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Blurry rendering of games on Mac

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Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#191

Post by latexr »

bigyabai wrote: post #77
lowkj wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When No Man’s Sky first announced a Mac port, they promised to release on Steam and App Store. I waited a year after the Steam release for the App Store release which never came. I am a very casual gamer and sometimes weeks go by without playing. My first experience with Steam was with Civ VI. Long flight, no internet, great I’ll play some Civ! But instead of opening up Civ, I was forced to open Steam which would the…

Surely this isn't your policy for all software. I've known many people that defend the App Store on iOS this way, but nobody that uses a Mac exclusively for App Store software.

That doesn’t matter. We’re not discussing “all software”, we’re discussing games. You can simultaneously dislike the Mac App Store and still prefer it over Steam. Those ideas aren’t contradicting.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#192

Post by incrudible »

crazygringo wrote: post #44
pezezin wrote: post #39

Am I the only one who finds screens with rounded corners and notches really stupid? We had to struggle for decades with CRTs and their funky geometry, and when we finally get displays with perfect geometry, we botch them again to make them look... cooler?

Don't think of notches as something stupid that takes away from screen area. Think of them as something that allows the overall screen area to increase, as bevels shrink. And then when the corners of the screen are so close to the corner of the laptop, and the corner of the laptop is rounded, it looks weird if the corner of the screen isn't rounded. Like a square peg in a round hole. Fortunately, it's all context-dep…

First of all, you can not argue anyone out of thinking it looks stupid or ugly. That is a visceral subjective experience and the extra space or whatever does nothing to make up for it.

Now for the bezels, mind that an equidistant circle (or squircle) radius converges to zero. So to avoid having a large inner radius, avoid a large outer radius. The Macbook is not a tablet, you do not hold its corners in your hand.

However, at some point Apple must have decided that the squircle is its entire visual identity and that hard corners on the XY plane are bad. That creates design problems it would not otherwise have.

The fact that developers are led into the trap of not pixel matching to the display however just shows a lack of attention to detail.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#193

Post by Toutouxc »

Rob_Polding wrote: post #181

It’s a good thing that most people don’t buy Macs for gaming, as they suck compared to any other platform. Anyone who expects a good experience is fooling themselves as they won’t get it! If you want to experience games as the developer intends, don’t play ports that use compatibility layers, just buy a console and play natively!

I’m pretty sure that if a developer releases their game on macOS, it plays, by definition, as the developer intended.

I have both a powerful gaming PC with Windows and all that, and a PS5, but some games I just like on my MacBook.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#194

Post by jiggawatts »

spike021 wrote: post #176
trinix912 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's even worse is they used to have great documentation, then for some nonsense reason archived it and replaced it with this wannabe JavaDocs crap with vague function explanations that leave more questions open than they resolve. They now tell people to watch WWDC videos as if those relatively short videos contained the same amount of information a proper API documentation does.

honestly i don't see this as Apple-specific but more of a sign of the times. i've seen a few libraries and vendor platforms we use at work with the same style of documentation (really lack thereof).

Microsoft's documentation quality very noticeably fell of a cliff about a decade ago. Now most of their public APIs and SDKs have hundreds of thousands of "documentation" pages that are just the name of the function with spaces added between the words. There might also be a listing of the parameters, which helpfully tells you that "string param1" is called "param1" and takes a string as the data type.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#195

Post by troupo »

phire wrote: post #180
troupo wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notch reduces the space available in the top menu bar. And since Apple is still incapable of creating a built-in Bartender-like functionality you end up with less space on screen. It's an actual objective fact of life. You don't get a larger 15"/16"/17" inch screen. You get a screen that size minus the notch because of a psychotic obsession with thinness. And then they struggle to compensate for that with barely…

If the notch was replaced with a 1cm bezel, then the entire top menu bar would move down by roughly 1cm, and I'd have less screen space for actual content. In some ways, a bezel could be considered to be a "notch" that takes the entire width of the screen. Personally, I've never run out of space in my menu bar, So the notch gives me 1cm of extra screen space. It's nothing to do with thinness. It's about packing the l…

> If the notch was replaced with a 1cm bezel, then the entire top menu bar would move down by roughly 1cm, and I'd have less screen space for actual content.

That perceived 1cm is largely meaningless for content. And you get less space in the top menu bar.

> Personally, I've never run out of space in my menu bar

I have 27 icons in my menu bar. Not because I collect them, but because quite a few apps add their icons there and I use a few of them.

On the laptop screen it manages to show 10.

IntelliJ idea has 12 top-level menus (I swear they had more). On a laptop the top menu bar manages to show 10 items on the left of the notch, and has to move two more to the right. This both splits the menu for no reason, and reduces the space for icons even further.

The notch has been around for 4 years now, and Apple still hasn't provided a solution for the problem they introduced.

