day-to-day work-related tasks, which is primarily what I use my MacBook for.
Yes, which is why I said that if you don't, the 4090 is irrelevant because it's just turned off.
People report playing Baldur's Gate 3 for an hour on M1 Max with 40% battery life left, is it AAA enough? https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/qogsov/battery_... (M1 Pro lasts longer)
Given that Baldur's Gate runs at Ultra 1080p60+ on a 3050Ti mobile, that's about what you can expect from a low end gaming laptop - and that GPU runs at 35-50W on most of those
If power consumption is about the same as M1 Max while running the same game at the same settings the only difference becomes battery life...
If the power consumption is the same and the battery capacity is the same size then the battery life is the same. It's a simple division.
Unless one OS consumes power more efficiently then another, sure...
> M1 Ultra
Do they put M1 Ultra in laptops tho?
No. There does not exist an M1 Ultra laptop of any kind. Nor an M2 Ultra laptop for that matter. The only machines with Mn Ultra are the Mac Studio and Mac Pro.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1#Products_that_use_the...
Yes. The MBP with an M1 Max will, at max performance, use enough power that it would discharge it's battery in less than an hour. I think Apple throttles it on battery, though.
The MBP with an M1 Ultra isn't a thing that exists.
You're right, I miswrote, it's the M1 Max. See https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... - the M1 Max can draw over 100W.
They did, although the graph cuts off just before the 3090 takes the lead and goes beyond.
https://cdn.videocardz.com/1/2022/03/M1-vs-3090.jpg
Frustrating they're being this misleading when M1 is outstanding for it's own reasons, but 3090 eats it alive in the workflows it excels in too.
Perfect machine would be both those chips in the same box tbh.
They've been straight up lying about the M series chips performance from day one. They will show insane graphs of the M chips beating top end desktop parts with an asterisk that explains the very specific BS benchmark they used that clearly favors their chip but won't generalize and then public benchmarks never even come close.
People still parrot it.
I do not understand. The picture you link clearly does not cut off that way: if it were the case, the curves would be about to cross at the cut, or maybe I am missing something?
To be fair, the M1 is now approaching 3 years of age. And the game is being emulated.
Many much cheaper 3 year old PCs would handle this fine
No, you won’t many cheaper 3 year old laptops running Cyperpunk 2077 on Ultra this well… name one.
Honestly, I wouldn't use the phrase "this well" non-sarcastically for ~15fps at 1440x900 like shown in the video.
this is on Ultra graphics settings.. not lot of laptop could even run it on Low
Cyberpunk is known to be a VERY demanding open world game
on lowest setting, this should probably be fine
Without RT it's actually not that demanding.
I mean, here's the game on Ultra on a Steam Deck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHeso2jc_L0
Comparison is not fair, game porting toolkit also does X86 -> ARM, so it's missing perf on lot of HW intrinsics
Also this is the 1st gen M1, which was released in 2020, I wonder what's the performance like on the newest models?
Hey, you made the claim "not a lot of laptops could run it even on low". I just put that in perspective.
It says Ultra, but ray tracing is not supported so it is not really "ultra".
It's an impressive turnout, but I wouldn't ignore the power of modern low-end APUs. Here's a 3-generation-old, entry level Ryzen laptop playing the game for comparison: https://youtu.be/Aqgm0zcV7Kw
"this well" is more or less equivalent to a older Ryzen 3's native performance. Apple is really banking on developers recompiling for ARM to reduce overhead here.
> name one.
At 900p? Steam Deck does just fine (and it's SOC is even older).
1440p900? Any laptop with a 2060 mobile would do it. At 1500$ it's well within budget.
13 inch ultra lights? I very much doubt that. You are basically relegated to igpus. I could see Ryzen 7840u beating the M1. But 3 years ago the best there was was the Ryzen 5800u.
Do keep in mind this script was marketed as a way for game developers to judge the viability to port to using native apis and native isa.
I would imagine that not running through this codeweavers patch and through rosetta would have better performance.
>I'm not sure - Apple's marketing claimed that the M1 was beating top end PC parts. This isn't even close.
Your statement is quite misinformed.
First, this is the M1. Not M1 Pro. Not M1 Max. The M1 is almost 3 years old.
Second, this is being translated from DX12 to Metal and also x86 to ARM64. Yes, both the CPU and GPU layers are being translated.
Third, Apple claimed that the M1 Max was the most powerful GPU on laptops. It was probably true depending on what benchmarks.
Finally, this is Cyberpunk 2077 running in Ultra settings. It's the most demanding PC game ever.
M1 has 8 GPU cores, M1 Pro has 16, M1 Max has 32 cores. Apple says the GPU of M1 Max is four times as fast as M1. So 30FPS Ultra on 1080p should be possible?
This is not the M1. You can’t configure a MacBook Pro 16 inch (stated in the tweet) with anything other than an M1 Pro / M1 Max, or M2 Pro / M2 Max on the latest models.
This is an M1 with 16 GB of RAM not 16 inch.
You’re right, my apologies I misread the 16 GB as 16 inch!
It's being run through several layers of emulation. Of course it's going to be slow.
Wine + DXVK disagrees. Graphics API emulation doesn't necessarily provide worse performance, in fact DXVK often wins against raw DirectX 9/10 and sometimes even DirectX 11. VKD3D performance is pretty awesome.
