Inside Apple's Massive Push To Transform the Mac Into a Gaming Paradise (inverse.com) 144
Apple is reinvesting in gaming with advanced Mac hardware, improvements to Apple silicon, and gaming-focused software, aiming not to repeat its past mistakes and capture a larger share of the gaming market. In an article for Inverse, Raymond Wong provides an in-depth overview of this endeavor, including commentary from Apple's marketing managers Gordon Keppel, Leland Martin, and Doug Brooks. Here's an excerpt from the report: Gaming on the Mac in the 1990s until 2020, when Apple made a big shift to its own custom silicon, could be boiled down to this: Apple was in a hardware arms race with the PC that it couldn't win. Mac gamers were hopeful that the switch from PowerPC to Intel CPUs starting in 2005 would turn things around, but it didn't because by then, GPUs started becoming the more important hardware component for running 3D games, and the Mac's support for third-party GPUs could only be described as lackluster. Fast forward to 2023, and Apple has a renewed interest in gaming on the Mac, the likes of which it hasn't shown in the last 25 years. "Apple silicon has changed all that," Keppel tells Inverse. "Now, every Mac that ships with Apple silicon can play AAA games pretty fantastically. Apple silicon has been transformative of our mainstream systems that got tremendous boosts in graphics with M1, M2, and now with M3."
Ask any gadget reviewer (including myself) and they will tell you Keppel isn't just drinking the Kool-Aid because Apple pays him to. Macs with Apple silicon really are performant computers that can play some of the latest PC and console games. In three generations of desktop-class chip design, Apple has created a platform with "tens of millions of Apple silicon Macs," according to Keppel. That's tens of millions of Macs with monstrous CPU and GPU capabilities for running graphics-intensive games. Apple's upgrades to the GPUs on its silicon are especially impressive. The latest Apple silicon, the M3 family of chips, supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and mesh shading, features that only a few years ago didn't seem like they would ever be a priority, let alone ones that are built into the entire spectrum of MacBook Pros.
The "magic" of Apple silicon isn't just performance, says Leland Martin, an Apple software marketing manager. Whereas Apple's fallout with game developers on the Mac previously came down to not supporting specific computer hardware, Martin says Apple silicon started fresh with a unified hardware platform that not only makes it easier for developers to create Mac games for, but will allow for those games to run on other Apple devices. "If you look at the Mac lineup just a few years ago, there was a mix of both integrated and discrete GPUs," Martin says. "That can add complexity when you're developing games. Because you have multiple different hardware permutations to consider. Today, we've effectively eliminated that completely with Apple silicon, creating a unified gaming platform now across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Once a game is designed for one platform, it's a straightforward process to bring it to the other two. We're seeing this play out with games like Resident Evil Village that launched first [on Mac] followed by iPhone and iPad."
"Gaming was fundamentally part of the Apple silicon design,â Doug Brooks, also on the Mac product marketing team, tells Inverse. "Before a chip even exists, gaming is fundamentally incorporated during those early planning stages and then throughout development. I think, big picture, when we design our chips, we really look at building balanced systems that provide great CPU, GPU, and memory performance. Of course, [games] need powerful GPUs, but they need all of those features, and our chips are designed to deliver on that goal. If you look at the chips that go in the latest consoles, they look a lot like that with integrated CPU, GPU, and memory." [...] "One thing we're excited about with this most recent launch of the M3 family of chips is that we're able to bring these powerful new technologies, Dynamic Caching, as well as ray-tracing and mesh shading across our entire line of chips," Brook adds. "We didn't start at the high end and trickle them down over time. We really wanted to bring that to as many customers as possible."
Ask any gadget reviewer (including myself) and they will tell you Keppel isn't just drinking the Kool-Aid because Apple pays him to. Macs with Apple silicon really are performant computers that can play some of the latest PC and console games. In three generations of desktop-class chip design, Apple has created a platform with "tens of millions of Apple silicon Macs," according to Keppel. That's tens of millions of Macs with monstrous CPU and GPU capabilities for running graphics-intensive games. Apple's upgrades to the GPUs on its silicon are especially impressive. The latest Apple silicon, the M3 family of chips, supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and mesh shading, features that only a few years ago didn't seem like they would ever be a priority, let alone ones that are built into the entire spectrum of MacBook Pros.
The "magic" of Apple silicon isn't just performance, says Leland Martin, an Apple software marketing manager. Whereas Apple's fallout with game developers on the Mac previously came down to not supporting specific computer hardware, Martin says Apple silicon started fresh with a unified hardware platform that not only makes it easier for developers to create Mac games for, but will allow for those games to run on other Apple devices. "If you look at the Mac lineup just a few years ago, there was a mix of both integrated and discrete GPUs," Martin says. "That can add complexity when you're developing games. Because you have multiple different hardware permutations to consider. Today, we've effectively eliminated that completely with Apple silicon, creating a unified gaming platform now across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Once a game is designed for one platform, it's a straightforward process to bring it to the other two. We're seeing this play out with games like Resident Evil Village that launched first [on Mac] followed by iPhone and iPad."
