cyberheater
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So No Mans Sky and the latest Resident Evil are both coming to Mac via Metal 3. Interesting times.
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Looks like Mac is starting to become a gaming platform with Metal 3.
- Thread starter cyberheater
- Start date
TrebleShot
Member
Combined with PS Studios the death knell for Traditional PC has been rung.
kyliethicc
Member
Apple unveils Metal 3 API for better Mac gaming
Apple announced its Metal 3 application programming interface for low-level graphics will improve gaming on the Mac.
venturebeat.com
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lostinblue
Banned
I've heard this mac becoming a gaming platform story since the 90's. They always bait it get some support, then stall and drop support or features, piss a lot of developers off and then nothing happens. Also if they wanted to be a real gaming platform they would just support Vulkan.
I'll believe it when I see it.
I'll believe it when I see it.
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qwertz12345
Banned
Dream-Knife
Banned
You only need to pay $4000 for PS5 performance! With worse SSDs of course.
Of course Apple has great marketing, so who knows where this will go.
Of course Apple has great marketing, so who knows where this will go.
CobraAB
Member
Macs have historically been pretty weak in GPU performance And the ones that had decent permanece cost a fortune.
The Fartist
Member
Not an Apple fan but it would be absolutely gut-busting hilarious if it does happen and it's like $300 - $500 USD and blows everything else away with strong 3rd party support out of the gate.
ChuckeRearmed
Member
I heard it 20 years, 10 years. Is this it the time now?
Kacho
Member
Probably. I can't wait to abandon a platform with all the games to buy an overpriced Mac and play No Man's Sky.
rabbity-thing
Member
We've seen this before.
worldwithpyramids
Member
why is this different from the other times Apple got drip-fed old games?
wipeout364
Member
It's different because now they have competitive and in some ways better silicon for the price.
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Decontamination Silo
Banned
Pretty sure the iPhone is already the most lucrative gaming platform of all time.
Syphon Filter
Member
to be fair windows is becoming more of a walled garden by the day. windows 10 had awful backward compatibility with older games, and with it being a service there are updates that sometimes break compatibility with games too. So anytime there is an update for windows, there is always a chance it can break compatability.
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ChuckeRearmed
Member
I literally can run old ass games and still play GTA 3. What are you talking about?
theHFIC
Member
No Man's Sky is coming to Mac AND iPad which is even more interesting. THis is where the benefits of a unified environment will start paying off for write once publish to the whole ecosystem.
The problem will be with games that use a lot more storage than No Man's Sky with the tax Apple charges for their larger storage options beyond defaults.
The problem will be with games that use a lot more storage than No Man's Sky with the tax Apple charges for their larger storage options beyond defaults.
Kacho
Member
It was true for a while when Windows 10 first dropped but not anymore. Off the top of my head Diablo 1 (disc version) was one that required some neckbeard tinkering. You could get it playable and it has since been resolved. The GOG version also runs perfectly fine. Can't think of any games that don't work on Windows 10/11.
lostinblue
Banned
Not true in the laptop space. Apple accelerated their operating system via GPU since the early 90's offloading animations, minimize and such so they always spent a little more on mobile pc's in order for them to have a bit of graphical oomph (and memory to store those things as framebuffers) just to make things fluent. This was very evident from the 2002 line-up onwards, until Core i5/i7 came along, with Apple famously opting to not use them on 13" macbooks because intel nuked Nvidia's licence to do northbridges with integrated graphics, taking the space Apple needed to have a "good GPU" in. They opted to have a crappier CPU because they needed the better GPU.
This is why, despite the desktop PC's never being powerhouses, there was any game releases back then IMO. Steam on MacOS would also never have happened otherwise.
But time and time again, Apple proved that they didn't give a damn about the market they initially promised to foster, leading to exodus.
For a reason, and they still won't be relatively good value gaming machines.
The real problem will be the App Store's policies.
Crayon
Member
the linux guy is killing me.
theHFIC
Member
I guess we'll see with the release of these games, more with larger ones like Resident Evil Village. It looks like all 3 of them are going to be Mac App Store exclusives and not on Steam initially. Apple did this for other games that they helped with the development of like Divinity Original Sin 2.
lostinblue
Banned
Actually... Apple already has PC's doing 7.3 GB/s. PS5 internal SSD sits at 5.5 GB/s.
Thing is Apple won't be user replaceable, what we call SSD has memory chip and controller in every shape (nvme, sata) and platform (pc, console, etc). Apple is doing controller on the SoC/motherboard and in some cases memory chip on the board that is replaceable. But, plot twist, they have to pair it, and they don't give us the tools.
