Valve drops VR support for macOS
techcrunch.com
Valve drops VR support for macOS
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Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS
#2I don't understand why a Mac is such a bad platform for gaming, what is the technical challenge here? Can someone enlighten me?
Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS
#3I don't understand why a Mac is such a bad platform for gaming, what is the technical challenge here? Can someone enlighten me?
The main reason is that Apple's pushing their own graphics API (Metal) rather than supporting the cross-platform Vulkan API. Apple also doesn't make any machines targeted for gaming use, and they haven't used NVidia graphics chips for quite a while and don't ship drivers for recent NVidia chips, so even Hackintosh users have trouble building a great Mac gaming system.
Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS
#4I don't understand why a Mac is such a bad platform for gaming, what is the technical challenge here? Can someone enlighten me?
As the article alludes, lack of a build your own, flexible yet affordable desktop option seems to be a pretty deadly aspect.
Pretty much Mac owners are on laptops. Even in the PC world few laptops can power VR. Those that do tend to be bulky for cooling and have nVidia GPUs; both things which MacBooks seem unwilling to have.
Having a extensible desktop at 1k that supports nVidia would probably go a long way.
Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS
#5I don't understand why a Mac is such a bad platform for gaming, what is the technical challenge here? Can someone enlighten me?
The main reason is that Apple's pushing their own graphics API (Metal) rather than supporting the cross-platform Vulkan API. Apple also doesn't make any machines targeted for gaming use, and they haven't used NVidia graphics chips for quite a while and don't ship drivers for recent NVidia chips, so even Hackintosh users have trouble building a great Mac gaming system.
Since after High Sierra (Mojave I think?), Apple eliminated the ability to use non-metal drivers on macOS wholesale. Nvidia’s drivers weren’t developed in Metal and there’s zero reason for them to do so (only way to use Nvidia is intentionally either as an addon to a Mac Pro or as an eGPU, which they don’t see a large market for it) and Apple has a long history of killing off support of something on their platforms, users be damned.
Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS
#6Mac is a horrible platform to support for video game developers. Speaking from experience the issues are:
1. No cross platform builds allowed. We can compile to Windows, Linux, Android, Switch, PS4, Xbox One all from one windows build machine.
2. Shifting sand of non-backwards compatibility. Notice how of the above list everyone except Linux and Android have solid back compat stories. Video games are in development for 2-3 years, and stay on the market for 5+ years with no planned recompiles. So a 7 year period of support after inital build machine setup is expected, anything less is going to get your platform side lined.
3. Small market. Mac users make up a share of sales similar to Linux. "What are you talking about! Linux is 1% while Mac is a whole 4%!", nope! Those numbers are the same insignificance per a video game business plan. Platforms with such low sales, like Stadia, might be support provided the platform owner pays porting costs.
4. Culture. Steve Jobs disliked games, it shows in Apple's support.
5. Horrible hardware. Supposing you've decided to ignore all the downsides, and the small upside still appeals to you. Now you have to tune your game to run on hardware which would put cheap Wal-Mart machines to the test. Apple's install base is almost all integrated older intel GPUs. If you do not support Metal, then you are forced to support these old intel integrated GPUs with bonus hacked up OpenGL drivers.
All points are ones I am speaking from experience on. We shipped TINY METAL on MacOS, the lack of cross build delayed the release. The horrible sales numbers meant carrying forward support was a net drag on the game. All further games I work on do not get MacOS ports for these reasons.
Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS
#7Good riddance.
Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS
#8I don't understand why a Mac is such a bad platform for gaming, what is the technical challenge here? Can someone enlighten me?
Mac tends to fail meeting minimum graphics requirements. There’s no practical way around it.
Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS
#9I don't understand why a Mac is such a bad platform for gaming, what is the technical challenge here? Can someone enlighten me?
Danieru explained pretty well in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23048633
Re: Valve drops VR support for macOS
#10Mac is a horrible platform to support for video game developers. Speaking from experience the issues are: 1. No cross platform builds allowed. We can compile to Windows, Linux, Android, Switch, PS4, Xbox One all from one windows build machine. 2. Shifting sand of non-backwards compatibility. Notice how of the above list everyone except Linux and Android have solid back compat stories. Video games are in development f…
> Video games are in development for 2-3 years, and stay on the market for 5+ years with no planned recompiles.
Do video game makers plan for updates? Am I getting this wrong, or are patches and such deployed without a game recompile?