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Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

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Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#351

Post by reroute22 »

i_am_jl wrote: post #282
afavour wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise I don't think Apple is chasing the "dedicated gaming machine" crowd here. They want casual gamers to be able to load up a couple of games on the machine they're buying for non-gaming reasons. I'm exactly one of those people: I rarely play video games these days but when the pandemic hit I ended up installing B…

I think you nailed it. >This toolkit is the means to reopen it. I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase. I think there's a segment of Mac users who own Windows machines exclusively for gaming. I think the value in these capabilities isn't that people will buy Apple Silicon machine primarily as gaming machines, I think the value is in enabling someone in the Apple…

The post quoted did indeed nail it IMO.

But I don't think those who pulled the trigger on buying a whole PC in addition to Mac just to game are the audience here: those people clearly value PC gaming a lot, spending that kind of money and going through that much trouble having the necessary setup at home, taking space and time to build and maintain. Those who care that much won't be satisfied with the state of Mac gaming and continue owning those PCs.

It's for those who would like to play on Mac but currently don't play at all on anything because games they'd like to play don't work on the only performance computing device they have - that Mac.

The second category of people I'd like to add are those who were really on a fence between getting a Mac and a PC (probably laptop at this point, as laptops are sufficiently similar for such a fence to be realistic, desktop PC and desktop Mac are very different machines in comparison), could have gone either way, but would prefer a Mac slightly, but also wanted to play games - not enough to own 2 computers, but enough to begrudgingly choose a PC over a Mac just for that reason.

Those folks are likely to buy a Mac instead next time they buy a new computer, which is probably going to be years from now, for some - years from the point in time when gaming on Mac because actually accessible and good, not immediately on spot.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#352

Post by reroute22 »

abujazar wrote: post #315
madeofpalk wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's neat and impressive, but that's all they have. They don't have a high end. For $3000 you can get a top end gaming PC. There's no amount of money you can spend on a Mac to equal that. I think you're missing the point that parent (and Siracusa) made - Apple invests a signficant into the software and graphics stack, only to fumble it at the last minute by not having high-end graphics hardware, and caring enough t…

For $3000 you can get a top end GPU, not a whole gaming PC. Most gamers have mid-range GPUs like those in the M2 Max.

This is wildly false, see https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/143ugg4/comment/j... as a real world example of a gaming PC you can buy right now for $2,600 which is the top of the crop and an absolutely wild gaming machine that's vastly better at gaming than $5,000 M2 Ultra Mac Studio even if the comparisons are done only in games that actually work and work well on the Mac.

If you were after a comparable experience with the fastest Macs on Earth you could configure a PC that's another $1,000 cheaper than that ($1,600).

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#353

Post by throwaway290 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #334
throwaway290 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People report playing Baldur's Gate 3 for an hour on M1 Max with 40% battery life left, is it AAA enough? https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/qogsov/battery_... (M1 Pro lasts longer)

Given that Baldur's Gate runs at Ultra 1080p60+ on a 3050Ti mobile, that's about what you can expect from a low end gaming laptop - and that GPU runs at 35-50W on most of those

If power consumption is about the same as M1 Max while running the same game at the same settings the only difference becomes battery life...

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#354

Post by rldjbpin »

apple is getting too much credit for this. they are essentially bootstrapping on the long-term efforts made at winehq.

i would like to know what value-add they have done besides making it work better at os level. i would be more impressed if they contributed to improving the translation itself like valve has done with the proton project and by contributing directly to the main project.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#356

Post by MaxPengwing »

reroute22 wrote: post #351
i_am_jl wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you nailed it. >This toolkit is the means to reopen it. I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase. I think there's a segment of Mac users who own Windows machines exclusively for gaming. I think the value in these capabilities isn't that people will buy Apple Silicon machine primarily as gaming machines, I think the value is in enabling someone in the Apple…

The post quoted did indeed nail it IMO. But I don't think those who pulled the trigger on buying a whole PC in addition to Mac just to game are the audience here: those people clearly value PC gaming a lot, spending that kind of money and going through that much trouble having the necessary setup at home, taking space and time to build and maintain. Those who care that much won't be satisfied with the state of Mac ga…

Hi, actual mac gamer here, I use Geforce Now to play games. Got myself a founders edition account and while I would have liked to have access to all my weird little indie games, the major games I play is on it OldWorld, Generation Zero, Stellaris, Timberborn, Elite Dangerous, etc..