Not sure how much of the bottleneck here is because of Rosetta though (i.e. cpu-bound) although I suspect not much really.
Unless it is running a JIT internally as part of the game engine, Rosetta should take the whole executable and rebuild it ahead-of-time.
Rosetta can only do that for an x86 macOS binary. Once it goes through WINE it's all JIT. Though I think it should get cached after a while.
What, in playing Windows games with translated DirectX and amd64 calls?
it translates X86 to ARM, that's not free
High-end games makes ton of use of SIMD instructions to gain massive boost, I wonder if that's translated properly
I think it's a network effect thing as much as anything else. If it's good enough to get people playing games on their macs at all (even if at relatively sub-par settings), that builds the market, shows there are people willing to spend money on games to play them on their macs.
Then at that point games developers might be more inclined to give the platform explicit support.
Otherwise it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation: people aren't playing games on their macs because the library isn't there, the library isn't there because no developers will support a platform where there aren't gamers and so on.
Not as massive an achievement as Proton getting nearly every Windows game in existence running well from unmodified binaries on Linux.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Think about how many Steam Decks have been sold. Game devs are already actively targeting the Deck. If porting games to Mac can be made easier, we all need to actively encourage it. Unfortunately, the only way we get Apple to give us more game dev tools is by porting the games.
I have a Steam Deck and a Mac. I would love to play half the games from my Deck on my laptop.
Do you find this is a good solution for playing Steam games?
I have an older PC, and I'm thinking about replacing it with a macbook air and a steam deck. Does the steam deck feel more limiting than just having a windows PC with steam?
only get a steam deck if you're really interested in portable playing. You can build a better desktop from old parts. The steamdeck is an interesting device that's doing a lot for gaming via proton, but that makes tradeoffs for battery life and portability. If you're not interested in the portability just get a desktop. If you're interested in the portability but need a large screen, get a laptop. If you want a sega game gear form factor that can run steam games get a steam deck.
Proton isn’t as massive an achievement as the sun! That thing pumps out around 2.3012⋅10^27 joules a second!
Yeah, but that's the first attempt. The game porting toolkit is designed to shorten the time it takes to launch the game on macOS for the first time by allowing you to take the ready Windows version and just running it directly on macOS with translation. A finished macOS port would have additional work after this step.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10123/
"Technically possible" is a non statement. Of course its technically possible. The question is how much money is Apple willing to throw at making games run well on their gpu.
all while being emulated on rosetta
Ultra with 16gb of memory shared between cpu and gpu. Unlike a a traditional laptop or desktop with separate memory for both.
Running at ~40 fps on M2 Max:
https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpun...
Nice, imagine all these games on an iPad…
Imagine all these games on an Apple TV… I’m assuming at some point those will also start using M chips. Excited to see if apple can enter the console market.
Could you just airplay from the mac to the Apple TV? Not sure about input lag in that situation but it'd be interesting to see
That would be wonderful!
On iPad they would need their controls redone; it's possible, but an extra step.
I'm also getting the feeling the ipad is quickly running out of favor, I haven't seen one in ages except on my parents' dinner table.
You can pair your XBox or Playstation controller with an iPad.
Also keyboard and mouse!
Those are terrible controls for most of games.
Only for RTS, most other games actually favor the controller due to the included aim assist in FPS games, for example.
Having to be on console makes pretty much any game controller compliant.
If they were a good kind of controls they would not require an "assist".
You can pair a mouse and keyboard with an iPad too. You can even plug them in…
GeForce Now should allow you to do that right now :)
Yeah but you need to subscribe to them, you need a stable low latency connection, etc
Flights will be way more fun to just pop down with your iPad (or Vision Pro) and not have to also bring along your switch or steam deck
So, you need to spend $3k to get playable framerates, which are possible with a 3060 laptop, maybe even a 3050ti, as they can do 1080p, this just seems to be 900p.
The point is that you'll be able to play games on the machine you already have. Yes, a PC with GPU is going to be better and people that are really into gaming will probably always opt for that. But there's a big casual market out there too.
Actually you can play these games with Xbox Series S at 1440p easily. I wonder if people would just simply buy a game console (if they don't already have one) for the more demanding titles. Most people don't need a processor that is nearly as powerful as M1 Max, and I doubt anyone is going to spend extra money on a computer just for its GPU that doesn't even play games as well as a $300 console.
>Actually you can play these games with Xbox Series S at 1440p easily.
The Xbox Series S version of Cyberpunk runs at 30 FPS with a dynamic resolution between 2304x1296 and 2560x1440 on quality mode and at 60 FPS with a dynamic resolution between 1410x800 and 1920x1080 on performance mode. If you were to run it with a fixed resolution of 1440p, then you'd definitely not be averaging 30 FPS.
There are options if you just want to play the game, yes, but Apple did the work here, and met developers the wrong half way IMO. If you just want to play with higher settings and fps on the computer you have, less emulation is better, as impressive as it might be. A Vulkan driver would be less emulation and more performance all around I think. Also, $300 can buy a lot of games if games can be made to run well with minimal work.
The last thing I still use my windows machine for is the occasional gaming session. I'd love to be able to be rid of it forever. This seems like a positive step in that direction.
