81–90 of 92 posts
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…
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)
Not really. On pure speed a 5090 will still comfortably beat a top end Mac configuration. Just constrained to 32gb mem ofc
Top Mac has mem throughput around the 900 mark while a 5090 is at 1800
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.
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.
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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…
This idea that Apple has been plotting this whole time to turn the Mac into iOS, in terms of limiting the software you can run to their own App Store, is a tired meme that makes zero sense given what we've seen from Apple in the past... checks ... 19 years . Like, seriously, do you think they need longer than that to do it if it's really what they plan? If they were ever going to do it, it would've been when they swi…
The Mac App Store hasn't existed for 19 years. Then they started displaying scary warnings for apps downloaded from the internet. Now they require code signing for third party apps. Meanwhile they not only obviously do it on iOS but are adamant that no one even attempt to do otherwise, even in the face of law requiring them to.
It's not paranoia when they're really out to get you.
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Kind reminder that Rosetta is being removed.
It isn't; they specifically have said it will be retained. They aren't too specific but I think what they mean is all the Framework and App support for it will be gone. But as far as keeping a lot of self contained games and wine running I think it'll likely continue to work fine.
Some dev support is being retained but you shouldn't consider that "will be retained". It is going away.
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It isn't; they specifically have said it will be retained. They aren't too specific but I think what they mean is all the Framework and App support for it will be gone. But as far as keeping a lot of self contained games and wine running I think it'll likely continue to work fine.
It isn't being retained in the way it is now. You won't be able to open Intel apps, and won't be able to use x86 CLI items like wine.exe Some dev support is being retained but you shouldn't consider that "will be retained". It is going away.
Also who cares if the wine exe itself can run as x86? Ideally you want something that resembles windows chpe where the loader is native but works with the translator to bridge translated game code to native sys/lib calls.
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> 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 smoothe…
By decoupling the support for Windows games from Apple's whimsical downstream release cycle, obviously. Proton would build perfectly fine on macOS with proper DXVK support, enabling the "same day" support patches that the Steam Deck and Steam Frame enjoy. There would be no need to wait to play games like Arc Raiders because all you'd need to do is update your Proton runtime. Users would get have more flexible options for playing new games that Apple doesn't support with GPTK point releases.
> But that doesn't mean Vulkan is going to be some panacea of gamer/game-dev adoption.
They can perfectly well support both APIs. If Apple wants to have a mobile-first rendering API on their desktop, fine, but it shouldn't hamstring the other features of a computer like eGPU support or basic third-party drivers like Mesa. There's no reason it would.
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 co…
Apple's pivot to Metal and mobile-first distribution was the beginning of the end. The iPhone's revenue potential eclipsed the value that Mac gaming could ever provide, and Apple made sure to capture it with the App Store. Once Tim Cook showed everyone how easy it was to make service revenue, the execs probably realized that they could make bank off of a captive, game-deprived customerbase.
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…
This idea that Apple has been plotting this whole time to turn the Mac into iOS, in terms of limiting the software you can run to their own App Store, is a tired meme that makes zero sense given what we've seen from Apple in the past... checks ... 19 years . Like, seriously, do you think they need longer than that to do it if it's really what they plan? If they were ever going to do it, it would've been when they swi…
They did, though;
- macOS lost support for eGPU and dGPU drivers
- OpenGL support was frozen to focus on Apple's mobile GPU API
- Apple promoted Mac Catalyst apps instead of pushing Mac-native ones
- The iOS and iPadOS App Stores became available on macOS alongside the native store
- The macOS design language was reworked to take cues from overly padded touch-first design
- iBoot became the hardware entrypoint, which Apple has authority over with OTA updates in macOS
- UEFI and ACPI went away, forcing devicetree drivers to be reverse engineered with zero documentation
Old Macs are just computers. None of these limitations apply to them because you can pick one up and install a normal OS if these concessions concern you. Apple Silicon was shipped in a way that deliberately prevented reverse-engineering and gives Apple the ability to revoke boot-time features if alternative OSes ever threaten them. They depreciated vast swathes of functionality that professionals relied on, and eventually depreciated the Mac Pro altogether. Their tentpole desktop products are a Mac Mini, a bigger Mac Mini, and the iMac. There's not any hardware left for real pros.
But you're still unconvinced, right?
Well, look at Apple's revenue breakdown. The Mac is not carrying much water, and it's a huge sinkhole of resources to constantly maintain and update the OS on a yearly update cadence. Conversely, the iPad is doing great, making almost as much money as the Mac does with vastly cheaper hardware (and bigger profit margins, too). If Apple could have their druthers, they'd start polishing the iPad experience, ship "Pro" hardware to entice developers and boundary pushers, slowly roll out support for HID and external display support, and eventually provide a sort of cloud service for building applications within the Apple ecosystem. Oh wait, I've just described things they've already done! https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
Apple has no obligation to their niche pros, anymore. They already cut them out and depreciated their rackmount and short-lived wheeled PC. I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that Apple is internally laser-focused on depreciating the Mac and macOS both, either with the Vision hardware or by promoting the iPad as a laptop replacement a-la Microsoft's Surface Pro.