So it's proprietary and not user changeable. You can't buy an Apple Studio Mini Mac and add a bigger disk without going through them, even if you had the parts.
But the speed trumps PS5 already.
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nominedomine
Banned
They sure are taking their time.
bitbydeath
Gold Member
GTA3 works on a Mac too.
Yep. Unified development is key.
Will be interesting to see Village's performance on the M1/M2.
Jinzo Prime
Member
I was seriously anticipating the announcement of Vulcan for Apple Silicon. Until Apple supports an industry standard API, Apple will not have a gaming platform anyone is willing to fully support.
TGO
Hype Train conductor. Works harder than it steams.
My TV can also play games.
Remember when your Sky Box could play games?
There is a difference between a gaming platform and something you could run games on.
just because it's capable of playing games doesn't mean it's a platform
Remember when your Sky Box could play games?
There is a difference between a gaming platform and something you could run games on.
just because it's capable of playing games doesn't mean it's a platform
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theHFIC
Member
The Mac port of GTA 3 stopped working after Mac OS 10.14 Mojave. Any release after that removed 32 bit support. The only way to play GTA3 now is to side-load in the iOS GTA 3 .ipa and the process is flaky to say the least.GTA3 works on a Mac too.
ChuckeRearmed
Member
I thought that their Rosetta emulator supposed to tackle the problem with x86/x64 support?
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Depending on the size of the SSD you get, good luck hitting anywhere near that on a less than 2 TB SSD model also that is raw bandwidth with CPU/GPU doing decompression in software from shared RAM (XSX and PS5 have a unit sitting between SSD and RAM that decompressed memory increasing the effective bandwidth by a factor of 2 or more [on PS5 the Kraken decompressor can hit from 11+ to up to 22 GB/s]).
Write speed is higher on Mac machines for sure though.
If you have a games based on UE or Unity or have a very large multiplatform engine, adding one more target platform is not a huge huge deal if the platform is worth in terms of sales.
iPhone + iPad + Mac might appeal to people, I am not sure how they will sell them AAA quality/priced titles without going massive MYX heavy.
LiquidMetal14
hide your water-based mammals
Good for them.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
I think they deprecated Rosetta 1 a good while ago, but Rosetta 1 was for the PPC to x86 transition not for 32 bits x86 support on x64 ones.
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lostinblue
Banned
There's a big chance of a Windows update breaking something yes. But I wouldn't call it walled garden, just lack of QA, testing, clusterfuck kernel with lots of bad practices and plain incompetence.
But I don't remember a time that wasn't like this.
No, Rosetta 2 is for x64 to ARM64.
x86 32 bits support has fallen to the wayside even though they could easily continue to support it for a while longer.
Still better than Microsoft and how they made Windows 10 (limited to 3 GB of RAM) for x86 32 bit only CPU's until they launched Windows 11. Surprising to see that the same company that did something so stupid then demanded CPU's from 2018/2019 to run Windows 11, a system who has nothing all that different from Windows 10.
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ChuckeRearmed
Member
Oh, I see. Crazy to think that on Windows you can still run stuff from 3.1 era. Though I am not sure if anybody needs it when VirtualBox, Dosbox and other stuff exists.
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Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
I guess a lot of enterprise devs enjoy that long long BC support MS has always offered and well users wanting to preserve software with minimal changes / effort enjoy it too. On macOS and especially on iOS every so many years you lose a batch of software (iOS lost several games one after the others as it went through major HW and OS transitions).
M1 / M1 Pro machines are really really well designed powerful little beasts, but losing x86/x64 compatibility and an easy way to virtualise or install Windows is not a small loss :/.
theHFIC
Member
Rosetta 2 on M-series chips is for 64 bit Intel Mac apps to run at full speed (or close to it) on Apple Silicon. They gave a lot of warning prior to Catalina (10.15) that 32 bit support would be gone. I am guessing they did it to simplify the amount of calls Rosetta would need to translate by moving it to just unified 64 bit Mac OS calls and nothing legacy.
x86/x64 Windows based apps and games are able to run on Mac through either virtualization through native Parallels with Windows ARM or through Crossover which is basically a better supported, paid version of WINE and that runs through Rosetta 2 so it is basically two separate translation layers. Neither of these methods support things like Vulkan or Direct X 12 and neither work as well for larger modern games as people like. The Mac Gaming Subreddit is filled with people bragging about getting games like GTA5 to run but then in the fine print you see it is running at 1200x700 in low resolution.
At some point, like Rosetta 1, Apple will phase it out of macOS once the native adoption rate is high enough which would eliminate Crossover altogether and just have Parallels be the only way Windows applications could run unless there ever is a version of Boot Camp for Apple Silicon series Macs.
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