I play Cyberpunk with an aging AMD RX570, and get consistent rate of 45 FPS running at 3K with high quality settings.
I'm not an Apple fan, but have to admit that Apple chip is getting incredible frame rates, considering it has no discrete GPU.
I'm already spending $3k for my laptop so that I can develop.
This means I won't _also_ have to spend several thousand dollars on a gaming PC in addition.
Yes, but then you have a gaming laptop...
This is the entry level M1. 15fps at 1400x900 isn't great (or even playable), but it's very impressive that it runs at all without any changes, let alone on ultra settings.
Yes, thank you. I mean, let's have a bit of context.
I'm Mac based (well, my computing is, I'm still biological ;) ) and I took an interest in what's happening in the AI space. Knowing that RAM and CPU would be bottlenecks but that there would be open source ways to run stuff, I got a Mac Studio, which is M1 Ultra and 128G of RAM, which then becomes also GPU RAM because on M1 the architecture is like that.
So I'm able to do AI stuff up to the heavy-lifting stuff (still steadily downloading LLaMA data on my old DSL, but I've got everything but 65B and have run 7B, 13B and 30B without issue, and of course I'm having no trouble running Stable Diffusion stuff)
If a basic laptop with just an M1 and laptop amounts of RAM can do 15 fps at 1400x900, my 20-core M1 Ultra with 128G of RAM ought to do at least that at 3840x1600 on my big ol' curved monitor. And at that point it starts acting like the PC gamer experience, except at no point did I set out to make a gamer-specific system. The whole thing was put together to serve very much other purposes, and retains usefulness for those purposes.
I'm sure I can tolerate pleb tier 30 fps or not being on Ultra settings or something, to get performance that's very similar to decent gaming rigs on games designed for Windows PCs, on a machine I got to serve entirely other purposes.
A lot of us with the financial means to buy a Mac Studio are also old and are "PatientGamers" and fire up games like Skyrim from time-to-time and don't chase after the latest AAA titles. Even 10-15 years ago I used to a have a $200 limit on graphics cards and roughly $100 limit on CPUs and would wait to play games on highest resolution until it was a few years later and I went through a hardware refresh cycle, always staying about 2 years behind. I've never bought a $1000 GPU for a gaming rig.
At the same time I find this interesting that Apple is clearly starting to notice the PC gaming market. Makes me wonder if they're going to start a more serious push soon, and if we might see some changes and repair the relationship that Apple has with AAA studios.
[Edit: And another thought is that with virtual iPhone saturation in the US market, Apple may be facing the economic reality that in order to grow they need to enter into other markets like gaming, and this may as well be a necessary part of the long-term Vision Pro strategy]
Maybe they want to do beefy VR stuff?
> This is the entry level M1. 15fps at 1400x900 isn't great (or even playable), but it's very impressive that it runs at all without any changes, let alone on ultra settings.
And running non-natively through Codeweavers patch and through Rosetta.
The people shaming this couldn't have any idea what they're looking at.
It runs bad! I could spend less on a PC and get a better frame rate!
Of course it runs bad, it's miracle-like that it runs at all or has a frame rate, let alone a rate that is based on high performance settings.
The entire thing is hacked together through tenuous layer upon layer of emulation - no part of this is designed for the hardware it's running on. It should not be this fast, it should be spitting out a low-res, low-detail frame once every 30 seconds, if at all.
This is not the M1. You can’t configure a MacBook Pro 16 inch (stated in the tweet) with anything other than an M1 Pro / M1 Max, or M2 Pro / M2 Max on the latest models.
It’s the 13” MBP. If you look at the metal overlay in the corner it shows the product name of the processor, and in this case, it’s the base M1 with 16GB of memory.
Huh where does it say that? It states 16GB of RAM, not screen size.
You’re right, my apologies I misread the 16 GB as 16 inch!
The tweet says "M1 MBP". That is short for Macbook Pro and means the CPU is an M1 Pro or M1 Max. Not the entry level M1.
The 13” M1 MacBook Pro does not have the pro or Mac chip. Not sure that’s what is being used here, but your assumption that this combination isn’t possible is false.
Thanks for the clarification, I appreciate it.
I knew about the 13" M2 MBP (although it seems very easy to forget somehow), but maybe due to marketing materials I encountered, I'd incorrectly thought that product line started with the M2 not the M1.
In fairness the 13” MBP is an entirely forgettable machine that IMO should not exist so I definitely don’t begrudge anyone making mistakes about it!
The 13" M1 Macbook Pro is a thing. You cannot infer M1 Pro/Max just from that.
This is total speculation on my part, but I do wonder why Apple have suddenly got this out the door to developers right at the same moment their headset is announced. They’ve never seemed very interested in this section of the games market before.
I wonder if this could be the first building block of allowing existing modern 3D games to play in some kind of new semi immersive way inside. I’m imagining playing an FPS on a huge wrap around screen with some adjustable depth perception. That could potentially open up a huge market.
I feel like they're targeting VR.