And, of course, when you want to truly take advantage of "more content" you can't because the "safe screen space" without the notch is still squarely below the notch, and apps have to to be very careful to actually use that, or the notch will get in the way.

> It's nothing to do with thinness.

Yes, it does. In this case with thinness of bezels.

> Sure, you could argue to just make the laptop 1cm higher for that bezel

Yes, you could do that if you didn't have an institutional psychosis about thinness everywhere.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#196

Post by latexr »

nativeit wrote: post #63
behnamoh wrote: post #12

This just shows how little Apple cares about gaming on Mac. It's so sad that I spent thousands on multiple Mac devices (MBP, M Studio, etc.) only to be bottlenecked not by hardware, but by Apple's shitty approach to gaming software. I know why they do it though. Apple can't take their undeserved 30% cut of Mac games the same way they take their iOS cuts. We had a teacher years ago who said something that remains true…

I don’t try to game on my laptop, and I have always thought “gaming laptops” are somewhat akin to “racing-spec BarcaLoungers”. That’s why I’ve never understood why so many people bitch about not being able to game on Macs. If you want to play video games, you should probably buy a console or a desktop PC. White-hot take: you’re allowed to own a PC and a Mac. They aren’t like matter and antimatter, you won’t collapse…

Not everyone has the extra money or space to spend on another device just to play games from time to time. I don’t even own a TV, I’m not going to get one, plus a console, plus rearrange my living room and get new furniture to house them, to play games occasionally. Nor will I buy an extra expensive, bulky, and noisy desktop machine and monitor, plus (again) rearrange my furniture.

Additionally, laptops are more than capable of playing demanding games these days.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#197

Post by troupo »

ylk wrote: post #190
troupo wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand your logic unless you're implicitly saying the camera needs to go away Yup. We never had camera before the notch. > The notch makes for a smaller menu bar but without the notch there would be no menu bar there Yup. Before the notch we neither had a menu bar that could comfortably fit most menu items even in professional apps, nor did we have a camera. BTW, you literally are saying "The notch make…

The screen is a 16:10 screen with some extra pixels added next to the notch. By default, the system uses a resolution of 1512x982 (14"), which you can change to 1512x945 (16:10) to move the menu bar below the notch and end up with black pixels next to the notch.

"If you go make weird contortions and workarounds you might just find a semi-working non-solution to a problem that didn't exist until Apple introduced it".

Also my response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44909996

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#198

Post by jiggawatts »

makeitdouble wrote: post #70
xcf_seetan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody told me that the quality of a company is directly proportional to the quality of its documentation...

Boeing's documentation is probably excellent. In general it is assumed that documentation is the boring part and paying attention to it is a sign of quality. But where do you put people who prefer writing and/or teaching to thinking long and deep about product issues ?

I've read one of the manuals for the 787 management software stack, and it was... beautiful. It read like a novel. I read it twice on the train for the simple pleasure of it.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#199

Post by esperent »

Rob_Polding wrote: post #181

It’s a good thing that most people don’t buy Macs for gaming, as they suck compared to any other platform. Anyone who expects a good experience is fooling themselves as they won’t get it! If you want to experience games as the developer intends, don’t play ports that use compatibility layers, just buy a console and play natively!

> If you want to experience games as the developer intends, don’t play ports that use compatibility layers

A few months ago I would have assumed you're correct.

But recently I've played some games on my laptop with Lutris on Ubuntu which uses Wine or Proton under the hood.

The performance and stability is excellent. Although I haven't done any testing, subjectively it feels superior or at least equal to Windows. I've played several intense titles which are pushing my laptop's GPU (Nvidia 3070m) to it's limit, most recently the new Indiana Jones game (which is excellent FYI).

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#200

Post by nottorp »

nativeit wrote: post #63
behnamoh wrote: post #12

This just shows how little Apple cares about gaming on Mac. It's so sad that I spent thousands on multiple Mac devices (MBP, M Studio, etc.) only to be bottlenecked not by hardware, but by Apple's shitty approach to gaming software. I know why they do it though. Apple can't take their undeserved 30% cut of Mac games the same way they take their iOS cuts. We had a teacher years ago who said something that remains true…

I don’t try to game on my laptop, and I have always thought “gaming laptops” are somewhat akin to “racing-spec BarcaLoungers”. That’s why I’ve never understood why so many people bitch about not being able to game on Macs. If you want to play video games, you should probably buy a console or a desktop PC. White-hot take: you’re allowed to own a PC and a Mac. They aren’t like matter and antimatter, you won’t collapse…

> If you want to play video games, you should probably buy a console or a desktop PC.

> White-hot take: you’re allowed to own a PC and a Mac.

I do own a console, a pc and two macs. But for what I've paid for the macs Apple should make it easy for me to play games on their hardware if i so choose.

There is some hope: Lies of P is actually very playable on the minimum requirements M2/16G ram. And you get the Mac version on Steam with the Windows version so you're not limited to a single platform.

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