"Gaming was fundamentally part of the Apple silicon design,â Doug Brooks, also on the Mac product marketing team, tells Inverse. "Before a chip even exists, gaming is fundamentally incorporated during those early planning stages and then throughout development. I think, big picture, when we design our chips, we really look at building balanced systems that provide great CPU, GPU, and memory performance. Of course, [games] need powerful GPUs, but they need all of those features, and our chips are designed to deliver on that goal. If you look at the chips that go in the latest consoles, they look a lot like that with integrated CPU, GPU, and memory." [...] "One thing we're excited about with this most recent launch of the M3 family of chips is that we're able to bring these powerful new technologies, Dynamic Caching, as well as ray-tracing and mesh shading across our entire line of chips," Brook adds. "We didn't start at the high end and trickle them down over time. We really wanted to bring that to as many customers as possible."
Steam? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Steam? (Score:5, Funny)
They should make an Apple Steampad and call it Pippin.
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Re: Steam? (Score:2)
I guess BG3 is not on my mac. It must be the shrooms.
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In my experience, very stable -- the problems I've seen are either bugs in the game logic or visual glitches that the patch notes say affect Windows as well. I'm not sure how to compare performance; it seems snappy enough at 4K on my M2 Max (38-core GPU variant), but I'm not very demanding about frame rate.
Re: Steam? (Score:2)
Works great on my m1max. No complaints.
Re:Steam? (Score:4, Insightful)
It really is pretty simple, Steam or it will be a failure. No one wants another marketplace (die already Epic), especially not the best Apple could do building one from the ground up. I think we’ve all hit our bubble pop limit. Developers have no interest in giving someone else a cut. As an end user, I havr no interest in yet another marketplace beyond GOG or Steam.
Re: Steam? (Score:5, Insightful)
THIS.
BUT...
this is perennially Apple. They've been focused on making MacOS a gamer's paradise many times over the years, get a little developer response, trumpet some marquee games, lotta fanfare, then the narcolepsy takes hold for a few years 'til they announce it again like it's a brand new thing.
I've seen it. I've used Macs since the 80s, owned since the 90s, and for a while worked at one of the 3 companies authorized to make Macintosh clones (remember those? Didn't think so).
I've watched Apple lose focus on two things again and again: 1. The Internet. 2. Gaming.
I learned long ago never to rely on Apple for either of these things. They're just not core competencies.
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They have a medium range CPU, a medium performance mobile phone GPU, and a baseline of 8GB RAM.
There are two main groups of gamers. You have console owners who just want a low cost, fixed platform that plays everything as it was meant to be played. Apple is too expensive for them, and does regular hardware refreshes so isn't a fixed target.
Then you have PC owners who want upgrades and value for money.
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Then you have PC owners who want upgrades and value for money.
And RGB LEDs. So many RGB LEDs. Glowy RAM is faster than the regular sort.
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I wonder why Apple hasn't released gamer peripherals. People will pay extra for a keyboard that claims to be gamer garde, 9000hz update rate and all that. Apple could add a zero to their prices.
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Another good question, the amount of gamer bling is getting ridiculous. Mice with 100 programmable buttons and a resolution higher than full-hd screens that claim rates that border on current CPU speeds, keyboards that can be programmed to play your games for you and all that with more blinkenlights than the average Christmas decoration in Texas.
Should be exactly what Apple is great at.
But I have this feeling that Apple isn't exactly considered a "good" brand among gamers. Most gamers I know like to pretend
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Lemme guess, removing the numpad is supposed to be a "cutting edge gaming feature", not just a "cutting cost rip-off feature"?
Re: Steam? (Score:2)
Some people (me included) like not having a numpad because they never use it and it takes space on the desktop. For many, the mouse is directly right of the keyboard, and having the numpad take that space can make things actually quite uncomfortable.
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Lots of gamers buy keyboards that ditch the number key on purpose. I thought about it with my last purchase (I now use a RedDragon Devarajas with outemu red hotswap switches, replacing my Aukey board with soldered gateron red) but I still play space sims occasionally and then I often want it. I never learned 10 key so I generally use the central number keys anyway... though to be fair those keyboards usually are cheaper than the equivalent model from the same manufacturer which has the number pad. Charging
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Pretty much that, but it's "worse" than that.
The console crowd would be an Apple dream, they're used to being able to buy from a single shop, since you can only play XBox games on XBox and PS games on PS, and they're even used to rebuying the same game over and over when a new console generation hits the road. They're also used to pay console tax on their games and don't instantly go "aw, hell, no!" when a game costs like 30% more for their console than they'd pay on a PC. So they're ok with paying a premiu
Re: Steam? (Score:4, Interesting)
THIS.
