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Blurry rendering of games on Mac

colincornaby.me

41–50 of 328 posts

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#41

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

The Xbox Series S only uses about 80w under full load, and that's built on TSMCs old 7nm process. Apple's bleeding edge 3nm silicon should be able to do even more with a similar power envelope.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I guess mathworks is one of the best companies ever.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#43

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 spent thousands on multiple Mac devices

I mean... yeah why would they change?

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#44
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-dependent. So when you watch a video that is inherently rectangular on a Mac, that takes precedence. It's only shown below the notch, and the rounded corners on the bottom disappear.

So it's kind of the best of all worlds. Bigger screen with round corners for actual work (the notch is not particularly objectionable in the menu bar), slightly smaller screen with rectangular corners for video (and games too I assume?).

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#45
post #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-editi…

Except for the handful of Mac ports exclusive to the Mac App Store, who with a lick of sense would choose to buy from there? Steam, GoG and Epic are all more feature rich, have more often sales/3rd party resellers and throw in the PC version too.

On iOS there is no choice.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#46
post #7

Which says more about the volume of the market of gaming on Mac. It's small and unfortunate.

It's actually really small, according to Steam Hardware Survey, Macs are only 1.88% of Steam users, which is less than that of Linux, which is probably why most developers don't care.

Mac users might prefer to get their games through the default Mac App Store than Steam for distribution which plausibly could unrealistically distort the numbers.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#47
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually really small, according to Steam Hardware Survey, Macs are only 1.88% of Steam users, which is less than that of Linux, which is probably why most developers don't care.

Between the deprecation and stagnation of OpenGL on the platform, the removal of 32 bit support completely, the refusal to natively support Vulkan in favor of Metal, and the switch to ARM based systems... I can't believe it's still that "high".

Don't worry, they plan to gut Rosetta 2 so it will only support Mac games from the Intel era, that should help shrink that number!

> Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the next two major macOS releases – through macOS 27 – as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The included charger is 45W but the chip consumes less.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#50

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: inst…

No, Your TV says it’s 1080 but it’s not, it’s 1074… This is a solved issue now but it wasn’t when HDMI was first introduced. The Xbox 360 suffered from red rings of death. Microsoft hated Linux. And C# was cool.

Basically, if you rendered an avatar image in the top left of the screen, perfectly placed on your monitor, on the TV its head would be cut off. So you change to safe area resolution and it’s perfect again (but on your monitor safe area and screen resolution are the same, except Apple apparently). Make sense?

You can see how if your screen says it’s 4k, but really it’s short 40 pixels, you render at 4k - the screen will shrink it by 40 pixels and introduce nasty pixel artifacts. TV overscan goes the other way. Interesting find by the author about the notch.

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