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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

#71

Post by DCKing »

yreg wrote: post #63
DCKing wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bro…

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…

> 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.

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

#72

Post by maleldil »

valzam wrote: post #21
whizzter wrote: post #10

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…

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.

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

#73

Post by senttoschool »

yreg wrote: 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…

>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.

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

#74

Post by djsavvy »

izacus wrote: post #62
flohofwoe wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#75

Post by reaperman »

willcipriano wrote: post #70
izacus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They put comparison of power against nVidia 3090 which made every Apple fan think it's comparable in performance too :D

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.

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

#76

Post by skavi »

radicalbyte wrote: post #36
gilgoomesh wrote: post #6

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.

To be fair, the M1 is now approaching 3 years of age. And the game is being emulated.

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

#77

Post by spookie »

DCKing wrote: post #44
yreg wrote: 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 bro…

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.

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

#78

Post by throwaway290 »

willcipriano wrote: post #70
izacus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They put comparison of power against nVidia 3090 which made every Apple fan think it's comparable in performance too :D

Wasn't it the "fastest laptop ever"?

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...

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

#79

Post by Hamuko »

gilgoomesh wrote: post #6

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).

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/

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

#80

Post by PinkiesBrain »

scns wrote: post #39
mort96 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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