Some background: Currently PCVR is basically 100% Windows. It's possible to stream VR games from a PC to a standalone headset (ie: with the Quest AirLink) but it depends on network conditions. For example, if both computer and headset are connected via WiFi, and neither has line of sight to the router, performance is likely to be questionable, at best. In theory a computer could use it's own WiFi chipset to make a direct connection, but there's also a WiFi 6 dongle that allows for a direct link between computer and headset.
With that said: Apple already has devices that talk to each other, laptops with high-speed WiFi chips, and now they're making a VR headset. So they have all the parts for a really slick PCVR (er, MacVR?) experience, except the games.
So I 100% don't think the timing is coincidental. They're almost certainly targeting PCVR, although I don't know what they will do with motion controllers. That said, there's still nearly a year until launch, so maybe they haven't shown us everything (or maybe it's not ready).
Edit: should also add that this might be really important for VR gaming because we don't know how much compute is available for apps. However, the dual-chip design implies that a single M2 was not enough for visionOS, which does not bode well.
It is also their first Vision generation, and it is spec:ed more closely to a Mac Pro than anything else really. Which makes me think of this as a devkit to see what devs are going to do with it.
100% agree with you on targeting PCVR Gaming, which is why I am a bit pissed off that they just dragged in wine as an abstraction layer. It means they are not really committing to working with gaming companies, they just want the fruits of their labour and can at any time just yeet that layer out of the OS.
They could have come with Wine at the same time they did Rosetta 2 but they chose not to. Had they done that, then I would have been less suspicious of their motives.
VR’s biggest use case is gaming and Apple is so far away from gaming, they’re not in the same universe.
If they want people to game on their headset - they need devs to port their games over.
I think more than gaming porn is the current killer use of 360 VR tech. More on that later.
I’ve always believed VRs biggest use case in the end is work, but resolution and integration to the surrounding environment has been lacking. Have a 360 3D environment to work in, assuming resolution is high enough to read text, opens a lot of possibilities up. Ive done a fair amount of POC with various devices over the years and I stand by that. The gesture recognition of the new apple devices leads more in that direction IMO. For instance, it should be able to key (harhar) off a virtual keyboard being typed on. (Haptics will be an issue!)
I’d note also that VR has been successful in high end manufacturing design as well for these reasons.
I think gaming is what proves a tech and motivates people to engage. On the shadier side, porn even more so. But these technologies wend their ways into all aspects of our lives after being proven out in the game / porn use cases.
This is an actually interesting use of the headset. Price tag at this state to high for most users -- but imagine it dropped down to something reasonable. Throw in your favorite game and the immersive experience would be pretty slick.
You are definitely correct -- they are opening the door for gaming on that system though they are doing it quietly not to get competition up in arms.
I will wager the headset will drop slightly in price but new skus will be offered that cover a price range. Apple products have always been too high for most users - yet they seem fairly successful as a company by chasing the top half of the market only. I don’t see them making burner VR headsets ever, I think they’ll stick at the ultra high end with some high to mid market lower ends that eschew things like showing yours eyes etc.
There are rumors floating around that macs are dropping support for discrete GPUs.
Maybe Apple has set their sights on Nvidia's AI market.
Man if Apple somehow could have their own Windows emulation layer similar to Valve's Steamdeck developments - I could see myself returning to the Mac. It would be so amazing. The Mac would become truly a gaming platform, regardless if it costs twice the price of an equivalent PC - since people who appreciate Apple's hardware and software will see its value.
Having said that there's still the issue of upgrades. But again, I have to replace pretty much my entire PC every 5 years (new CPU needs a new mobo, needs new RAMs etc). So hmm.
edit: as an aside an interesting question.. I wonder if Valve's efforts, having incentivized developers to make their games more Steamdeck compatible - and hence more "predictable" in terms of how they access Windows APIs - would also make it easier for Apple to translate the games - even if the target is different.
I mean, this is a Windows emulation layer. It's just designed for game developers to be able to quickly see what a rough version of their macOS port would look like. Like, does translating your game automatically yield you 40 FPS, or 4 FPS? Valve's emulation layer on the other hand is designed for end users to be able to run games without a native port.
Right but it's open source apparenty, and there's already efforts to create GUI etc to make this easier for end users.
Even if it doesn't run Cyberpunk at full speed, you'll have a huge catalog of indie games on Steam and older games that will run at full framerate without requiring any ports.
True, the main gotcha here I suppose is that Rosetta is also on top - since we're looking at Apple's ARM CPUs. Rosetta can translate and store the code so it doesn't have to do it every run.
Yeah but how can you stick a gtx 3090 in a Mac?
In the new Mac pro..
The new Mac Pro that, despite having PCI Express slots can't be used to add discrete GPUs to the system for graphics tasks.
Hmm, I wonder if this is technical or something else.
I mean, nobody is going to get a Mac Pro just for games even if it works...
There haven't been Nvidia drivers for macOS for years. Maybe since like the GTX 900 series?
Yeah, Apple could build their own nvk-like for Metal driver at this point if they cared about any GPU other than their own. Nvk/mesa itself might enable Linux gaming on Mac pros with 3rd party cards.. one day.
From what I gather, Game Porting Toolkit is two things - a fork of Wine, and their own adaptation/extension of open source projects for DirectX compatibility. Some observations:
Windows compatibility:
* Windows platform compatibility is achieved with a slightly patched version of Codeweavers' Wine fork - virtually all of the hard work of Windows compatibility has been achieved by the Wine developers and Codeweavers and was already available open source before today.