BUT...
this is perennially Apple. They've been focused on making MacOS a gamer's paradise many times over the years, get a little developer response, trumpet some marquee games, lotta fanfare, then the narcolepsy takes hold for a few years 'til they announce it again like it's a brand new thing.
I've seen it. I've used Macs since the 80s, owned since the 90s, and for a while worked at one of the 3 companies authorized to make Macintosh clones (remember those? Didn't think so).
I've watched Apple lose focus on two things again and again: 1. The Internet. 2. Gaming.
I learned long ago never to rely on Apple for either of these things. They're just not core competencies.
Apple don't care about gamers because not a single model comes with a gaming GPU.
They don't even come with x86-64 compatible CPUs any more.
I can spend £2,600 on a Macbook Pro and get a less powerful laptop than an £900 Asus and the Asus is likely to have RAM and SSD that you can replace, with the Mac you're stuck with a 512 GB drive, OK, maybe they've upped it to 1 TB now, that's still only 3, maybe 4 AAA games these days. My gaming desktop has 3.25 TB of SSD storage alone and I've just bought a new 2 TB M2 SSD to add to that (yeah, I'll get round to installing it soon, no need to ask me every 6 months).
Unless they're trying to get mobile gamers onto an overpriced laptop, game developers are just going to ignore Apple as they've always done. Steam tried to get Mac users on board for years and there's more Linux users on Steam than Mac users, even before the Steam Deck simply because you could get the GPUs working on Linux (Linux drivers for GPUs are terrible, but the Mac offerings make them look good).
Yes, the first thing you get when you google "Mac GPU" are a dozen different articles on how to use an external GPU, however if you're seriously into games an external GPU is utter pants compared to one in a PCI-E slot, so we'll buy desktops that can have them or laptops with them built in.
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The bulk of games are released for Windows and not for Linux or Mac.
The bulk of these games are built for amd64, and not for ARM etc.
That means that if you want the best performance while running the bulk of games, you need an amd64 processor and windows compatibility.
Yes, you can run them in emulation, and in many cases (where the game is mostly graphics bound) this can give good results. But you're throwing away performance. In cases where the game is mostly CPU bound, you're going to experience negative
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"Focused"? no. I've been a daily Mac user since '94 and at no time have I believed they wanted to do anything other than play lip service.
If they had, we would have had machines capable of using the same video cards, throughout this time. We had a few hot spots with the G3 smurf towers through the G4 and G5 Mac Pro's, but those were too expensive.
We begged Apple for mid-range desktops that could be upgraded and the response from Jobs and Cook has been a clear and consistent "fuck you."
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It really is pretty simple, Steam or it will be a failure. No one wants another marketplace (die already Epic), especially not the best Apple could do building one from the ground up. I think we’ve all hit our bubble pop limit. Developers have no interest in giving someone else a cut. As an end user, I havr no interest in yet another marketplace beyond GOG or Steam.
Apple should buy Valve, and offer optimized updates for games and "verified" status on Apple devices like Valve currently does for Steamdeck. Valve is worth 8 billion. Apple is worth 3 trillion. I'm shocked Apple or Microsoft hasn't done it already considering Valve is so cheap.
Honestly, I predict Valve will take over the console market, because they've proven with the steam deck that PC gamers are willing to ditch a keyboard and mouse if provided with a proper controller and the steam deck has been a
apple needs to cut the storage pricing big time if (Score:5, Insightful)
apple needs to cut the storage pricing big time if they want games and the ram is an joke 8GB base in some system with an $200 upgrade to go to 16GB?
Also that ram is shared with video.
for under $200 you can get 32GB of ddr5 ram on pc
as for storage some systems start at 256GB with an upgrade to 512GB at $200?? for under $200 you can get an 2TB m.2 drive on pc.
Re:apple needs to cut the storage pricing big time (Score:5, Interesting)
It's even worse than that. A Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB is regularly on sale for under $100. That's a premium brand. You can get cheaper brands for even less.
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It's even worse than that. A Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB is regularly on sale for under $100. That's a premium brand. You can get cheaper brands for even less.
Indeed, I saw a Lexar M2 drive for under £50 today. If SSD prices keep dropping like this it won't be long before I can consign my last remaining spinning disk to the role of backup drive (it's a 6 TB, 2/3 full so I'll need an 8TB drive to replace it, which might happen within a year if things keep going the way they are).
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If Apple wants to gain market share, they are going to stop shipping RAM and storage starved systems. 8 GB today is a joke, and 256 gigs of disk space? That is insane. Especially with one of macOS's functions being a fast RAM paging to make that 8 GB of RAM not feel so slow when swapping. Combine that with disk space, that that is going to be a lot of wear on a small SSD. To boot, because the iBoot partition is on that SSD, if that drive fails, the Mac is bricked, as it won't even boot from external me
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M chips don't need as much RAM as Intel because they are much more efficient. Read up on the architecture to understand.
