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Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

macworld.com

31–40 of 92 posts

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#31
post #19

This, once again, misses the elephant in the room. The fact is simple, there isn't enough of a Mac gaming market for the game developers to go through the effort. The hardware has been good enough for a while now. I'm not saying this will never change but the developers that shipped games on PC and Mac report something along the lines of 6-11% of users use a Mac. That isn't worth the effort unless you have a very str…

    That isn't worth the effort 
Maybe I'm too unambitious as a small indie, but "porting" my game to mac merely requires building that target (I use unity & have both mac and windows automated building scripts - I press a button and it builds and uploads both to steam). There's nowhere in my codebase where I had to specifically adapt to one or the other.

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#32
post #19

This, once again, misses the elephant in the room. The fact is simple, there isn't enough of a Mac gaming market for the game developers to go through the effort. The hardware has been good enough for a while now. I'm not saying this will never change but the developers that shipped games on PC and Mac report something along the lines of 6-11% of users use a Mac. That isn't worth the effort unless you have a very str…

That's not the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room for gaming on Mac is Apple's policy non-commitment to traditional gaming. Technical support for non-gambling gaming is just a checkbox item to them for mandatory 45-second segments in product launches. That transcends into their customers and develop into various gaming and Mac related chicken and egg problems.

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#33
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this attitude. It'll never be enough until it is. Making porting lower-effort and higher performance can only help.

Apple is getting kind of a PR problem with developers. In theory they don't do all the same things on Mac as they do on iOS, but as long as they continue to do them on iOS and keep feature creeping the gatekeeper stuff, people are hesitant to end up stuck with Apple taking 30% of their revenue or denying their app for opaque reasons after they've spent big money to develop it. At which point who is going to spend dev…

That really doesn’t make any sense. Do you really think Apple will ban steam on macOS overnight?

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#34
post #9
post #8

Do macs really have GPUs though? Or are they like intel integrated graphics?

An on-board GPU is not a GPU?

It’s only a GPU if it’s made in the RTX region of Silicon Valley, otherwise it’s just sparkling floating point calculations.

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#35
post #8

Do macs really have GPUs though? Or are they like intel integrated graphics?

People say they think it's faster than top of the line RTX 3070[1] and hands down the fastest GPU ever for local LLM purposes, and OTOH they're like Intel integrated graphics with RAM shared VRAM for ultra thin laptops, so the truth is either of that, or somewhere between those two. Probably wherever its TDP suggests.

1: (Laptop)

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is getting kind of a PR problem with developers. In theory they don't do all the same things on Mac as they do on iOS, but as long as they continue to do them on iOS and keep feature creeping the gatekeeper stuff, people are hesitant to end up stuck with Apple taking 30% of their revenue or denying their app for opaque reasons after they've spent big money to develop it. At which point who is going to spend dev…

That really doesn’t make any sense. Do you really think Apple will ban steam on macOS overnight?

That's not how you boil a frog.

If it gets popular enough then they start trying to get games to use their app store instead of Steam, gradually make it easier to use that and harder to use anything else, then the gate closes only after the herd is where they want it.

Better, then, if it never gets popular enough to begin with.

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#37

Oh, who gives a damn. Half the games in my Steam library don't work since Apple killed 32bit. When they fix it, I'll know they care about Mac gaming.

Most of those are gonna work using Rosetta, crossover, and the game porting toolkit.

You really don’t need Apple to support 32Bit x86 macOS games when it’s not much more overhead to run windows x86 games (which is easily the better library to spend time Optimizing for).

Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is getting kind of a PR problem with developers. In theory they don't do all the same things on Mac as they do on iOS, but as long as they continue to do them on iOS and keep feature creeping the gatekeeper stuff, people are hesitant to end up stuck with Apple taking 30% of their revenue or denying their app for opaque reasons after they've spent big money to develop it. At which point who is going to spend dev…

That really doesn’t make any sense. Do you really think Apple will ban steam on macOS overnight?

Nah there will be a new model and a new OS version on it that will only lets you use the App Store (30% tax of course). People here will complain and a fuck ton of people will dick ride Apple with bullshit about how they shouldn't buy that new laptop and they should feel privileged for Apple allowing any money to go to the person actually providing you value.
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