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Blurry rendering of games on Mac

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Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#71

Post by MBCook »

bee_rider wrote: post #54
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?

Are the screens OLED? The phones are... IMO the notch is pointless, but they need space for the front camera. With OLED they can just turn the pixels off when it suits the application and it becomes like a big bevel, which was the alternative anyway.

Expected in the next year or two on the pros, but not yet.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#72

Post by munificent »

MBCook wrote: post #17

Interesting article, but I think the demonstration image isn’t doing its job. Neither side really looks good to me. They both look roughly the same.

The bottom left side is showing the circle with the artist-created rough texture that it's supposed to have. The top right shows that that edgy-but-sharp texture has been softened by anti-aliased.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#73

Post by makeitdouble »

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.

Push this logic one or two notches further and people should write and build code on desktop only with an e-ink portrait monitor.

Specialization has its place but asking a generic computing device to gracefully handle most applications isn't a big ask IMHO.

They're not running the latest top notch games or anything exotic, it should be fine with no tinkering.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#74

Post by freehorse »

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…

People are complaining because the hardware is capable but there are other reasons may make gaming on a mac an annoyance. Not because macbooks are not powerful enough to run games. And to be fair, macbooks can perfectly run games, and indeed a lot of titles perform great, even if most have to use some sort of compatibility layer (roseta 2, vulkan to metal etc). Why should I get a PC just for gaming if my machine can handle that? Especially something like a big form factor gaming PC that takes quite a bit of space in a room.

And this is not a matter of laptop vs desktop because most of these issues (not the notch) will be present for a mac studio.

In fact apple itself has started advertising gaming in macs in WWDCs last years. So it is only fair that people will complain about it.

But in general gaming in macs is perfectly feasible (maybe not the latest most demanding graphics game at max settings, but most of the stuff). You may miss certain graphics features that may not be available for macs, but otherwise performance is not bad. Even playing windows versions of games through whisky or CrossOver is perfectly feasible.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#75

Post by debugnik »

freehorse wrote: post #60
debugnik wrote: post #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 issu…

> Are they supposed to leave a menu bar on macOS? Depends also how the specific game is implemented, but often that area is just black and inaccessible, as in you cannot even move the cursor there. It is as if the screen does not include the area above the notch anymore, ie how the screen would be if there was no notch, like the m1 air.

Thanks for explaining! I see this is common then. If I'm understanding correctly the docs of NSPrefersDisplaySafeAreaCompatibilityMode[1], this is supposed to be a compatibility mode that apps can opt-out of to behave like I expected, and can be force-disabled from Finder.

So I guess rendering around the notch is the intended experience, but devs don't seem to know or care enough to opt-out, and the bug here is that enumerating display resolutions doesn't take this compatibility mode into account.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/in...

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#76

Post by lostlogin »

whateveracct wrote: post #56
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…

It's a shame because a Mac Mini is a solid gaming computer.

I just replaced a nuc 9 ghost canyon with a Mac mini.

The difference in power consumption is insane. Nuc was 67 watts. The mini is 4-10. I don’t have enough data for a long term average on the mini yet, but it’s ludicrously efficient.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#77

Post by bigyabai »

lowkj wrote: post #65
goosedragons wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#78

Post by neutronicus »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #25
gchamonlive wrote: post #20

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…

> 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...

What, you mean you aren't champing at the bit to get death threats over a bug in a piece of software for which 70 dollars was paid three years ago?

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#79

Post by reactordev »

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 ?

You encourage them to blog about it and you aggregate the posts into documentation - somehow. (I'm sure there's people for that, or an AI, or something). They had to explain it when they implemented it - explain it on a post. Confluence. Somewhere.

You're right though.

Re: Blurry rendering of games on Mac

#80

Post by internetter »

wlesieutre wrote: post #24
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 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.

A WWDC session, I might add, with a mildly relevant title and rarely a hyperlink from the relevant documentation, let alone a timestamp.
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