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Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

macworld.com

61–70 of 92 posts

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

#61
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>macOS market share is smaller than Linux market share Not true? macOS has like 12-14% and Linux 3-4%

If you check Steam hardware survey you'll see Linux market sgare is 3% against macOS 2%. This is what matter for game studios.

That's because it makes no sense to use Steam on macOS because there are nearly no compatible games and Steam itself only has an ARM version on Beta and the Intel version is unusably slow. Overall a catch-22 situation though.

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

#62
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you check Steam hardware survey you'll see Linux market sgare is 3% against macOS 2%. This is what matter for game studios.

That's because it makes no sense to use Steam on macOS because there are nearly no compatible games and Steam itself only has an ARM version on Beta and the Intel version is unusably slow. Overall a catch-22 situation though.

Its not like every single Linux PC have Steam installed either. And if you run Steam client under Wine / Crossover it able to properly detect real platform.

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

#63
post #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).

[deleted]

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

#65
Game Porting Toolkit will be irrelevant unless it's as open and free to use as Proton is. Linux has far and away taken the lead here.

It also doesn't help that x86 compatibility is being ejected, so you can't even run basic Wine in the near future. Due to all this, there's no reason to be excited for this misguided endeavor of Apple's.

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

#66
post #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).

Kind reminder that Rosetta is being removed.

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

#67
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…

I disagree. When OS X went to Intel, there was an explosion of Mac games on Steam. Valve went all in with big ports of TF2 (complete with exclusive era-appropriate in-game items like the earbuds), and all their other games soon followed.

Apple self-owned themselves by slowly killing off support for this, culminating with the transition to the M chips and the upcoming removal of Rosetta to put the final nail in the coffin. Their negligence to support a major market is their downfall here. The hardware is more than willing, the software and company are causing the fumbles.

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

#68
post #45

Apple could easily make gaming on Mac feasible by contributing to Proton, Wine, DXVK and officially supporting Vulkan at least through translation layer. Or just partner with Valve to do exactly this for their platform. Instead they choose to build another proprietary solution nobody gonna use and that will die as soon as they lose interest.

My theory is that Apple chooses to make gaming a second class experience on Mac because they don't want the Mac brand to be associated with the main demographics that play AAA games.

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

#69
If Apple wants to really show they are serious about gaming, they’d have some in-house game studios release some AAA games as Mac exclusives, that people actually want to play. System sellers.

This is effectively how every other platform gets people in the door and builds the critical mass of gamers for 3rd parties to show up.

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

#70
post #49
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on wine, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are doing this quietly (landing patches to make Wine better on Mac), but for the purposes of making directx shaders perform better I fail to see why it matters if they support dx to metal conversion or if they support vulkan (for the goals of making games run better for their customers)?

> landing patches to make Wine better on Mac AFAIK they dont contribute back to Wine. There some chance they quietly pay to CodeWeavers, but likely this wouldnt be kept secret. > I fail to see why it matters if they support dx to metal conversion or if they support vulkan It matters because if Apple embraced Vulkan it would give more market share to one standard API for non-Windows platforms. Their strategy trying to…

> It matters because if Apple embraced Vulkan it would give more market share to one standard API for non-Windows platforms.

How does this actually help Apple customers have a better experience in some unique way that live translation to Metal does not? Runtime GPU compilers already do plenty of runtime translation; having worked on several I could be convinced having a simpler interop layer would make things smoother but your argument comes across as ideological more than about shipping product.

> Their strategy trying to push proprietary solutions simply doesnt work when their OS have 2% of PC gaming market share.

Hardly anyone one uses their proprietary solution (Metal) directly. But that doesn't mean Vulkan is going to be some panacea of gamer/game-dev adoption.

> Apple announced game porting toolkit 3 years ago and no one uses it. Well, unless Apple fund ports as PR stunts.

While I agree its not that widely used for porting actual games, I think a lot more people probably do use D3DMetal to run Windows games on mac.

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