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Agreed about storage. My biggest concern is how critical the internal SSD is, and concerns about wear. The fix? Make it as big as possible so wear gets evenly distributed.
Of course, one can attach Thunderbolt 3/4 (4 doesn't increase throughput, but is a higher number) drives, and get 95-99% of the performance of the internal drive, which would be good enough for BG3, but hanging drives off a laptop is annoying, and somewhat pointless, unless the laptop is mainly sessile. Desktops are less of an issue, b
Bullshit article (Score:4, Informative)
It's a bullshit article that might as well have been written in the 80s. We owe modern gaming to the Mac because Steve Jobs stole the mouse from Xerox, literally a claim made by the author.
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that, and Raskin's master's thesis, describing such an interface in the 60s. [for the younger here, Raskin was one of the Mac architects]
oh, and the stock that apple paid Xerox to license what Xerox *did* add.
And the mockups of the Lisa interface that predated the visit. And . . .
didfent apple drop vulkan and opengl? (Score:2)
diffident apple drop vulkan and opengl? and they want to be into games?
Good luck getting them made for mac os when it will cost game dev's hardware cost and time to port games to mac os.
Re: didfent apple drop vulkan and opengl? (Score:2)
All game engines worth more than $0.01 include a hardware abstraction layer to handle different hardware and APIs on different consoles and platforms. Almost all support metal, because iOS is a huge platform. Apple provides tools to port shaders from D3D. In practice, Metal is a non issue for game devs. The question theyâ(TM)re asking is purely and simply âoeis the market big enough to justify the support costs.â Current steam stats suggest no - despite there being many more macs out the
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Current steam stats suggest no - despite there being many more macs out there than Linux machines, far fewer of them seem to be being used to buy games.
Correction: Far fewer of them seem to be being used to buy Steam games. Steam doesn't have many Mac games, so it's a chicken-and-egg problem. You can't know for sure whether Steam gets terrible Mac game sales because Mac users truly aren't interested or because Steam doesn't have enough content for Mac users to know that they exist.
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You'd have a point if there were better storefronts for selling Mac games, but there aren't.
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You'd have a point if there were better storefronts for selling Mac games, but there aren't.
Whether there's anything better or not, if there's almost nothing to buy for the Mac, Mac users aren't going to go there. Besides, if you count iOS games (a lot of which run on at least current-generation Macs), one could argue that there are much better storefronts. :-)
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You'd have a point if there were better storefronts for selling Mac games, but there aren't.
Whether there's anything better or not, if there's almost nothing to buy for the Mac, Mac users aren't going to go there. Besides, if you count iOS games (a lot of which run on at least current-generation Macs), one could argue that there are much better storefronts. :-)
There's progress being made. Can't find the source off hand, but I remember reading an article that Apple was subsidizing development costs for Resident Evil 4 [apple.com]. That's about the only thing that makes me consider this "push" to actually be a push this time.
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Steam used to have a lot more mac games, but many of them never made the transition to 64bit. Valve aren't interested in updating their games either which tells you how little they care about the mac now. It cools your enthusiasm for purchasing things on a digital storefront when stuff just becomes inaccessible and everyone points the finger of blame at everyone else. The devs are bad for not patching their old stuff, publishers are bad for squatting on the rights and not permitting patches, valve are bad f
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Steam used to have a lot more mac games, but many of them never made the transition to 64bit. Valve aren't interested in updating their games either which tells you how little they care about the mac now. It cools your enthusiasm for purchasing things on a digital storefront when stuff just becomes inaccessible and everyone points the finger of blame at everyone else. The devs are bad for not patching their old stuff, publishers are bad for squatting on the rights and not permitting patches, valve are bad for forcing Steam client upgrades that shut out old the OSs necessary to play these unpatched games and apple is bad for deprecating interfaces that these games need.
A big part of it was the elimination of the 64-bit Carbon API. A lot of the 32-bit Mac games that didn't get updated were written for Mac OS 9, and just got brought along for the ride when Mac OS X came out. The Mac versions of those games would have been from-scratch rewrites of at least parts of the Mac integration code.
And that part is entirely Apple's fault. Nothing prevented them from releasing 64-bit Carbon. IIRC, they originally said they were planning to make it available, and even made 64-bit C
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Why should the developers be expected to update their old games years later for a completely different architecture because the hardware dropped backwards compatibility? This is squarely on Apple. You might notice that Windows, while not perfect, has a much better story when it comes to running old stuff including games. I still regularly play a game released in 1999 on Win11, written even before NT on gaming desktops was a thing.
This is squarely on Apple. You might notice that Windows, while not perfect, has a much better story when it comes to running old stuff including games.
