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>can’t sync frames What does this mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing
Now that I’ve had more time since I read the post, I think they may have been referring to adaptive refresh rate.
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>can’t sync frames What does this mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing
Now that I’ve had more time since I read the post, I think they may have been referring to adaptive refresh rate.
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It’s not necessarily about the hardware, but (for me at least) more to do with the OpenGL hacks I have to do to get reasonable cross platform support rolling. Took about 2 days to take a win project to linux, that same win project took about 3 weeks to port to mac. That was the first time I’d done it of course (to either mac or linux), but I just found the mac documentation to be severely lacking. Also all macs are n…
There is no Vulkan support on Mac as far as I know, except with MoltenVK...
I 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.
iOS is an exception due to it's position in the market but I've been seeing less and less interest in mobile overtime too
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You cannot run macOS virtualized on anything but Apple hardware. It's against the Apple Terms of Service. Is it technically possible to do? Yes. However most companies will not do so because that's ground for getting sued, or having your developer licenses revoked. For the same reason as macOS games must be build on Apple machines, iPhone and iPad applications must also be build on Apple hardware. There is an entire…
Sure, you're right about running macOS on non apple hardware but I know a lot of windows user do that and if you're a serious developer why not just buy an apple computer. I really doubt the cost of the apple computer to then compile isn't going to be paid off from macOS users if the game is any good. Renting out a mac mini isn't raising the cost or complexity to something unreasonable either. It's like people are fo…
As a company, adding an additional different testing infrastructure (rent a macmini farm) with the additional pipeline costs (setup, build pipeline etc) as well as the additional opex, again, for a small potential market, is not economical.
I remain skeptical of the long term viability of VR; I’m old enough to remember when 3D TVs and monitors were going to change the face of both TV and video games, and yet here we are. I priced out VR recently and I was unimpressed with the price per value available, with most systems adding $500-$1,000 to my gaming system’s cost, and some requiring that I modify my room to work properly. And that’s not even accountin…
Yeah but have you played beat saber? I'm dead serious though the experience you get in a good immersive VR rig is completely unrivaled. Well worth the hassle and overhead. This will get better as costs come down and developers continue to innovate.
Beat Saber is the most fun game I have ever played. No qualifiers. No shifty language. Nothing else is even in the same order of magnitude as Beat Saber. I dare to even call it a video game, because very few other games even possess the language to compete with it. The combat in FF7R is visceral, but you're not actually swinging Cloud's sword. The loop in Animal Crossing is entrancing, but it doesn't become your entire world like when you put a headset on. Even other VR games, which have that language they can use to tell their gameplay, often feel like the VR experience is bolted onto something which could, and maybe should, be non-VR. You often fight with the game; the game transplants you into a world, not just on a screen, but every degree surrounding you, yet you're limited in how you move, you're limited in how the game allows you to interact, nothing feels natural, and you soon adapt your actions with what the game wants.
I am solidly in the camp that, honestly, VR will not become a household item like a game console is. Even with headsets priced about at the level of a game console, like the Rift, the platform has too many downfalls.
Startlingly few games work well in VR. Even an experience like Half Life Alyx, the pinnacle of VR technology, feels like a shell of a game like Half Life 2. Its different. It can't tell a strong story, because players don't generally spend more than 30-90 minutes in VR at a time. It can't really innovate in puzzle design, because movement and viewport control is so heavy that it becomes tiring if you ask the player to do too much. The mechanics feel incredible. No one enters HL:A for the first time, loads that pistol, and doesn't have this HUGE GRIN on their face. But, its also a novelty; it wears off far too quickly once you begin realizing how many fundamentally core things Valve had to sacrifice to make the game work at all.
Nearly every game in VR is, bluntly, a tech demo. The platform is still figuring out if it is viable. Of the top selling VR games on Steam, #7 is a sim game which models a hyper-realistic anime girl, allowing you to mess with her clothes in a predictable anime way, and #10 is Skyrim. Of course, HL:A and Beat Saber are #1 and #2, but roughly this state is where VR was six years ago. It hasn't really evolved, and I'm not convinced HL:A was the catalyst I think Valve is hoping it is.