* Interestingly, Apple is distributing this thing as a Homebrew library. Has Apple ever done this before? [1]
DirectX compatibility:
* In addition, outside of the core Wine based stuff, there's a framework called D3DMetal.framework. This is a DirectX 9-12 compatibility layer akin to DXVK used in Proton as a compatibility layer from DirectX 9-11 to Vulkan. This is what seems to be the game changer here compared to before. Before today, running DirectX on macOS was possible but lost a lot of performance and compatibility needing to go through Apple's old OpenGL support or a third party Vulkan intermediary layer in MoltenVK. This is direct (heh) first party Direct3D to Metal translation.
* Actually, it's more than "akin to DXVK". The D3DMetal.framework contains copyright attribution to DXVK as required under their MIT license. It's quite likely Apple ported a lot of DXVK to Metal. It's worth noting that DXVK itself doesn't support Direct3D 12 though, Proton uses another LGPL2.1 licensed library called VKD3D for that.
* However, D3DMetal.framework is very much not open source itself. Its license is actually very restrictive, seemingly only permitting use for game development/QA use cases. [2]
* The restrictive license seems to make it harder for someone like Valve to use this akin to how they use Proton on Linux in a sanctioned way. Apple seems intent on preventing developers from dumping their games on macOS with just their compatibility layer. It definitely won't stop hobbyists making better tools to continue run Windows games on Macs though.
* The fact that D3DMetal.framework appears to support DirectX 9 and 10 is interesting. No new commercial efforts use those anymore, so that's just there for what? Allowing homebrewers to run their 00s era Windows games?
[1]: https://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple/tree/main/Formula
[2]: It contains a license with the following language - "you are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, personal copyright license to (i) install, internally use, and test the Apple Software for the sole purpose of developing, testing, or evaluating video games for use on Apple-branded products".
It's sad that D3DMetal isn't open source. Worth noting that this stuff is exactly why people should strongly consider using a copyleft license. It's pretty annoying that nobody can build on top of Apple's work here or incorporate any improvements into DXVK, but that's the license the DXVK project chose.
I don't care much for it being open source or not, it's just a shame Apple is making attempts to limit its use cases through licensing [1]. It's on brand for Apple and totally expected, but still sad. It's not going to stop a bunch of homebrew efforts springing up around it, but it will likely be enough to stop third party app stores like Steam from opening up a huge game library on the Mac in a straightforward way like what happened with Proton.
[1] The license is probably actually meaningless in a lot of jurisdictions, but it still has a chilling effect for commercial parties using it. That's probably exactly what Apple intends.
Well, i'm pro copyleft but in this case i have to disagree. This way Apple could develop D3DMetal much faster, and attrbution is given. If DXVK where GPL3 it might have happened years later if ever.
Huh, why are you saying Apple could develop D3DMetal much faster because DXVK was MIT-licensed? Literally nothing would've changed up until now if DXVK had been GPL-licensed, the only difference is that now that they've made it publicly available, they'd have had to license D3DMetal under a GPL-compatible license. Where does the extra delay come in?
They can weaponize it against Valve. Helping displace steam for relatively little effort bumped it up in priority.
Is it faster to build it to weaponize it against Valve than it is to build it without the weaponization?
There's only so much developer time and management focus. "This will help us cement our monopoly on software distribution without being too obvious to regulators" is a good pitch.
PS. I'm sure the people who pitched it and their managers are all sufficiently skilled at lying and lying to themselves to not put it or even think in those terms.
You can ship macOS native games on Steam as well. People need to stop throwing conspiracy theories. Their main motivation is to make sure games are native to macOS so they can take advantage of system-native features, which Win32-translated games won't. Otherwise games running on Macs will always be kind of janky and run slower than Windows.
So now they are propping up an ecosystem on which open computing will always be a second rank citizen at best. I wonder if they are all happy about it in retrospect, wine got patches, DXVK gets to be a brick in the wall of Apple's garden (if Valve can't distribute it, it's useless to them in the grand scheme of things, normal people want a one click install).
Monetarily good for the devs who ended up on Apple payroll, another nail in the coffin for competition and open computing at the same time.
> Windows platform compatibility is achieved with a slightly patched version of Codeweavers' Wine fork
If by "slightly patched" you mean "DirectX 12 support on Apple Silicon was added, then sure.
Codeweavers recently announced their own effort to support DirectX 12, but so far only one game, Diablo II Resurrected, works with it.
No, I mean slightly patched. The list of patches is included in the Homebrew formula [1].
The D3DMetal framework and its DirectX 12 support are independent of that Wine work.
[1]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apple/homebrew-apple/main/...
If you ignore the part where they added DirectX 12 support, it's only slightly patched?
You do you.
They said that’s independent of the Wine fork
> The fact that D3DMetal.framework appears to support DirectX 9 and 10 is interesting.
Lots of popular games are DX9 or 10. Rimworld, for instance, is high in the Steam charts and is DX9.
So... why is this not an end-user product like Proton on SteamOS?
Is this actually going to do anything for Mac gaming considering it's only meant for game developers for... testing? What kind of workflow is Apple envisioning here?
