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Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

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Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#41

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).

all while being emulated on rosetta

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#43

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).

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#44
post #34

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 fa…

> 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.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#45
post #34

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 fa…

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.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#48

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.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#49
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.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#50

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 diffe…

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