One big difference is that Rosetta involved Apple paying Transitive for licenses, and then IBM bought Transitive [wikipedia.org]. Apple may or may not have had much choice in the matter, given that IBM announced that they were shutting down the team that developed the underlying technology (which was originally created for going the other direction and running x86 binaries on Power/PowerPC) just two months after Apple stopped shipping Rosetta in Mac OS X. Had Apple written it themselves, things might have been different.
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If you're using a major engine, yeah, Metal's a non-issue. If you're rolling your own tech or using a smaller engine, a Metal port is a big pain. It's not easy to port to the modern, low level graphics APIs like Vulkan & Metal, so it's a deal breaker for some devs. The shaders are trivial - all the shader languages are pretty similar, so unless you're doing something with bleeding edge shader tech, it's usually easy to port them.
But yeah, the market size is the real issue. It's not a question of whether
Re: didfent apple drop vulkan and opengl? (Score:2)
Nonsense. The API specific source found in a HAL is usually just 2 or 3 files. Vulkan, D3D 11/12, and metal use extraordinarily similar ideas, so itâ(TM)s easy to build the abstraction. It is a few days work. A couple of weeks by the time you account for all the bits and bobs of integration, testing, bug hunting etc.
The graphics api really makes bugger all difference here, in the same way that sound, windowing, event etc apis make very little difference.
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All game engines worth more than $0.01 include a hardware abstraction layer to handle different hardware and APIs on different consoles and platforms
Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Lumen when using Hardware Ray Tracing in Unreal 5 are only supported on DirectX 12. As you say.
Almost all support metal, because iOS is a huge platform
And for that reason, most engines don't implement much past what is needed for iOS. This is the entire point of Metal 3 to hide any difference between the two. That said, DirectX is the target pretty much everyone aims for and everything else is second to last. Mobile indeed Vulkan and Metal are important, but "the gaming" that this article is talking about is DX and that's abo
Re: didfent apple drop vulkan and opengl? (Score:2)
macOS *does* have a working compatibility layer for DX 11/12 - see Apple Game Porting Toolkit.
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https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-13-working-and-broken-apps.2347026/
Just one of many lists of broken apps, and not just small rando apps / 32-bit apps are here from a macOS major update. This turns into either dropped app support (angry customers) or higher support costs which will eat into profits. And when
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You forgot, ignored, or plain didn't know that Vulkan was well understood to be the way forward before Apple actually released Metal, despite the release dates; this is exactly like USB-C, where Apple was a member of the USB-IF and that was coming, and brought out their Lightning crap instead to sell licensing chips that hampered charging current for years.
OpenGL is still relevant, people are still using it to do real work — CAD software commonly still uses it because it is featureful, well-understood
no way (Score:5, Informative)
apple might capture some of the mobile ios gaming market, since macos is incorporating ios features (and some are worried that macos and ios will eventually merge)
developers coding AAA games for apple silicon is not going to happen in scale. apple silicon has ram soldered, doesn't allow for external gpus and apple still thinks 8 GB RAM base is realistic for 2023
Re: no way (Score:3, Insightful)
And these things are different to the PS5 how?
Re: no way (Score:5, Insightful)
It would take some miracle for Mac to become go to gaming machine.
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PS5 comes with 825GB ssd by default at a $499 cost. The lowest priced MacBook Air is $1000 and comes 256GB storage. Modern games are 50+GB. Also I am sure Apple would want 30% commission on sale of the game, which will push prices way up. Although maybe Sony charges high commission too. It would take some miracle for Mac to become go to gaming machine.
You're not going to be gaming on anything less than a MacBook Pro which has an entry level SSD of 512 GB at my local Apple Store. If I was going that way I'd also probably pick up the 1 TB option partly for gaming and partly for other things I do that have nothing to do with gaming. Sure, a MacBook Pro costs far more than a PS5 and you could probably buy a better gaming PC and get a pretty decent Gaming Pod for the money you'd be shelling out for a MacBook Pro. However, the average Apple user is not exactly
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PS5 comes with 825GB ssd by default at a $499 cost. The lowest priced MacBook Air is $1000 and comes 256GB storage. Modern games are 50+GB. Also I am sure Apple would want 30% commission on sale of the game, which will push prices way up. Although maybe Sony charges high commission too.
It would take some miracle for Mac to become go to gaming machine.
50 GB... and the rest. GTA V started out as 80 GB in 2015 (PC release) now it's well over 100 GB, mine's nearly 200 but a fresh install might cut that down. The latest Modern Snorefare is 240 GB.
It's little wonder they're selling external drives for Xboxes or that the internet is full of hacks on how to replace your XBox hard drive.
The thing is, storage is cheap and has been for a long time, so given how much you pay for a Mac, why is it so limited (and soldered in so you cant replace it)?
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There is no commission on a sale of a game.
