I don't want to be dismissive, but this article talks about the graphics APIs and the hardware architecture (x86) yet fails to address the elephant in the room there: Cider ports. That is, macOS games which are actually Windows games running atop the the WINE-based proprietary middleware known as Cider.
Cider has both been a great boon to Mac gaming — it makes it cheap and quick to port Windows-only titles to the Mac without having to make them internally cross-platform — and also a great detriment: its Windows translation layer imposes a performance penalty and prevents true native feel, and crucially, many such games are using Cider's slow Direct3D-to-OpenGL translator, which is not only slower than real Direct3D (thus why such games will always run better under Windows in Boot Camp on the same hardware), and limits you to the Direct3D 9 featureset, but it is also translating to a graphics API Apple basically don't care about now (OpenGL).
The good news is that more and more games are using commodity engines, and those engines usually have proper native macOS support, and ideally Metal support. Nonetheless, Cider ports are very much a thing that must still be contended with.
For a recent high-profile case of Cider causing trouble, Square Enix went the cheap route when they ported their MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, to the Mac, and used Cider. The result was infamously bad and they had to pull it from the shelves. They did of course fix it up and re-release it, but even then, the resulting port is slower than and graphically inferior to simply running the game under Windows, because it's stuck with fake Direct3D 9. On Windows you get to choose between Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 11.
For me, the big problem with mac gaming is that my $3k+ work laptop has a fairly shitty integrated gpu and even the dedicated gpu is pretty low end compared to what you can get in a non-mac laptop.
This means that, even though 1/3rd of my steam library has mac versions, half of these games don't actually run well.
(Disclaimer: since switching to mac, I typically game only on PS4 nowadays, which I guess probably doesn't have better hardware, but at least has well optimised games and lots of awesome exclusives)
I always heard the Mac port of FF14 had issues. I just never knew what they were or how they affected the game until now. I think Square Enix demanding you buy a license for each platform you play the game on (non-Steam, Steam, Mac, PS4) is ridiculous and refuse to buy the same game twice. If I want to play on my Mac, I do the same thing I do for Overwatch, boot into Windows or play on my PC.
I thought Cider's performance and feature set had fallen dramatically behind Wine years ago, in part because some parts of their stack do rendering in software instead of hardware (the D3D to OpenGL translation is not the slow step in the process).
I was just about to say I remember a lot of speculation was that FFXIV was done this way. I luckily didn't have too many issues with the original version on the Mac but it did randomly quit and it ran very hot.
I haven't tried the new version but I'm okay with getting these versions that are degraded instead of not having a game. Which makes me wonder how they're doing this nearly flawlessly on consoles. There has to be some performance hit due to making the game work with the various translation layers but in reality I hardly notice them. Would be nice if they could get it that performant with Mac.
I work for a game publisher. We do not suggest developing for Mac. If you're building your game in Unity and can export it in Mac, then great (although now you have to factor in extra support). Otherwise, don't waste your time. Mac accounts for 3% in Steam [1], and Linux is even worse off.
Development time is better spent on internationalization than getting a working Mac build.
And I say this being a Mac user myself. Games actually run really well on my MacbookPro. But from a business standpoint, I wouldn't develop for Mac.
The economics may make sense, but it's also a self-fulfilling prophecy: People don't play Steam games on Macs because there are hardly any games!
There's a reason lots of people dual-boot into Bootcamp. I would love to play more games on my Mac, as opposed to under Windows or on my console, but the selection is terrible. Even when the engine the developers have used compiles for Mac, developers often don't do a port. That extends to indie games, too; still no Downwell for Mac, for example, despite the fact that it was made with GameMaker, which supports macOS as a target. Wadjet Eye, which produces a lot of technologically basic point and click adventure games, are very inconsistent about their releases; some games are releases on macOS, but most aren't.
Mac is also treated as a black sheep by the Steam app, to the extent that it's its own distinct item [1] in the genre list, next to "Action", "Adventure" and so on, and if you're a Mac Steam will still happily bury you in Windows games, despite the fact that they aren't playable.
Apple may be blamed on the AAA game situation, but for everything else (and most games aren't AAA), it's squarely on publishers, developers, and Steam.
And I say this being a Mac user myself. Games actually run really well on my MacbookPro. But from a business standpoint, I wouldn't develop for Mac.
It also doesn't help that Apple's commitment to video games on the Mac has been inconsistent at best. They insist on developing their own perpetually out-of-date OpenGL front end rather than leaving this to Nvidia and AMD - I don't know how well those two would do as the user-space maintainers of OpenGl on MacOS, but it couldn't be much worse than Apple. Considering this, maybe its a good thing Apple isn't providing a Vulkan front-end?
In my opinion the reason the Mac marketshare is so small is because up until recently, you simply can not buy a mac with a graphics card capable of running any decent game.
Aren't the major game engines already cross-platform? I'm definitely an outsider to the industry, but it almost seems like a game developer would have to go out of their way to NOT support Mac and Linux these days.
Why would one take a cross platform game engine and make the rest of the game logic Windows-only?
Mac gaming isn't going to go much of anywhere... I mean, Apple is still trying to push Metal instead of updating OpenGL on macOS. Practically no one except the largest AAA developers and engine authors care about Metal. Everyone else doesn't have the time or money to learn another graphics API and implement it in parallel. OpenGL performance on macOS is stagnant and Vulkan is nonexistent.
Apple's hubris is starting to catch up with them. They're trying to pull devs in with Metal but are instead pushing them away by making it harder or impossible to use APIs that devs actually want. To add insult to injury, the games market on Mac is small anyway, even relative to its market share. Windows has been absolutely dominant in this space for so long that I can't believe that Apple would try to get developers working on their platform by making it harder, not easier, to develop for.
