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Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games

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Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games

#21

Post by caseyy »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #13
caseyy wrote: post #10

Earlier 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…

> 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 -…

Nice find, it’s true.

That’s the only avenue I see where porting a AAA-style game makes sense for a Mac financially.

Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, and several Counter-Strike games were also ported, but CS:GO was later discontinued for Macs. These were done without Apple’s money as I understand. And the discontinuation seems related to support costs on a platform that doesn’t have many gamers.

Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games

#22

Post by modeless »

It seems pretty clear to me that this is for Valve's long-awaited standalone VR headset, Deckard. What other reason would they have to support Gorilla Tag on ARM? https://x.com/SadlyItsBradley/status/1837210246076588500

Compatibility with your existing Steam library out of the box will be a huge competitive advantage for Deckard over Meta Quest.

Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games

#23

Post by caseyy »

hot_gril wrote: post #20
caseyy wrote: post #10

Earlier 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…

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).

It seems that way. For a long time, what Apple didn’t use or specifically wanted on their platforms didn’t get a lot of thought.

Most game engines haven’t figured out resolutions and DPI scaling for windowed full-screen games in macOS and for a long time, it didn’t seem like there were many guidelines (bare minimum) or support from Apple.

Third party is just not as important as first party to Apple, I think. Which is ironic for a company that has succeeded tremendously off the backs of 3p devs on iOS. But perhaps it’s a different strategy for each product line. And it’s probably been a good strategy to focus on certain areas and not others for them.

It’s not all bad, you can definitely port games to Macs with some effort. If it was only worth it, it would be fantastic.

Though I’ll say, I think there is a niche for casual games with excellent graphics on Macs now. This niche could be worth a lot of money by the end of the decade, just like casual mobile games.

Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games

#24

Post by jamesfinlayson »

caseyy wrote: post #21
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 -…

Nice find, it’s true. That’s the only avenue I see where porting a AAA-style game makes sense for a Mac financially. Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, and several Counter-Strike games were also ported, but CS:GO was later discontinued for Macs. These were done without Apple’s money as I understand. And the discontinuation seems related to support costs on a platform that doesn’t have many gamers.

Yeah I think Valve ported their whole catalogue of games, but I'm not sure what exactly happened with the discontinuation - I thought they quietly dropped the Mac support tag from all of their games two or three months ago, probably because Intel Macs haven't been sold in a few years now? Presumably they didn't want to sink more money into Mac support (they had 11 years worth of Mac usage statistics to back up their decision).

Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games

#25

Post by namrog84 »

speed_spread wrote: post #5

Would it possible to AOT-recompile from x86 to aarch64? Or will it all be emulated forever?

Yes i dont see why not. At least on the surface technical level.

I used to work at ms on xbox backcompat games and we AOT recompile PowerPC arch to x86. (Xbox 360 to Xbox one).

You could likely aot recompile any arch with enough resources to fix up issues and things.

One key difference is older games were fixed so no more updates. It can be a little trickier with modern games still taking updates but could be done.

Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games

#26

Post by caseyy »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #24
caseyy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice find, it’s true. That’s the only avenue I see where porting a AAA-style game makes sense for a Mac financially. Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, and several Counter-Strike games were also ported, but CS:GO was later discontinued for Macs. These were done without Apple’s money as I understand. And the discontinuation seems related to support costs on a platform that doesn’t have many gamers.

Yeah I think Valve ported their whole catalogue of games, but I'm not sure what exactly happened with the discontinuation - I thought they quietly dropped the Mac support tag from all of their games two or three months ago, probably because Intel Macs haven't been sold in a few years now? Presumably they didn't want to sink more money into Mac support (they had 11 years worth of Mac usage statistics to back up their…

I don’t think Intel v. ARM matters too much once the engine HALs support it natively, or through Rosetta 2. This to me doesn’t seem too bad.

The OS APIs and building an ergonomic experience is the challenging part. Supporting APIs is harder than it may seem. That’s graphics, sound, task scheduling and multi threading, I/O for both files and devices, and many more. All these things have different approaches on different OSes, as well as different limits of what is allowed and what is not. Different best practices and degrees of documentation, too. This all then needs to make for a good player experience and meet gamer expectations. It’s a Herculean task.

It is even harder, because many graphics APIs, for example, support different features. So either your artists must accommodate and create several versions of skeletal meshes, visual effects, and similar; or your engineers must develop new graphics technologies to compensate automatically. And if that didn’t seem hard enough, try recruiting from a pool of game graphics programmers for macOS without a hot six figures a year burning a hole in your pocket. Now consider this for other APIs, though they are often more standard and less challenging.

I could be wrong, but many corners are cut for platforms that don’t have that many players — you just can’t justify the costs it would take to do an excellent port. And that creates pretty deep and difficult to patch issues. The same is seen on games ported to Linux.

Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games

#28

Post by Rohansi »

namrog84 wrote: post #25
speed_spread wrote: post #5

Would it possible to AOT-recompile from x86 to aarch64? Or will it all be emulated forever?

Yes i dont see why not. At least on the surface technical level. I used to work at ms on xbox backcompat games and we AOT recompile PowerPC arch to x86. (Xbox 360 to Xbox one). You could likely aot recompile any arch with enough resources to fix up issues and things. One key difference is older games were fixed so no more updates. It can be a little trickier with modern games still taking updates but could be done.

Not possible to fully AOT for all applications because you don't know which ones do JIT compilation to generate x86 code at runtime. Many games make use of LuaJIT, for example.

Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games

#29

Post by zaptrem »

shmerl wrote: post #15
caseyy wrote: post #10

Earlier 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…

Many games that work in Wine work just fine in GamePortingToolKit (which is just an Apple-written patch on top of CrossOver which is just more patches on top of Wine)

Re: Valve is testing ARM64 support for popular games

#30

Post by simooooo »

modeless wrote: post #22

It seems pretty clear to me that this is for Valve's long-awaited standalone VR headset, Deckard. What other reason would they have to support Gorilla Tag on ARM? https://x.com/SadlyItsBradley/status/1837210246076588500 Compatibility with your existing Steam library out of the box will be a huge competitive advantage for Deckard over Meta Quest.

It should be called DeckHead
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