Sony collects 30% on PSN sales, and licensing fees for publishers come to another dollar or two per copy sold.
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There's one PS5, and it has plenty of memory.
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For starters, the PS5 has 16 GB RAM and a more powerful GPU than Apple devices.
More importantly, everyone buying a PS5 is buying it to play games. People buying a Mac are buying it for some other purpose, and then maybe also using it for games.
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A fixed configuration platform is much easier to support, providing predictable and consistent performance just like a games console.
An upgradeable platform is a pain to support, and ends up with lots of compatibility problems.
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I wish PC gaming laptops supported eGPUs. That way, the laptop itself can be thin, light, and not need so many fans that it sounds like a hovercraft. Especially if this laptop is going to be schlepped around on business trips, or taken from home to work daily. An eGPU puts those heavy duty, high energy consuming and high heat components into an external box that can sit on a desk, and doesn't need to go with the laptop.
In the meantime, Macs have one advantage when it comes to laptops, and that is cooling
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eGPUs have terrible bandwidth, though -- at best the equivalent of 4x PCIe lanes, versus 16 lanes in a standard motherboard. That will put a significant damper frame rate when the scene has high complexity. There's a reason -- actually several reasons, but performance is the killer one -- they never really caught on and are now getting harder and harder to find.
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The real reason why eGPUs aren't popular with laptops, IMO, is because they require those bulky, heavy enclosures.
You could make a slinkier eGPU but it would have to a dedicated case and/or GPU design to handle airflow. The market is small enough to not merit that. At least Thunderbolt 5 will provide a credibly fast link to one, which eliminates the other big objection.
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Macs have one advantage when it comes to laptops, and that is cooling. A gaming laptop has so much air going through it that they often become choked with dust and need opened up and hosed out in a periodic basis. Something like a MacBook Air, which has passive cooling is less prone to dust overheating issues.
The Macbook Air is limited by its lack of active cooling, so it can't deliver its maximum potential performance. The gaming laptop can. If you don't want it to choke itself so quick, you can limit its performance artificially in much the same way the Macbook does naturally — just set a performance profile that doesn't permit it to use the fans over a low speed. Then it too can have its clock rate thermally throttled, and provide mediocre performance. Nice way to spin the drawback of a lack of choice,
Re: no way (Score:3)
Hahahahah
That's what apple said, and it was wrong when they said it. Now you're just repeating a falsehood.
You still need just as much RAM if you want to work with just as much data and also have good performance. Macs are the Switch of the computer gaming world. Just not enough resources to do what the big boys do, period. That doesn't mean you can't have good games, but it does still mean you can't have the same performance. My PC has 32GB of system RAM and 16GB of vram and if you think that 16gb (for exa
Meh (Score:2)
Re: Meh (Score:2)
Shared memory architectures and shared memory architectures are not the same thing.
The Intel igps that earned such derision were bad for a few of reasons:
1. They were just bad - like, the GPU was bad.
2. The RAM was accessed over buses designed for the CPU, meaning low latency, low bandwidth. GPUs typically aim for high bandwidth at the cost of latency because memory access is much more predictable than on the cpu.
3. The memory was divided in two, and henceforth never actually shared. The system just prete
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This is why modern consoles also use shared memory architectures. Itâ(TM)s in modern terms, the better way of doing things.
This is also why modern consoles are adequate but don't actually compete with PCs in the serious end of the market. And you are also disregarding upgradability as a desirable thing. Something consoles don't have and Apple has never been famous for either and is unlikely to ever be, unless upgrading means buying a whole new console or iDevice.
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Things are not looking good for upgradeability in the future though. Socketed RAM and PCIe may be convenient but they are performance sucking dogs and high end business customers want better which looks like it's going to be soldered HBM and compute accelerators closer to the CPU with better sharing. nVidia doesn't care about gaming beyond marketing now. It was all fun and games when gamers could subsidise their push for compute, but now gamers are a significant cost for a small but irritating competition f
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Things are not looking good for upgradeability in the future though. Socketed RAM and PCIe may be convenient but they are performance sucking dogs and high end business customers want better which looks like it's going to be soldered HBM and compute accelerators closer to the CPU with better sharing. nVidia doesn't care about gaming beyond marketing now. It was all fun and games when gamers could subsidise their push for compute, but now gamers are a significant cost for a small but irritating competition for their GPU dies that they want to put on $10k datacentre cards and sell by the pallet load. Basically the needs of business customers and the needs of gamers are diverging so much that I would expect gaming hardware to get more niche and more expensive with lesser and lesser gains.
You are a perfect example of why AI is a failure so far.
Re: (Score:2)
consoles have slots for storage and what is bad ab (Score:2)
consoles have slots for storage and what is bad about that?
also the mac studio and pro has storage in slots but it's the apple only cards that cost like 4-5X the cost of other m.2 drives.