But, maybe I'm wrong. I will say this: There is no price you can pay for a VR headset that does not make Beat Saber worth it (within your means, of course). It is that good. I have an Index ($1000); beyond spending an hour or two in as many games as I can, 100% of my time is spent in Beat Saber, and I do not regret the purchase. Everything else VR has to offer is just icing. But this, a platform, does not make.
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What? You'll run an unsupported card over 4 slow PCIe lanes over thunderbolt in some third party box? That's a terrible experience.
See other comment and it hasn't been a bad experience for me. Have you personally tried it? I used to have a windows desktop just for gaming and before I decided to limit what I own.
Already a terrible experience.
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> Did Steve Jobs really dislike games? Dislike may be a bit strong, but John Carmack described him as indifferent: > Over the years I've been through a number of initiatives where Apple wants to get serious about games, and we've done things with them. The idea way back with Quake 3 on there, that was my deal with Steve Jobs: if Apple adopts OpenGL rather than going off and doing QuickTime3D or something else of thei…
This always struck me as highly shortsighted of Jobs and other Apple leadership. Games helped to drive and define the Apple II and Macintosh successes, and the virtuous cycle of gamers growing up on those platforms and then wanting to try their hands at developing their own games for them is how many, many software developers got their start, including some who later found themselves at Apple. What's especially stran…
[0]e.g. see the concluding paragraph on https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
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Agree with everything except > 4. Culture. Steve Jobs disliked games, it shows in Apple's support. IMO their lack of support has less to do with hate and more that they just didn't find value in that demographic. No one is making money off gaming hardware. On the other hand Apple has put in a LOT of effort into iOS gaming. Steve Jobs himself had multiple games showcased in his keynotes.
>No one is making money off gaming hardware. Huh? I mean, surely nobody is making Apple-money from gaming hardware. But plenty of companies of various sizes are decently profitable and making money in this space.
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> Did Steve Jobs really dislike games? Dislike may be a bit strong, but John Carmack described him as indifferent: > Over the years I've been through a number of initiatives where Apple wants to get serious about games, and we've done things with them. The idea way back with Quake 3 on there, that was my deal with Steve Jobs: if Apple adopts OpenGL rather than going off and doing QuickTime3D or something else of thei…
This always struck me as highly shortsighted of Jobs and other Apple leadership. Games helped to drive and define the Apple II and Macintosh successes, and the virtuous cycle of gamers growing up on those platforms and then wanting to try their hands at developing their own games for them is how many, many software developers got their start, including some who later found themselves at Apple. What's especially stran…
Apple II, but Macintosh? I'm not sure I agree with that.
I think a lot of Jobs' opinions about personal computers gelled in the 80's. Back then, with the various Sinclair machines, the Ataris, the C64, and the Amiga, there were a lot of people who said that games actually harmed those platforms. In North America at least, having a large library of games made businesses see those platforms as toys and game consoles. Why would you buy an office full of game consoles? You're a serious business man wearing a serious business suit, running a serious business, and you need computers from a serious business computer company that can run serious business software! You need an IBM!
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Even if you DO buy a lot of expensive hardware, it’s a giant pain in the ass. There are no good rackmount solutions and so we ended up with a room full of expensive “trashcan” macs and they were STILL the biggest drag on our build infra. This has been an issue for decades. Twenty years ago I was doing grid/HPC computing at Sun and there were a lot of bioinformatics firms that used macs and wanted compute clusters of…
It's possible to mount the trashcan mac pros with unofficial mounts, its just awkward and definitely not intended [0]. You can also mount iMac Pros [1]. [0] https://twitter.com/brianstucki/status/800778773998145536 [1] https://www.macstadium.com/imacpro