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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

#341

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…

> 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…

Every couple of years? My MacBooks typically last a lot longer than that. I know some people do chase the latest releases but in my experience MacBooks remain plenty usable for years after purchase.

I won’t buy an industry standardized PC that can be upgraded because I need a laptop. PC laptops aren’t a whole lot more upgradable than Apple ones, it just comes with the territory.

> And you still bag on PCs

The defensiveness here is unwarranted. At no point did I “bag on” PCs. I simply stated that I am not in the market to buy a standalone PC just for playing games.

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

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't PC gaming companies have only one real outlet (Microsoft) to work with? Not to be confused with distribution channels such as Steam.

Are there still games that only come out on PC? I thought most big titles are released on Xbox and Playstation as well?

Well I’m not sure I’d draw a meaningful difference between Xbox and PC in this context, but at best you’d then just have two channels: Sony and Microsoft (Xbox/PC) so it’s no different than Apple and Google.

But specifically for computer channels there’s effectively just one: Windows PC.

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

#343
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…

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

#344
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blizzard since mid to late 2010s is basically a different company from the one that pumped out Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo. The old company’s dead.

I think you misunderstood your parent's comment. Blizzard _today_ takes to maintain World of Warcraft's macOS build. The same Blizzard is releasing all new titles as Windows-only. This difference between WoW and there rest is what puzzles you parent.

Of course they won’t drop a good chunk of their existing subscribers overnight; once the initial work is done, maintenance shouldn’t take a ton of resources, especially considering it’s still a cash cow. Likewise, they are sort of maintaining SC2 with these tiny balance patches, and it’s still working on macOS, but it’s clearly the last echo of the old company.

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

#345
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to switch away from mainframes too, but I haven’t heard of a company that was founded in the last ten years that is a Microsoft Office shop.

Well, maybe your anecdata may be in conflict with reported revenue numbers? Google Office is not taking the world by storm. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move... No it’s also not the year of the Linux desktop either

Most places I have worked don’t use office suites. Instead of formatting stuff for 8.5x11” PDFs or printouts, things go into wikis/gdocs/etc, markdown files in git, python or splunk dashboards or whatever instead of excel; stuff is shared on slack, not office/google drive, etc, etc.

Sure, you can get access to an office suite at these companies, but people certainly raise an eyebrow when emailed a docx or told to click this office online link to run word in their browser.

In the link you pasted, the studies are limiting the market in strange ways. Like what is a “workstream collaboration tool” (teams, and whatever google workspaces is. I’ve never used either, despite using google docs periodically).

So, if the question is “which wordperfect clone is winning”, then word is a plausible answer. If the question is “what percentage of all documents are created in each tool”, there’s no way office (excluding outlook) + gdocs + iwork sum up to a majority at most companies.

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

#346

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…

> 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…

I really can’t understand this argument. Apple has the least planned obsolescence of any major manufacturer available.

The only upgradeable laptop you can buy is the Framework, which is more expensive than a baseline MBP. It also didn’t exist until a few years ago, so we don’t know if it has 10 years of longevity. What I do know is that my 2015 MBP still has hours of battery life even after being used daily for many years.

As far as software, 2017 MBPs can download Ventura, which will be supported until 2025, which seems like a long time to me.

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Some hypothetical reasons: 1. Playing games is one of the reasons to prefer a Windows laptop instead of a Mac. 2. The AR/VR headsets will need games to be successful, so they need to be more attractive to the gaming industry. 3. iPads are more powerful now. They support game controllers very well, and you can plug it into a big screen to play. However, most of the iPad games (except Divinity Original Sin 2) are scale…

Pretty spot on and exactly what I would have wrote.

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

#348
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, maybe your anecdata may be in conflict with reported revenue numbers? Google Office is not taking the world by storm. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move... No it’s also not the year of the Linux desktop either

Most places I have worked don’t use office suites. Instead of formatting stuff for 8.5x11” PDFs or printouts, things go into wikis/gdocs/etc, markdown files in git, python or splunk dashboards or whatever instead of excel; stuff is shared on slack, not office/google drive, etc, etc. Sure, you can get access to an office suite at these companies, but people certainly raise an eyebrow when emailed a docx or told to cli…

> Most places I have worked don’t use office suites. Instead of formatting stuff for 8.5x11” PDFs or printouts, things go into wikis/gdocs/etc, markdown files in git, python or splunk dashboards or whatever instead of excel; stuff is shared on slack, not office/google drive, etc, etc.

Yes because most of corporate America is doing work in Markdown.

Have you ever thought that your workplace may not be representative of the wider world?

> the question is “what percentage of all documents are created in each tool”, there’s no way office (excluding outlook) + gdocs + iwork sum up to a majority at most companies.

I’m sure you have a citation to back that up?

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

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, you can keep playing your old ass game at low frame rates. Enjoy your power savings... the game still runs like crap and the GPU still isn't that great.

Game enthusiasts can be so weird. Do y'all even have fun playing games, or do you just keep buying hardware and optimizing settings until they run at 120fps, declare victory, and move on to the next AAA game? I don't think I have worried about game frame rate since the days of Quake 1. I set my graphics settings to "Medium" and then spend the rest of my time actually enjoying my old ass games.

In many genres of game, frame rate makes a huge difference in the ability to control the game and catch what's happening. Framerate is probably the worst thing you could have picked to mock when you're making an argument about enjoyment. Especially when citing an FPS.
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