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Blurry rendering of games on Mac

colincornaby.me

21–30 of 328 posts

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#21
post #14
post #11

Not mentioned about WoW in here is that they considered the notch enough to also have an option to have the UI avoid the notch. It calls a function in C_UI to get the safe region, and then resizes UIParent to fit within that region while still rendering the game up to the true top of the display.

WoW has always been exceptionally good at treating macOS like a first-class citizen. It's a shame Blizzard has stopped supporting macOS for their newer games.

Back in the day they even implemented near-zero-performance-impact video recording that leveraged AVKit/Quicktime as a Mac-exclusive feature, which was pretty neat. It let me get silky recordings where Windows user guildmates’ videos skipped and stuttered from having to run both WoW and much heavier third party recording software.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#23
> But World of Warcraft is an older game using the legacy CoreGraphics display services full screen API. That API actually allows World of Warcraft to draw into the notch.

Not knowing much about Macs, I would have thought games were supposed to render full screen around the notch for immersion but respect the safe area for UI and gameplay. Are they supposed to leave a menu bar on macOS?

> Control gets around the issue by just making up its own resolutions.

That's hilarious, I wonder if they had trouble enumerating resolutions and gave up or if they simply couldn't bother.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#24

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 think their bigger problem is there's shit for documentation. You get a big list of function signatures and if you actually want to know how you're supposed to use anything you find the WWDC session from 4 years ago and hope it's still accurate.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be fair there is only so much you can do inside the power envelope of 100W or so

Not really. If you compare it to gaming rigs, they bear radically different architectures, so you can't really compare them by TDP or power requirements. They don't emit the same hear or require the same amount of power per TFLOP. And I wouldn't be surprised if tflops also wouldn't translate to actual compute room for shaders. Even if they did, 100w should be room enough to play relatively recent titles, specially in…

> Nothing really excuses Apple from this contempt it has for the gaming market.

Considering how the typical self-identifying "gamer" conducts themselves online, I think Apple might be on to something...

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be fair there is only so much you can do inside the power envelope of 100W or so

Not really. If you compare it to gaming rigs, they bear radically different architectures, so you can't really compare them by TDP or power requirements. They don't emit the same hear or require the same amount of power per TFLOP. And I wouldn't be surprised if tflops also wouldn't translate to actual compute room for shaders. Even if they did, 100w should be room enough to play relatively recent titles, specially in…

While the differences between ARM and x86 CPUs are quite substantial, Apple's iGPUs follow the same architecture as all the brands

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#27

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…

to be fair there is only so much you can do inside the power envelope of 100W or so

[deleted]

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#28

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 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.

Why would Apple be deliberately sabotaging the experience? They would gain nothing from it. That argument makes even less sense when you consider most of the games mentioned in the article are on the Mac App Store, Apple can take their cut.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/control-ultimate-edition/id650...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shadow-of-the-tomb-raider/id14...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/riven/id1437437535

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cyberpunk-2077-ultimate/id6633...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stray/id6451498949

This is an obvious case of Hanlon’s Razor. Anyone who develops for Apple platforms and has had to file Feedbacks is aware of Apple’s incompetence and lack of care.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be fair there is only so much you can do inside the power envelope of 100W or so

Not really. If you compare it to gaming rigs, they bear radically different architectures, so you can't really compare them by TDP or power requirements. They don't emit the same hear or require the same amount of power per TFLOP. And I wouldn't be surprised if tflops also wouldn't translate to actual compute room for shaders. Even if they did, 100w should be room enough to play relatively recent titles, specially in…

> Even if they did, 100w should be room enough to play relatively recent titles

Steamdeck runs on 45W, and that's plenty enough power to have fun.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#30

Oh it’s not just Apple… This was an issue I also discovered on Xbox 360 in 2008. TV’s have overscan and depending on that setting, your resolutions will be off. However, at the time, we couldn’t create render targets that matched the overscan safe area. XNA added a Screen SafeArea rect to help guide people but it was still an issue that you had to consciously develop for. Now, we can create any back buffer size we wa…

If I understood you correctly... you wanted to be able to render to a slightly smaller surface to avoid wasting graphics compute time, but that's still going to be upscaled to 1080 for the HDMI scanout, and then mangled again by TVs' overscan - which to me feels like introducing more problems more severe than whatever problem you were trying to solve in the first place.

(Besides, TV overscan is a solved problem: instead of specifically rendering a smaller frame games should let users set a custom FoV and custom HUD/GUI size - thus solving 3 problems at once without having to compromise anything).

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