Re: (Score:2)
No backwards compatibility, no sale (Score:2)
Nope. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Nope. (Score:4, Insightful)
Vulkan isn't a friendly API the way OpenGL was and I think that has really hurt it. Vulkan is what AAA bleeding edge, Unreal Next Version developers need and it doesn't care about your toy renderer. It's a sheer cliff face of difficulty that doesn't get any easier and constantly kicks you in the shins every time you fail to understand the design ethos behind it. I get it, OpenGL was a dead end, it was a bag of spiders by the end and there was nothing that could be done to make it properly threaded and performant without essentially rebuilding it in a non-compatible way, but I feel like Vulkan has caused a divide between the high end and the people who want to learn how to do engine development.
And I feel like Metal *is* that halfway house between "build your skills as you go" opengl and "high performance stateless compute kernel based rendering." Vulkan I think pushes a narrative that either you want to make the next gen rendering engine and are willing to aim for the top 0.01% of programmers, or you should just be playing drag and drop in an off the shelf engine. It means I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes easier for companies to find Metal fluent developers to make mac/ios ports than it is to find competent Vulkan devs.
But that's just my opinion.
Re: (Score:3)
Apple needs Vulkan because VKD3D-Proton.
With those two things Apple could run games without modification.
Most developers are never going to bother to port their engine to Metal because the Mac market is so small. It's a small percentage of the market worldwide, and only a percentage of the users are gamers.
There seems to be no problem supporting D3D, Vulkan, and OpenGL on Windows. Why can't Apple support Metal and Vulkan? Answer, NIH. And as long as they behave that way, they will always be a third rate con
Re: (Score:2)
So, I game on Linux. I got angry enough at Windows ca. version 10 that I just wasn't willing to mess with it any more, and I say this as a guy who has historically paid for his Windows licenses. I am kind of a cheapskate so my PC is A) mostly old and slow and B) has a kind of Ship of Theseus thing going on, and I just upgraded to a 4060 Ti 16GB (good budget AI card, got it for $50 off so it was only about $50 overpriced given its specs) from a 1070, so I have a little experience gaming with both old and new
Re: (Score:2)
not really, you dont have to code in low-level metal because it's well integrated into a few development environments. It's literally a build target on Unity and Unreal so it's relatively low effort. Game porting kit offers a pretty smooth path across, and while Mac and iOS are different, the effort to support metal works for both. I have a customer that uses Unity for development of their product and they ported it to metal in a day and had it running on Apple TV. They aren't a AAA game studio but they
Re: Nope. (Score:2)
I don't see Apple being anywhere near competitive with either consoles or PCs in any practical way. Currently the status quo for both is you spend less than $1,000 every 5-7 years and you'll generally keep up with the latest games.
For PCs you're basically just talking about replacing the GPU now and then. Everything else will generally last you over a decade.
While you can't do that for consoles, the hardware price is at least subsidized, and it will still work long after EOS. Even if something breaks, you c
Even with loadsa money it is still unworkable (Score:2)
Meanwhile, in console land, Microsoft finally closed the gap to the point where most Xbox gamers can just use their latest console to play their entire game library, and with Sony, gamers can keep just a
Oh yes (Score:2)
As a Mac owner, you made me smile (in complete agreement) this morning.
Re: (Score:2)
I think basically everything you said is incorrect. Apple breaks compatability far less than Windows and when Apple does it, it's a big advertised thing dressed up as a possitive while Microsoft just reworks the backend so gamers are stuck on older versions of windows until support is almost up and everyone has finally got their stuff to play on the newest version. Windows 11 is just 1/4 of all windows installs. Why don't gamers update? too much doesn't work well or performance regressions. Tons of game
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You completely lost it leading with $1000 every 5 years for gaming PC. it's so non-sense that nothing else you said has any credibility.
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With Apple now pushing Metal onto developers, which means coding for yet another low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated 3D graphic and compute shader
You are aware that Metal was actually released before the only other low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated 3D graphic and compute shader was even announced to be starting development? "Now" my shiny ass. Well, you could almost get the impression Vulkan (The Khronos Group began a project to create a next generation graphics API in July 2014 with a kickoff meeting at Valve) only exists because of Metal (Initial release June 2014). But no, it's just another case of Apple using their damn time machine ag
Zero chance (Score:3)
There is simply insufficient memory bandwidth to compete with discrete cards.
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The most interesting part of Apple Silicon is the RAM is inside the CPU package, located directly adjacent to the CPU/GPU. This lets them run the RAM way faster than you can with socketed RAM on the motherboard.
It's still DDR5, so it can't compete with GDDR6 based designs, but it comes a lot closer than you'd think.
Re: Zero chance (Score:2)
Putting it in the same package and having Tim Cook fart on it doesn't magically turn it into SRAM dude... It's still DRAM. At best you're gaining an ever so slightly shorter RTT for signaling, which means fuckall when you're already waiting for bus synchronization.
