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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

#331

Post by tcmart14 »

musicale wrote: post #311
BryantD wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> if you talk to any sizable mobile developer they'd be able to tell you stories about the difficulties of working with Apple If you're a sizable game developer used to working with Sony or Nintendo, how much harder is it to work with Apple? For pure mobile devs, how much harder is it to work with Apple vs. Google, and why? If it isn't worth it, why bother? Android seems to have larger market share. How much higher a…

I don't think fees are a viable argument anymore. At least not at face value. Last I looked, Google, Apple and Valve all take 30% cuts. I believe Nintendo does too. Unless there are some backroom sweet heart deals at least with the major studios.

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

#332

Post by samspenc »

abujazar wrote: post #315
madeofpalk wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's neat and impressive, but that's all they have. They don't have a high end. For $3000 you can get a top end gaming PC. There's no amount of money you can spend on a Mac to equal that. I think you're missing the point that parent (and Siracusa) made - Apple invests a signficant into the software and graphics stack, only to fumble it at the last minute by not having high-end graphics hardware, and caring enough t…

For $3000 you can get a top end GPU, not a whole gaming PC. Most gamers have mid-range GPUs like those in the M2 Max.

Actually you can get NVidia's top consumer GPU today, the RTX 4090, for $1500-1600. Go back one generation and you can get a RTX 3090 for $750 which still packs a punch.

So it's quite possible to build a well-performing gaming PC for sub-$2000 with RTX 3090 which is still significantly more performant than Apple's latest Mac, in terms of GPU throughput.

I snapped myself a gaming PC for $1300 at last year's Thanksgiving sales, came with a AMD Ryzen, RTX 3080 (10 GB VRAM model) and 32 GB DDR4 RAM, no way I could have gotten a Mac with that performance for anything close in terms of price.

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

#333

Post by sudosysgen »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #297
sudosysgen wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you do AAA gaming on your M1 Max? If not, then the GPU is irrelevant, because a laptop with a 4090 mobile is going to shut it down completely. If you are indeed doing AAA gaming, then you wouldn't have sufficient battery life without plugging in, or you wouldn't have sufficient performance.

I'm not talking about AAA gaming here. I'm talking about day-to-day work-related tasks, which is primarily what I use my MacBook for.

Yes, which is why I said that if you don't, the 4090 is irrelevant because it's just turned off.

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

#334

Post by sudosysgen »

throwaway290 wrote: post #298
sudosysgen wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you do AAA gaming on your M1 Max? If not, then the GPU is irrelevant, because a laptop with a 4090 mobile is going to shut it down completely. If you are indeed doing AAA gaming, then you wouldn't have sufficient battery life without plugging in, or you wouldn't have sufficient performance.

People report playing Baldur's Gate 3 for an hour on M1 Max with 40% battery life left, is it AAA enough? https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/qogsov/battery_... (M1 Pro lasts longer)

Given that Baldur's Gate runs at Ultra 1080p60+ on a 3050Ti mobile, that's about what you can expect from a low end gaming laptop - and that GPU runs at 35-50W on most of those

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

#335

Post by cormacrelf »

astrange wrote: post #320
vore wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebGPU is not JavaScript only: https://eliemichel.github.io/LearnWebGPU/

Does it really work well for other use cases? Obviously you can call it, but typically a web API has many more security issues to handle than a native API, so I'd expect there to be a lot of compromises a game developer wouldn't want to deal with.

Yes. The non-JS interfaces are Dawn (C++) and wgpu (Rust). The Bevy game engine uses wgpu and I think many others will do the same. You can't really generalise from "typical web APIs" in the way that you have.

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

#336

Post by [deleted] »

flashback2199 wrote: post #209
kitsunesoba wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In that era they actively killed off relationships with gaming companies, e.g. the game that eventually became Halo was originally a Macintosh exclusive. That was Microsoft's doing, not Apple's. Microsoft scooped up Bungie to make Halo an Xbox exclusive (at least initially). This purportedly angered Steve Jobs, who probably wasn't too into gaming himself but understood the appeal it might have to consumers.

