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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

#101

Post by Hamuko »

izacus wrote: post #58

So... why is this not an end-user product like Proton on SteamOS? Is this actually going to do anything for Mac gaming considering it's only meant for game developers for... testing? What kind of workflow is Apple envisioning here?

As far as I can tell (as not a game developer) from the introduction videos is that the game porting toolkit / Wine is designed to shorten the time it takes to get a first macOS version of your game running and to evaluate how well does it run. A (near) zero-effort rough draft of your potential macOS port.

They show that previously you'd have to take the Windows version, port the source code, port the HLSL shaders, implement graphics/audio/input/HDR and then you'd be able to get a first running version of your game that you could evaluate. And now with the Wine tool, you'd take the Windows version, run it through the Wine tool and then you'd have the first running version version of the game to evaluate. And you can then evaluate what parts of the games run good and which don't, is it utilising the GPU properly, and so on.

And if you decide that there's potential in the macOS version, you'd then start doing all of the stuff that was previously required to get the first running version.

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

#102

Post by ece »

Hamuko wrote: post #91
ece wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the new Mac pro..

There haven't been Nvidia drivers for macOS for years. Maybe since like the GTX 900 series?

Yeah, Apple could build their own nvk-like for Metal driver at this point if they cared about any GPU other than their own. Nvk/mesa itself might enable Linux gaming on Mac pros with 3rd party cards.. one day.

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

#103

Post by m_eiman »

cultureswitch wrote: post #22
eliasmacpherson wrote: post #7

Fantastic would be 25fps, this isn't there yet.

25 FPS wouldn't be any more playable

Bah, when I was young we used to DREAM about 25 FPS!

I have fond(?) memories of playing Doom on a 386 with a monochrome passive TFT screen.

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

#104

Post by aurareturn »

_piif wrote: post #92
senttoschool wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. The most powerful iGPU likely. It still won't come anywhere close to high-end dedicated laptop GPUs in the vast majority of benchmarks regardless of how much optimization you throw at it - that's just falling for…

>The most powerful iGPU likely. It still won't come anywhere close to high-end dedicated laptop GPUs in the vast majority of benchmarks regardless of how much optimization you throw at it - that's just falling for marketing / hype.

In applications that actually use Metal natively, Apple Silicon GPUs do compare favorably to Nvidia laptop GPUs while using drastically less power.

So no. It isn't just hype/marketing.

Even if you look at the raw technical specs of the M2 Max GPU, it's comparable to Nvidia laptop GPUs - with the exception of ray tracing.

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

#105

Post by aurareturn »

SleepyMyroslav wrote: post #94
senttoschool wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It shows that Apple wants AAA games on Macs. Why do you think that ? I am asking as someone who is working in gamedev. Game industry got burned by some big company recently when multi year efforts were spent porting 3d stacks and the target platform got axed.

>Why do you think that ? I am asking as someone who is working in gamedev.

They built Game Porting Toolkit.

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

#106

Post by reportgunner »

GeekyBear wrote: post #32
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On iPad they would need their controls redone; it's possible, but an extra step. I'm also getting the feeling the ipad is quickly running out of favor, I haven't seen one in ages except on my parents' dinner table.

You can pair your XBox or Playstation controller with an iPad.

Those are terrible controls for most of games.

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

#107

Post by whazor »

senttoschool wrote: post #82
radicalbyte wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure - Apple's marketing claimed that the M1 was beating top end PC parts. This isn't even close.

> I'm not sure - Apple's marketing claimed that the M1 was beating top end PC parts. This isn't even close. Your statement is quite misinformed. First, this is the M1. Not M1 Pro. Not M1 Max. The M1 is almost 3 years old. Second, this is being translated from DX12 to Metal and also x86 to ARM64. Yes, both the CPU and GPU layers are being translated. Third, Apple claimed that the M1 Max was the most powerful GPU on la…

M1 has 8 GPU cores, M1 Pro has 16, M1 Max has 32 cores. Apple says the GPU of M1 Max is four times as fast as M1. So 30FPS Ultra on 1080p should be possible?

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

#108

Post by mort96 »

PinkiesBrain wrote: post #84
mort96 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, why are you saying Apple could develop D3DMetal much faster because DXVK was MIT-licensed? Literally nothing would've changed up until now if DXVK had been GPL-licensed, the only difference is that now that they've made it publicly available, they'd have had to license D3DMetal under a GPL-compatible license. Where does the extra delay come in?

They can weaponize it against Valve. Helping displace steam for relatively little effort bumped it up in priority.

Is it faster to build it to weaponize it against Valve than it is to build it without the weaponization?

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

#109

Post by reportgunner »

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.

> Moba/eSports titles also work on Mac (LoL, all things blizzard, cs:go)

That's like.. 10 games ?

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

#110

Post by madeofpalk »

Const-me wrote: post #95
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…

These GPUs aren’t too bad. Theoretically, M2 Max peaks at 14.4 teraflops, and 400 GB/s memory bandwidth. M2 Ultra is too new, but Apple says it’s GPU is 30% faster (probably 18.7 teraflops then?), and that it has 800 GB/s memory bandwidth. The numbers for M2 Ultra are comparable to some powerful GPUs. The theoretical TFlops number is close to Radeon 6900 XT and GeForce 3070, theoretical memory bandwidth is close to R…

Apple's best GPU is close to a mid-range previous gen nvidia GPU?

I'm sure it'll run a 4 year old game on medium settings great! But that's kind of the point, that it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry.

Who's supposed to be impressed by getting middling performance on Death Stranding 4 years after it came out? Literal definition of "also ran".

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