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GDDR6 isn't SRAM, it's DDR SDRAM with a couple of added mask & fill features to make it SGRAM. It's not only not static, it's not even dual-ported.
On the other hand, the ram on the apple chip also isn't dual-ported and is unified, so CPU and GPU are in competition for the same memory access. Not having a dedicated GPU with dedicated memory on a dedicated bus is always inferior, you're going to end up in contention sometimes even if you have a very fast bus. It's a great cheap solution, which Apple then
I remember... (Score:3)
I remember when Apple wanted to be taken seriously in the gaming market when Doom 3 was making the rounds. That turned out well.
No dice (Score:3)
Apple has always been and still is a gaming backwater. I see this as going the way of Apple TV+, where you get a bunch of mediocre "original content" that Apple bought and paid for, and not much else.
True enough (Score:3)
I was on the beta for Warframe Mobile, playing it on the same iPhone, iPad, and Mac where it ran butter smooth doing things that made my steam deck fans scream for mercy.
The platforms are more than ready, at this point i think there’s more issues with exclusivity agreements than porting process (I’ll never know if Borderlands 3 runs well on Mac, that platform version is an Epic Store exclusive and I won’t pay for that kind of BS).
Oh yeah (Score:2)
Let me just spend 10x the amount for the exact same hardware and still less gaming support no matter what they do. Yeah, no. Never Apple.
Gaming on Vision Pro, if you can afford it. (Score:2)
A joke (Score:2)
A gaming paradise with 8Gig of Ram and 265G of storage.... Yeah right .. I guess if all you want to play is candy crush. It's 2K for a 16gb Mac Book 'PRO' however the GPU will suck up 8GB running a good game. BTW my Radeon 7900 xt has 20GB of ram just for the card.
Apple laptops... (Score:2)
Proprietary never works (Score:2)
"... as many customers as possible."
Apple isn't developing the games so they have zero customers after the hardware and OS. The tech industry has seen it before: A hardware manufacturer thinks it can franchise the manuals/API to software developers with exorbitant fees and a percentage of the sales.
Proprietary hardware doesn't have the latest GPU or rendering software, so gamers stop buying it. Also it doesn't support the latest game controller, so gamers stop buying it.
Nowadays, the software industry is much more mature but price is s
Short of a revolution... (Score:2)
I can't see it happening.
It's all about the games - not just new titles, but old titles too.
There's a reason many console developers offer plenty of backwards compatibility - because they can sell more games and also entice users into subscriptions.
PC gamers already have a huge amount of flexibility to play older titles.
Where does that leave Apple Silicon?
I guess it'll be down to emulation to get a sizeable back catalogue - but they will be up against some stiff competition.
If Apple are willing to relinquis
It won't happen. (Score:4)
For example, here's a fairly major one for independent game developers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
This guy is a former penetration tester for Activision Blizzard and I believe at least one other major games publisher; he's now an independent game developer. This is one of the people Apple should be trying to appeal to the most. Is this something they've addressed in the 1-2 months since this video hit? I didn't see it in TFS, so I highly doubt it.
That's just one example. I've followed the progress of the cross-platform Dolphin Gamecube/Wii emulator over the years in their (sometimes-attempting-to-be) monthly progress report [dolphin-emu.org]. An occasional recurring theme I've seen with several of their feature implementations or big bugfixes is that the OS X solution requires some kind of kludgy workaround because OS X lacks basic support for something important, assuming they even implement said feature in the OS X build. I can't point to any specific examples (I have an unfortunately bad memory), but it's definitely come up more than once.
There's also Apple's apparent lack of support for something as basic as a native Vulkan implementation, presumably because they want to push developers to Metal instead? I'll admit I don't know all that much about the specifics of the situation. What I do know is that almost everyone that bothers to port games reliant on Vulkan to Mac apparently just uses MoltenVK, which is a FOSS project that just implements Vulkan on top of Metal. Supposedly it's a really solid project, but it's still a third party workaround for Apple's lack of first party support for something pretty basic and fundamental to modern cross-platform game development. And let's be real, OS X is not getting many games that aren't cross-platform.
For the record, I'm not even a developer at all (anymore), let alone a Mac one... this is all stuff I've just kind of heard about over the years following various gaming topics. I'm by no means an expert; I'm sure someone actually involved with game development for OS X would have much more insight on this and probably other major problems with OS X game development.
But I do know enough to know that a half-assed gaming push like every other one they've made won't be enough to capture any substantial percentage of the market. They'd need a much, much bigger, much more sustained push that addresses the existing fundamental problems, something which they seem unwilling to do.
Neat! (Score:3)
...future Apple hardware will finaly address the cooling/RAM shortage/limited storage problems they have had for decades.
Hmm (Score:2)