As far as I can tell (as not a game developer) from the introduction videos is that the game porting toolkit / Wine is designed to shorten the time it takes to get a first macOS version of your game running and to evaluate how well does it run. A (near) zero-effort rough draft of your potential macOS port.
They show that previously you'd have to take the Windows version, port the source code, port the HLSL shaders, implement graphics/audio/input/HDR and then you'd be able to get a first running version of your game that you could evaluate. And now with the Wine tool, you'd take the Windows version, run it through the Wine tool and then you'd have the first running version version of the game to evaluate. And you can then evaluate what parts of the games run good and which don't, is it utilising the GPU properly, and so on.
And if you decide that there's potential in the macOS version, you'd then start doing all of the stuff that was previously required to get the first running version.
What is the game porting toolkit?
Is this something that game devs would use or is this some wrapper or emulation layer for the end user?
Is there a list of games that use it?
Apparently it’s a emulator like Proton as used by Steam to run Windows games on Linux. It even uses Rosetta to run x86_64 core on ARM. But it’s not intended for end users. Instead it’s intended for developers to evaluate how their game would run on macOS so they can decide wether or not to port it.
According to CodeWeavers, it is based on their CrossOver code (GPL 2.1) and can be committed back into Wine:
https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/6/6/wine-come...
It uses a proprietary framework that implements Direct3D on top of Metal:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36224057
Your link confirmed that it uses wine. And your description sounds exactly like how codeWeavers wine implements direct 3D upon opengl.
I imagine it’s simply a proprietary product based on liberally licensed (LGPL) open source code, much in the same way Safari was built upon KHTML.
Sure it uses Wine, but the Direct3D API is handled by the proprietary D3DMetal framework, which implements Direct3D on top of Metal. This is different than CodeWeaver's CrossOver approach, which uses Wine's DirectX-on-Vulkan implementation and then MoltenVK to run Vulkan on Metal.
So, it is not just Wine. It is Wine plus a large proprietary Apple Framework that has most of the Direct3D magic sauce.
Thanks for the info! I think a couple of us in this thread may be arguing cross purposes - I want to ensure that codeweavers gets credit for their open source contributions and you want to ensure technical accuracy. These are both good goals and don’t conflict with each other.
Yeah, definitely! All of this wouldn't be possible without the Wine project and CodeWeavers.
Wine (and Proton) is not an emulator
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36222266
When people discuss Apple efforts in gaming, they tend to forget that this company owns second largest in the world, after Android, game platform. And with Vision, they could easily become the largest VR gaming platform in the world, even though this might not be the immediate focus upon release — but iPhone didn't have any games on release either.
Mentioning partnership with Unity in Vision announcement presentation is very significant. It is the most used game engine in the world (especially if you count by game installations) which dominates mobile market, and it has been developing VR/AR capabilities for many years now, even though it arguably doesn't have the same AAA graphics as Unreal.
apple is getting too much credit for this. they are essentially bootstrapping on the long-term efforts made at winehq.
i would like to know what value-add they have done besides making it work better at os level. i would be more impressed if they contributed to improving the translation itself like valve has done with the proton project and by contributing directly to the main project.
Fantastic would be 25fps, this isn't there yet.
That is on an M1 laptop. No dedicated GPU, not even an M1 Max. Just plain M1. Of course, it's not running super fast on Ultra settings, but imagine how slow it would be on a comparable Intel laptop with onboard graphics eating through your battery. Especially considering it only costs $1,299, which is not a lot for this kind of performance. And then it's not even an x86 CPU, for which Cyberpunk was developed. So yes, it's fantastic.
If you want to set the bar that low for fantastic, be my guest. Fps per dollar, any metric I can think of is lousy. You've not convinced me. Was impressed by Rosetta, but not this game porting toolkit, for the record.
This not only does DX12 -> Metal, it also does X86 -> ARM, and still manages to give you decent performance if you lower the graphics settings, you can manage easily 30fps, wich is enough on a laptop, considering it runs with a battery
So for 2020 laptop chip, it's pretty great achievement I'd say!
I don't know of any project that does X86 -> ARM this well
don't confuse Rosetta with this game porting toolkit.
No Apple hardware has a "dedicated GPU".
The tool is not meant to be used for that. It is fantastic in the sense that it was achieved with no changes to the game whatsoever.
I'm wondering if this is also translating the binary with Rosetta.
> I'm wondering if this is also translating the binary with Rosetta.
It is.
>Game Porting Toolkit can translate controller inputs, audio and graphics APIs, CPU instructions, and other APIs automatically.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-enabled-thousa...
Well if there are no changes made to the game whatsoever, then it has to be using Rosetta. Fantastic would be DXVK approximate levels of performance hit. This is far short of that.
DXVK does not support DirectX 12, and does only half of the job, missing the CPU instruction translations.
I was referring to the performance of DXVK not its feature support. Expecting DXVK to do Rosetta itself is beyond ridiculous.
I agree: comparing Rosetta plus the graphics API translation layer, with DXVK, which only accomplishes the latter, is ridiculous.
Here is what you said, though:
> Fantastic would be DXVK approximate levels of performance hit. This is far short of that.
Rosetta is a known quantity of approximately 20% of a drop. DXVK can do about a 20% performance drop in certain situations, and perform better than that in others.
