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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

#241

Post by WorldMaker »

BryantD wrote: post #188
afavour wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise I don't think Apple is chasing the "dedicated gaming machine" crowd here. They want casual gamers to be able to load up a couple of games on the machine they're buying for non-gaming reasons. I'm exactly one of those people: I rarely play video games these days but when the pandemic hit I ended up installing B…

Mobile gaming and PC gaming are somewhat different markets. In particular, mobile game development companies don't have any choice but to work with Apple and Google, whereas AAA PC gaming companies have another outlet already. I like Apple and I like their products but I think if you talk to any sizable mobile developer they'd be able to tell you stories about the difficulties of working with Apple.

Most of the "sizable" mobile developers are entangled in the PC/Console game developers if in no other place than on the broad sheet with one generating revenue to pay for the increasingly expensive other. King is a part of Activision Blizzard (and a part of the pending sale to Microsoft). Zynga is a part of Take-Two (Rockstar/2K). Riot is obviously Riot. A half-dozen others are arms of Tencent in one way or another, who in turn is heavily invested in Funcom and Epic and Riot and From Software and less invested but still invested in plenty more like Ubisoft. NetEase is a mobile developer and publisher that also develops (but so far generally doesn't publish) PC and console games and has been buying studios looking to deepen that.

The list goes on; everything videogames is deeply entangled financially. Therefore, the markets must be deeply entangled, too.

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

#242

Post by fnordpiglet »

madeofpalk wrote: post #110
Const-me wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I see, so in the world you propose we live in the Nintendo Switch must be a tremendous flop?

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

#243

Post by mlindner »

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.

It's being run through several layers of emulation. Of course it's going to be slow.

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

#244

Post by mekpro »

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…

This video sample use base M1 chip.

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

#245

Post by doctorpangloss »

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…

Here's another POV:

> Like how does all this Vulkan, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?

Vulkan today sucks. Nobody writes Vulkan native engines. It's not optimized anywhere.

Google has twice tried and failed to make Vulkan a thing - first on Android, where nobody cares to target it, even on the Quest, and the GPUs suck anyway; and second on Stadia, which besides the up front product development cost, it was 3-20x worse performance compared to DirectX for the games that were ports anyway.

But I'd rather have Vulkan around and succeed, even if it sucks today. Because having only DirectX, or only DirectX and middlewares for the Switch, iOS and PlayStation, is worse.

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

#246

Post by wishfish »

hedora wrote: post #228
ohgodplsno wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rosetta translation + D3D12OnMetal (which developers aren't allowed to use to publish their games, so you'll have to do it on your own and work with a subpar version) will happily eat that 30% difference. Not to mention the massive changes that drivers bring, where Apple will never either want or be able to do as much work as Nvidia does.

The 30% faster hardware is running Linux. The main reason I'm disappointed with steam on MacOS is that only a third of my library works at all, and that the stuff that does run is hit or miss, performance wise (especially the indie / casual games, which this hardware should laugh at). Also, another 25% of my library actually was ported to MacOS, but it is 32 bit only, so it won't run on an M2. (Also, typing that sent…

Steam has mislabeled many of the older Mac games as being incompatible. Several of them will work just fine. It's worth double checking on one of the Mac gaming wikis if you want a particular game.

Have no idea why the mislabeling happened. Maybe Steam is working solely off dates despite many games being 64 bit before the 32 bit cutoff.

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

#247

Post by fnordpiglet »

nightski wrote: post #163
hajile wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most used GPU according to Steam survey is the 1650 -- a low-midrange card from 2019.

Yeah and those people aren't going to pay significantly more money for a Mac M2 Max.

I paid a ton of money for my top of the line M2 Max because I build large rust systems that are high bandwidth and low latency and it’s as good as it gets for that. I also like to play games, but I don’t need the cutting edge. I would rather eat glass than buy a windows bing advertisement device and find another footprint in my home to install it just so I can get a higher frame rate than my eye can see. In fact, my strategy for gaming over the last 20 years has been to buy games 3 years old and devices that run them at their top end. No bugs, tons of reviews to guide my purchases, tons of mods, full DLC sets, always on sale. As long as I don’t sit around feeling envy looking at what’s cutting edge, following the 3 year wave front gives me precisely the experience folks had 3 years ago - but better. I’ll have their current experience in 3 years, so long as I don’t die, without all the bleeding edge problems.

So, great. Apple lets me stay away from bard directed bing advertising and OS level spy ware on my desktop, simplify my computing footprint in my household, and provides me games from a few years ago. Seems like a win win.

Source: I am someone who paid significantly more money for a Max M2 Max

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

#248

Post by dunham »

afavour wrote: post #170
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…

> it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise I don't think Apple is chasing the "dedicated gaming machine" crowd here. They want casual gamers to be able to load up a couple of games on the machine they're buying for non-gaming reasons. I'm exactly one of those people: I rarely play video games these days but when the pandemic hit I ended up installing B…

Although, as a casual gamer, I'd like to be able to run the games that I bought in the Apple App Store on my Mac. (e.g. "DeathSpank", a fun spoof of action RPGs, is 32-bit, so it's now unplayable.)

I've used crossover to play Skyrim on my M1 mac (and they just sent me an email saying Apple leveraged crossover code for their porting toolkit), so there might have been an option prior to this - if the performance is good enough for your game.

If you do want crossover, get a free trial, but wait for a discount. I think they discount around 30-40% near the end of the trial and during special sales.

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

#249

Post by doodlesdev »

mlindner wrote: post #243
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.

It's being run through several layers of emulation. Of course it's going to be slow.

Wine + DXVK disagrees. Graphics API emulation doesn't necessarily provide worse performance, in fact DXVK often wins against raw DirectX 9/10 and sometimes even DirectX 11. VKD3D performance is pretty awesome.

Not sure how much of the bottleneck here is because of Rosetta though (i.e. cpu-bound) although I suspect not much really.

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

#250

Post by fnordpiglet »

boringg wrote: post #212
christoph wrote: post #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…

This is an actually interesting use of the headset. Price tag at this state to high for most users -- but imagine it dropped down to something reasonable. Throw in your favorite game and the immersive experience would be pretty slick. You are definitely correct -- they are opening the door for gaming on that system though they are doing it quietly not to get competition up in arms.

I will wager the headset will drop slightly in price but new skus will be offered that cover a price range. Apple products have always been too high for most users - yet they seem fairly successful as a company by chasing the top half of the market only. I don’t see them making burner VR headsets ever, I think they’ll stick at the ultra high end with some high to mid market lower ends that eschew things like showing yours eyes etc.
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