Apple is constantly trying to shun gamedevs away from its platform, then from time to time they’ll be like “why won’t people make games for macs?” and do something like this to try to get them back, but shortly after it’ll go right back to screwing devs all over again.
The key to making gaming on macs great… you mean having games?
I’m not saying it’s a desert… but no one is calling it a tropical paradise either.
The Mac is a gaming tundra. Habitable, but not very.
Surely, what they need is an upgraded and more expensive VR headset.
Last I heard about Mac gaming, games had to support Apple’s proprietary Metal graphics API, so a game can’t run on anything else.
Apple are trying to throw their weight around and forcing developers to go Mac exclusive like they do with iThings, but Mac users are such a tiny segment nobody bothers.
Apple Game Porting Toolkit 2 kind of makes it clear Apple aren’t trying to force developers to make native games; taking a similar approach to Steam and Proton (Game Porting Toolkit is based on CodeWeavers’ CrossOver, the same developers working on Proton with Valve).
As far as I’d heard, Apple’s licensing only permitted GPTK to be used to evaluate games and their porting potential, and that they prohibited actually shipping games with it (whether this is just applying to the MAS or whether it was actually a licensing term within GPT I’m unsure).
Of course, I can’t find a concrete source on this, and perhaps it changed. The download, which I assume has the license with it, is locked behind having an Apple Developer account it seems.
If true, that’s ridiculous. If I were Apple, I’d be throwing money at CodeWeavers to get Proton-like capabilities into macOS.
They are years too late. The effort to make 30+ years of games, launchers and Windows based divers compatible would be staggering. The only way this happens is if they just run Windows or Linux virtually. They walled themselves off a long time ago. Now they get to suffer from it.
Apple does have a compatibility layer. But it’s restricted only to devs wanting to port their games to metal.
That’s what’s going to make things extra difficult for Apple. Not only do they need a compatibility layer for Windows --> Mac but from X86 --> ARM
Lol x 900
Windows literally retains itself as the defacto gaming OS, despite doing crap all except for cheapo driver support.
Apple has been reportedly “entering” the game market for decades now for nothing to show.
I have much higher hopes for Linux taking over than MacOS ever becoming good for gaming.
Oh no guys, watch out—Apple is going to start letting you play candy crush with even shittier graphics now. Oh no!
Do MacBooks even have dedicated GPUs to play high end games? Or is the hardware powerful enough without one, but the games just need to be rewritten from scratch?
I used to love Macs back in the early 2000s but I’m so out of touch now.
They have powerful iGPUs; something similar to Strix Halo. I am not a Mac user, but in my understanding the top end SKU have iGPUs comparable to high end dGPUs (with respect to synthetic performance, actual gaming performance tends to lag heavily).
I use a Mac. I’m not really interested in high end games though. I like turn-based things.
I’m still using a 2018 Mac Mini (middle-of-the-road specs) and I run things like Pathfinder:Kingmaker and Wasteland 3 just fine. Both are older, but came out around the same time as the computer. However, Baldur’s Gate 3 suffers.
You can add eGPUs to them, but I’ve never bothered to look too much in to it because I’m satisfied with the games available to me.
I’ve heard nothing but good things about the new M-series but have yet to try one.
I upgraded from a 2018 Mac Mini to an M1 Macbook Air. It was quite noticeably faster. I had a big code project at the time that took over a minute to compile on the Mini, and on the Air, it zipped through it in <20s. I think even Intel programs emulating through Rosetta were faster, which is just crazy.
But now I’m thinking about going back to a Mini again. That M4 model sounds like it’s an absolute beast!
MacBooks do not. I think the Mac Pro tower supports AMD dGPUs, but for nearly their entire computer line you’re working with integrated graphics. I will say, their high end Apple Silicon chips have some decent graphical capabilities that are comparable to APUs you would find in something like a Steam Deck or Xbox/PS5, so it’s not a total wash. I’ll see if I can find some M series graphics benchmarks now.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but looking at this, it looks to me that the best Apple Silicon results for this specific benchmark put their best processors at about the same level as a 3070 or so.