This is at about 50% performance drop translating DX12 to Metal, on top of the drop from Rosetta.
50% drop of what? Where are you getting your baseline from? Because, as far as I know, there is no native macOS port of Cyberpunk 2077.
At 1440p, and if we take this [0] at face value, it would be 50% of the performance of a RX 6700 XT paired with a 5950X, both desktop parts, which I think is pretty good.
[0] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/cyberpunk-2077-pc-pe...
Please don't use amp links.
The m1 gpu is broadly equivalent to a gtx 1650 in a host of benchmarks. This is getting less than half the fps a gtx 1650 does at these settings, and I am being charitable.
I don't know why you are looking at 1440p (2560 x 1440) as the m1 here is running at 1440x900. While I'm there, that 6700 XT posts 50fps, half of which is 25fps, which would indeed be alright. However this is putting out less than 15fps most of the time.
Have a nice day.
> I don't know why you are looking at 1440p (2560 x 1440) as the m1 here is running at 1440x900.
Ah, you are right, I messed up with the resolution.
> The m1 gpu is broadly equivalent to a gtx 1650 in a host of benchmarks.
Which ones?
> This is getting less than half the fps a gtx 1650 does at these settings, and I am being charitable.
... without having to emulate both CPU architecture and graphics layer.
I mean, this is not really a debate. DXVK is not comparable, Wine does not do the same either. We are talking about translating both CPU instructions and graphic API calls in real time, good enough that a triple A game runs without any modification on a laptop with 16GB of shared memory.
Have a fantastic day.
25 FPS wouldn't be any more playable
Bah, when I was young we used to DREAM about 25 FPS!
I have fond(?) memories of playing Doom on a 386 with a monochrome passive TFT screen.
Am I the only person wondering why they wouldn’t demo medium/high settings on a higher framerate? Being able to run at ultra at all is quite cool, but wouldn’t it be much more interesting if you were able to run the game with 60fps at all? Is there something I’m missing?
This guy got 30-40fps, idk what settings.
https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpun...
That's on an M2 Max, which is a significantly heftier chip than the M1.
This is my daily driver device and Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best video games I've ever played, so this has me very excited. Would love to take a break from code to play a few minutes of Cyberpunk 2077 on the same device I daily drive...
I truly wonder if Microsoft didn’t help with this port. Looking at the speed and quality of this port. It seems that Apple and Microsoft are working closer than ever. Maybe some execs of Microsoft asked for to be in this demo.
Insert Bike Fall Meme here :)
Have people here not tried Proton and DXVK? This is not impressive at all
Well, I tried running it on my MBP M1 Max 64gb and whilst it works great (in low res, it does not go max on 4K with acceptable fps), it gets really hot. Just don’t game on a laptop.
Why is that people start talking about VR game or stuff? You can't play any VR in 720p 15fps, so they just assuming magic happens?
Look at all the time and effort spent to port Wine when all they had to do to win over developers was officially support OpenGL and Vulkan.
13 FPS, so not really "playable" at Ultra settings for that resolution.
That being said, that it works at all is pretty amazing. :)
I wonder what it plays like at more modest settings
Yeah, it could probably be made playable. :)
This is about DirectX 12. How's the support for d3d9 through dxvk like for end users?
nice proof of concept about the highest settings, gamers only care about 60fps minimum so should probably find/post a tweet showing those settings
then gamers will move the goalpost to cost of the machine, but thats okay
95% lift by CodeWeavers, but Apple is the one to thank. Lmao.
I guess the video looks okay but the Twitter embed video quality is dog shit. Maybe post the video somewhere like YouTube instead that supports higher quality.
Oh, cool! You can use a tool to make a computer game barely run on an overpriced computer? I will never, ever understand the appeal of Apple products.
How are Wine and friends actually legal considering the Oracle v Google thing on Java?
I've always loved it but really do wonder. That was a blasphemous verdict.
Google won that in the end. It went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Oh they did? Well, that’s good news. Something is good in this world.
Won for now. Supreme Court decisions are reversible in time.
>> How are Wine and friends actually legal considering the Oracle v Google thing on Java?
>> I've always loved it but really do wonder. That was a blasphemous verdict.
So you think APIs and interfaces should be copyrightable despite decades of precedent?
If so, Oracle owes IBM a huge amount of damages for using SQL in Oracle database software without a license.
Direct-X 12 support, but not Vulkan?
why does it look laggy and verging on unplayable, i wonder?
Because they’re running it at Ultra on the lowest end hardware configuration, with an x86_64 to arm64 translation, and a shader translation and a windows api wrapper.
For comparison, the M1 was routinely benchmarked in NVIDIA 1050 TI to 1070 territory depending on the benchmark. This is only a few fps behind native.
This actually makes me wonder if I should sell my Apple stocks, that they even put out something like this (even if only as an "evaluation tool" and based on CrossOvers GPL code) screams as an validation that there is enough developers ignoring Apple/Metal that they're actually starting to hurt from a lack of titles.
Sure, everyone doing Unity or Unreal will probably have the middleware take care of the biggest differences and Vulkan being too verbose has kept back the field, but given a choice Metal will still be an afterthought for those making custom engines.
