It would be great if this meant proton is coming back to macOS :) I don't have high hopes however.
No native Vulkan on macOS, right? I know of MoltenVK, but I have no idea how suitable it is.
Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games
11–20 of 202 posts
Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games
#12I think, especially considering the news of Qualcomm talking with Intel about acquisition, or just Intel's general problems; we are in the last decade of x86.
Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Apple cared about gamers, they wouldn't have blocked proper Vulkan support. They simply don't care. A major reason to stay away from Apple if you are a gamer.
It’s not the end of the world to develop for macOS and iOS. These platforms are just idiosyncratic and don’t have many serious gamers. Neither smartphones nor Macs have been powerful or ergonomic enough to play current-generation games for decades. So the user base is almost entirely people who don’t play games. For a developer, the juice is not worth the squeeze (and by far!). The platforms are challenging to port f…
> Unless Apple funds your games like some other platforms do, it’s better to just blow the porting budget on something that’s at least fun. I haven’t heard of anyone’s game funded by Apple, but maybe it happens? These deals are rarely made public.
Maybe I'm wrong but I thought/assumed that Valve's work to get Steam and their GoldSource and Source game engines working on Mac was with some sort of support from Apple - I know they did Linux support around the same time but the extra work to get everything working on a Mac wouldn't have been trivial.
Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games
#14I think, especially considering the news of Qualcomm talking with Intel about acquisition, or just Intel's general problems; we are in the last decade of x86.
Even calling Intel x86 a loss overnight AMD is doing more than fine enough, server and consumer, for x86 to stay with a competitive presence into the 2030s even taking a dim view of the architectures future.
Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Apple cared about gamers, they wouldn't have blocked proper Vulkan support. They simply don't care. A major reason to stay away from Apple if you are a gamer.
It’s not the end of the world to develop for macOS and iOS. These platforms are just idiosyncratic and don’t have many serious gamers. Neither smartphones nor Macs have been powerful or ergonomic enough to play current-generation games for decades. So the user base is almost entirely people who don’t play games. For a developer, the juice is not worth the squeeze (and by far!). The platforms are challenging to port f…
Point is that Apple is deliberately blocking Vulkan support. Which prevents things like Wine / Proton from offering decent performance for games there (MoltenVK is not really adequate for that).
Being it's Apple, not some kind of poor entity who can claim lack of resources, I'd say they very much on purpose disregard gaming as a use case and therefore it's a strong reason to stay away from Apple to begin with if you do care about it as a user (gamer).
Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games
#16It would be great if this meant proton is coming back to macOS :) I don't have high hopes however.
No native Vulkan on macOS, right? I know of MoltenVK, but I have no idea how suitable it is.
It works well enough for many games via Steam games using Crossover but Vlavle may not be interested in targeting the platform anyways.
Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games
#17With SteamOS, they solved their dependency on Windows.
Now, they're trying to stop being tied to x86.
ARM64 is being tested because hardware is already widely deployed, but not being tied to x86 is the important part. Enabling e.g. RISC-V as well.
Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not the end of the world to develop for macOS and iOS. These platforms are just idiosyncratic and don’t have many serious gamers. Neither smartphones nor Macs have been powerful or ergonomic enough to play current-generation games for decades. So the user base is almost entirely people who don’t play games. For a developer, the juice is not worth the squeeze (and by far!). The platforms are challenging to port f…
Point is that Apple is deliberately blocking Vulkan support. Which prevents things like Wine / Proton from offering decent performance for games there (MoltenVK is not really adequate for that). Being it's Apple, not some kind of poor entity who can claim lack of resources, I'd say they very much on purpose disregard gaming as a use case and therefore it's a strong reason to stay away from Apple to begin with if you…
I just play whatever games happen to work on Mac. Which isn't a lot of them, but it's enough.
Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games
#19Huh. I wonder if this uses https://box86.org/ or such, like proton uses wine
Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Apple cared about gamers, they wouldn't have blocked proper Vulkan support. They simply don't care. A major reason to stay away from Apple if you are a gamer.
It’s not the end of the world to develop for macOS and iOS. These platforms are just idiosyncratic and don’t have many serious gamers. Neither smartphones nor Macs have been powerful or ergonomic enough to play current-generation games for decades. So the user base is almost entirely people who don’t play games. For a developer, the juice is not worth the squeeze (and by far!). The platforms are challenging to port f…
I feel like Apple has the opposite attitude of Microsoft's towards 3p apps in general, not just games. Mac updates will constantly break apps at least minor ways, sometimes major (like 32-bit removal).