That isn't the version of history I remember reading about Bungie, but I suppose there are probably differing viewpoints about it. In any case, I do know that John Carmack has said that Steve Jobs told him back then that he should stop working on games and work on operating systems instead, and that he generally did not like them.

[deleted]

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

#337

Post by spectre3d »

flashback2199 wrote: post #182
heyoni wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, you say that but there are plenty of triple A games in the App Store and Apple did put in the effort into getting their game subscription to work on their desktops. Let’s be real, we might all be getting more work done as a result but that’s because Apple dropped the ball, hard. They came out with the metal api but refused to support any others, even letting open GL fester. The fact that they couldn’t k…

I'm curious if Apple dropped the ball or if there is still something of an anti-gaming culture inside Apple since I know that the company was de facto anti-gaming in the late 90s going forward. In that era they actively killed off relationships with gaming companies, e.g. the game that eventually became Halo was originally a Macintosh exclusive. More recent things like the legal theatrics with Epic Games gives one a…

>eventually became Halo

Halo was introduced by Steve Jobs at MacWorld as an upcoming Mac game. It was always called Halo.

“This is not QuickTime. Everything you’re about to see is being rendered in real time on a Macintosh using OpenGL.” [1]

Then Microsoft bought Bungie and made Halo an Xbox-exclusive launch title. [2]

> de facto anti-gaming in the late 90s going forward

In 1997, the Power Mac 6500 shipped with MechWarrior 2 and Descent 2.

Between 1999 and 2005, Bugdom, Nanosaur, Cro-Mag Rally and Otto Matic by Pangea as well as Deimos Rising shipped as built-in platform games on various iMacs and iBooks, the G4 Cube, and the eMac. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 came with one model of eMac. Nanosaur 2 and Marble Blast were bundled with later iMacs, iBooks, eMacs and the Mac mini. [3]

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxdgo1rFcxU

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie#:~:text=Microsoft%20a....

[3] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/405405/what-third-...

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

#338

Post by ece »

belthesar wrote: post #227
ece wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the new Mac pro..

The new Mac Pro that, despite having PCI Express slots can't be used to add discrete GPUs to the system for graphics tasks.

Hmm, I wonder if this is technical or something else.

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

#339

Post by avaloneon »

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…

I feel like they're targeting VR.

Some background: Currently PCVR is basically 100% Windows. It's possible to stream VR games from a PC to a standalone headset (ie: with the Quest AirLink) but it depends on network conditions. For example, if both computer and headset are connected via WiFi, and neither has line of sight to the router, performance is likely to be questionable, at best. In theory a computer could use it's own WiFi chipset to make a direct connection, but there's also a WiFi 6 dongle that allows for a direct link between computer and headset.

With that said: Apple already has devices that talk to each other, laptops with high-speed WiFi chips, and now they're making a VR headset. So they have all the parts for a really slick PCVR (er, MacVR?) experience, except the games.

So I 100% don't think the timing is coincidental. They're almost certainly targeting PCVR, although I don't know what they will do with motion controllers. That said, there's still nearly a year until launch, so maybe they haven't shown us everything (or maybe it's not ready).

Edit: should also add that this might be really important for VR gaming because we don't know how much compute is available for apps. However, the dual-chip design implies that a single M2 was not enough for visionOS, which does not bode well.

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

#340

Post by zelon88 »

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…

> I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase.

Coincidentally you are in the market every couple of years for new Apple hardware because of planned obsolescence. Why? Because Apple designs proprietary metal that they are unwilling / unable to support every few years because they instead develop new hardware that completely breaks backwards compatibility. Then release updates to sandbag your older hardware when you still refuse to upgrade.

I just think it's funny that you'll buy three highly proprietary Mac computers every three years but you won't buy one industry standardized PC that does it all and can be upgraded. And Apple banks on you doing that and takes you to the cleaners every chance they can. And you still bag on PC's citing the economical sensibility of Apple.

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