One could hope for updated OpenGL/Vulkan support, but nobody is holding their breath anymore.
You're gonna sell your stocks in the most successful tech company of all time because they don't have enough video games? I think Apple has proven they can grow a company's value without games. But what we all want is a larger investment in games so the Mac becomes a competitive platform again.
Not to mention the headset... we'll see, but there is no reason to expect it won't be an insane commercial success by gen 3.
That's why I have stocks now (I bought them just before the first post-M1 xmas report because all I could hear about was them hitting out of the ballpark but the stock had hardly moved so I knew it to be undervalued), but past performance never guarantees future performance.
Games are a canary, Apple likes to lock in developers with their own API's and that works as long as you are the clear leader but once you're not it'll bite you. Apple mobile leadership since early iPhones attracted developers, but once the mobile market stagnated developers has looked elsewhere.
And the headset, I have a hard time seeing that people who buy Apple laptops,etc for their atheistic will put on these ski-goggles on a daily basis? And that's not even mentioning the pricepoint.
Apple had a runway after Jobs left the first time before things got bad, sure they know their history now and will do their darnedest not to repeat history but whilst Ive wasn't the right person to build professional machines, I can't wonder if he was still the type of person Apple needed for "personal devices" like the headset.
> But what we all want is a larger investment in games so the Mac becomes a competitive platform again.
As a Mac-only user, I really don’t care about games. I guess it’s cool if they work on it, but I wouldn’t want Apple diverting resources away from other areas to try and make it a gaming device.
I don't think it's about diverting resources. Apple has the funds to buy more developers to focus on gaming.
Yeah probably. My main point was mostly that it’s a bit of an overstatement to describe investment in gaming on Mac as something we all want.
Right now, the headset exclusively appeals to shareholders and apple cultists.
Just like the first iPhone...
Apple has video games, there are probably more people playing games on iPhone than ps5/Xbox combined. Many very popular Moba/eSports titles also work on Mac (LoL, all things blizzard, cs:go). The fact that there aren't many AAA games (that you can play on consoles anyway, not your laptop) is not a problem for Apple.
> all things blizzard
Recent Blizzard games (Diablo 2 Ressurected, Diablo 4) require DirectX 12 and aren't natively available for macOS.
Overwatch before that too.
Its surprising how on one hand a huge effort is put into World of Warcraft running smoothly on macOS (they always implement all the new Metal features with every expansion and it was the first native Apple Silicon game) but completely abandoned macOS for new titles.
Blizzard since mid to late 2010s is basically a different company from the one that pumped out Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo. The old company’s dead.
I think you misunderstood your parent's comment.
Blizzard _today_ takes to maintain World of Warcraft's macOS build. The same Blizzard is releasing all new titles as Windows-only.
This difference between WoW and there rest is what puzzles you parent.
Of course they won’t drop a good chunk of their existing subscribers overnight; once the initial work is done, maintenance shouldn’t take a ton of resources, especially considering it’s still a cash cow. Likewise, they are sort of maintaining SC2 with these tiny balance patches, and it’s still working on macOS, but it’s clearly the last echo of the old company.
Right, the point is that it isn't the same kind of games that you play on mobile that interests people on a "computer".
Continuing from that the mere _existence_ of this _porting toolkit_ is an indication that they do feel the lack of AAA as problem at Apple right now, otherwise they would've continued their "Metal is the future and all other API's are deprecated".
They want to tell the world that the M1/M2/etc family is the best chipset in the world (or at least in contention), showing games like Cyberpunk running well enough on a basically cold laptop would've been a coup, but games didn't support it because even larger developers didn't feel like putting in the effort.
> Moba/eSports titles also work on Mac (LoL, all things blizzard, cs:go)
That's like.. 10 games ?
I think this response lacks the context of the current state of the video game industry. In my mind this is no different than nVidia providing white glove engineering support and optimizations for titles to run on their GPUS.
There is a reason nVidia has generally won the consumer GPU arms race over the years over AMD. They go out of their way to support studios and titles, compared to what AMD does imho.
It shows that Apple recognizes it needs to lower the barrier of entry for studios to considering targeting Macs. Because compared to the larger gaming market most studios have very little incentive to build and maintain this because Mac’s could account for 1-3% of your player base. Is that worth 1-5 ICs worth of time if you are a small studio. Probably not.
They also need to focus more on backwards compatibility. If Apple continually makes most of my library unplayable as they have done repeatedly (Classic, Rosetta 1, 32bit) then I wouldn't trust them with gaming. It seems moving forward PlayStation and Xbox are making it a priority, it already was on PC and I don't think Apple will ever have anything with the draw of Nintendo that could surmount that.
This is a huge draw in PC gaming. People love going back to old games and modding them or updating them to run better. Heck, didn't Portal (a 2007 game) just get an RTX update?
As for AMD v Nvidia, imho it's more often a matter of AMD drivers being buggy even if their hardware seems to be almost on par in terms of performance, also right now NVidia has ridden high on both blockchain and now AI trends thanks to CUDA being propietary.
And the third paragraph is my point, porting would've been trivial instead of requiring another engineer if they had supported more standard API's, but they refused and now they're hedging their bets on another manufacturers API. It's just such a roundabout way of saying that they feel the pain without going back and fixing the basics.