Apple is never going to be taken seriously by the PC gaming industry, there is to much old wounds from being burned by Apple. So the next best thing as a MAc Gamer is to go with a streaming game service and run parallells for weird little indie games.

the only reason they are opening up for gaming on the Mac platform now is the Apple Vision system.

There is no VR games for mac, VR Chat is not for mac. To get Vision any traction they need to have Entertainment on it. Or Porn. But Apple is staunchly anti-Porn.

But we all know that their new VR movie recording system is going to be used for porn more so than birthday parties.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#357

Post by MaxPengwing »

avaloneon wrote: post #339
christoph wrote: post #49

This is total speculation on my part, but I do wonder why Apple have suddenly got this out the door to developers right at the same moment their headset is announced. They’ve never seemed very interested in this section of the games market before. I wonder if this could be the first building block of allowing existing modern 3D games to play in some kind of new semi immersive way inside. I’m imagining playing an FPS…

I feel like they're targeting VR. Some background: Currently PCVR is basically 100% Windows. It's possible to stream VR games from a PC to a standalone headset (ie: with the Quest AirLink) but it depends on network conditions. For example, if both computer and headset are connected via WiFi, and neither has line of sight to the router, performance is likely to be questionable, at best. In theory a computer could use…

It is also their first Vision generation, and it is spec:ed more closely to a Mac Pro than anything else really. Which makes me think of this as a devkit to see what devs are going to do with it.

100% agree with you on targeting PCVR Gaming, which is why I am a bit pissed off that they just dragged in wine as an abstraction layer. It means they are not really committing to working with gaming companies, they just want the fruits of their labour and can at any time just yeet that layer out of the OS.

They could have come with Wine at the same time they did Rosetta 2 but they chose not to. Had they done that, then I would have been less suspicious of their motives.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#358

Post by chrisldgk »

Am I the only person wondering why they wouldn’t demo medium/high settings on a higher framerate? Being able to run at ultra at all is quite cool, but wouldn’t it be much more interesting if you were able to run the game with 60fps at all? Is there something I’m missing?

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#359

Post by AltruisticGapHN »

Hamuko wrote: post #90
AltruisticGapHN wrote: post #54

Man if Apple somehow could have their own Windows emulation layer similar to Valve's Steamdeck developments - I could see myself returning to the Mac. It would be so amazing. The Mac would become truly a gaming platform, regardless if it costs twice the price of an equivalent PC - since people who appreciate Apple's hardware and software will see its value. Having said that there's still the issue of upgrades. But ag…

I mean, this is a Windows emulation layer. It's just designed for game developers to be able to quickly see what a rough version of their macOS port would look like. Like, does translating your game automatically yield you 40 FPS, or 4 FPS? Valve's emulation layer on the other hand is designed for end users to be able to run games without a native port.

Right but it's open source apparenty, and there's already efforts to create GUI etc to make this easier for end users.

Even if it doesn't run Cyberpunk at full speed, you'll have a huge catalog of indie games on Steam and older games that will run at full framerate without requiring any ports.

True, the main gotcha here I suppose is that Rosetta is also on top - since we're looking at Apple's ARM CPUs. Rosetta can translate and store the code so it doesn't have to do it every run.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#360

Post by [deleted] »

scotty79 wrote: post #60
AltruisticGapHN wrote: post #54

Man if Apple somehow could have their own Windows emulation layer similar to Valve's Steamdeck developments - I could see myself returning to the Mac. It would be so amazing. The Mac would become truly a gaming platform, regardless if it costs twice the price of an equivalent PC - since people who appreciate Apple's hardware and software will see its value. Having said that there's still the issue of upgrades. But ag…

Yeah but how can you stick a gtx 3090 in a Mac?

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