> Apple's hubris is starting to catch up with them.
If anything, their hubris has paid off. It's hard to see how mediocre gaming support has significantly hurt Apple until now. Mac gaming isn't exactly great, but it's far and away better than it was 10 years ago when I got my first Mac, and there's good reason to believe it will continue to get better. That's good for Apple and Mac users.
There's this persistent meme about Apple that their contrariness and spurning of received wisdom and practices in the rest of the industry will imminently bite them in the ass and hammer the company. It just persistently fails to actually happen.
Is Metal not squarely aimed at iOS developers though? iOS (casual) gaming is a sizeable market- I doubt it was developed with macOS as its primary focus.
This criticism doesn't make a ton of sense from a practical development standpoint in modern times, people continue to rehash the same OpenGL vs DX argument from the 90s and apply it to Metal vs Vulkan. Now, almost everyone that isn't an engine author or a large AAA game developer is using a game engine (Unity, Unreal, Game Maker, etc) and the few developers that don't are building graphically simple games where OpenGL is completely sufficient or have technical ability to port to a few different APIs without issues.
There are a couple of games with Vulkan renderers that don't support Metal that I can see this being an issue in (Doom being a good example), but id is still a AAA studio that could have someone write a Metal backend if Mac made sense to them (same way they have DX12 and gnm backends for ps4 and xbox one).
Another thing is people often assume the only cost involved in porting a game to a new platform is graphics API, which is strange, but makes sense if your exposure to graphics programming is NeHe tutorials or something. All modern engines use thin wrappers over the system graphics API and low level code that directly calls OpenGL, DX, Vulkan, Metal, etc is a very small percentage of total code. Rants about graphics API being the main bottleneck to game portability annoy me a little bit also because they ignore portability challenges that are not graphics related, and even graphics portability challenges that are not directly related to API. It's naive to think if everyone just supported Vulkan all games could be instantly compiled to every platform or even that low level graphics API calls are the hardest thing to port. I agree that metal makes things a little harder by introducing a new shading language, but cross compiling to other shader languages from hlsl or glsl is standard and mostly a solved problem by now. If you're a small developer that doesn't or can't write a thin low level graphics wrapper for your game there are good opensource libraries that will do this for you (bgfx, oryol).
I've never understood Apple's lack of prioritization for the gaming market. Weren't games critical (albeit not as much as VisiCalc perhaps) to the Apple ]['s success? Looking at the iOS App Store, games seem to be far and away the most active and best-selling category with almost more subcategories than all the other non-game categories combined.
That said, it's nice that we're experiencing a renaissance in indie game development, which seems to rely more on cross-platform frameworks like Unity. It's possible to have a full life of gaming if you're into puzzlers/strategy games like Factorio, Rimworld, and the Fireaxis library (Civ, XCOM).
I think it's a self-fulfilling prophesy at this point. The Mac was never really a good gaming platform (and I say this as a long-time Mac user and occasional gamer) and by now the reputation is entrenched. People who want to buy a computer for games won't buy a Mac pretty much no matter what, so Apple has no reason to court them, so they won't buy Macs, so....
Well it's probably because all of their computers are prebuilt with relatively weak gpu's for gaming..even if they had prioritised it through the software how many people would game on their hardware.
Though now with thunderbolt 3 and external gpu's I think some of that excuse is gone away.
Microsoft wasn't all that different in the mid 2000s -- at one point the graphics group was getting RIFfed, and many of the principle engineers had to move to the XBox group. Apparently execs in the Windows division thought that the gaming scene was over or something. It wouldn't surprise me if Apple execs came from the same mold.
> I've never understood Apple's lack of prioritization for the gaming market.
I think people overestimate the size of the AAA video game market with high hardware requirements. That's more the domain of a minority of gaming aficionados.
Personally I haven't bought a Steam game that hasn't had the Mac symbol on it for several years, and I used to be a heavy Windows user (still am at work and on my 'get work done' laptop). Generally requires me to get mostly indie games, but that's okay, I have consoles for the rest.
I learned about Nvidias GeForce Now platform a few weeks back. It looked like a great solution for me for the amout of gaming I do now a days. Looks very cool check it out :)
I've often felt that true hard-core gaming machines were best thought of as a kind of high-end workstation, since, well, when you're a true "gamer", you're doing it in a nice dark room with booming sound, etc. Ergo, not mobile.
Given that the trashcan Mac Pro was a mess when it came to upgrading, it's clear that Apple just didn't prioritize high end workstation environments. We'll see what the next Mac Pro brings, it might be a nicer platform, but it'll be such a minuscule part of the market, I find it hard to believe many game studios will jump on it.
Otherwise, you're left with the typical Mac which often prioritizes good battery life, mobility, etc. So Macs are best left for casual gaming, but... well, phones are great at that too.
I do notice that cross platform mobile games on iPhones are significantly better performing then Android devices. So it's not that Apple doesn't prioritize gaming, just hard core "workstation style" gaming environments.
Most of the same games that run on high-end gaming machines also run on relatively low-powered consoles like the Xbox One and PS4. Heck, the Nintendo Switch uses mobile hardware and comes within spitting distance of Xbox One performance when docked.
Raw power isn't the issue. It's Apple's poor drivers and API support.
I find Apple's lack of commitment to Vulkan incredibly short-sighted on their part and downright offensive to developers. At a higher level, both Metal and Vulkan address the same technical issues in previous APIs. The sheer waste of effort and squandered opportunities resulting from this type of fragmentation sometimes make me wonder if we need a regulatory agency to step in when big players show such obvious disregard for interoperability.
Back around the end of February Khronos announced a "3D Portability" initiative [1], which would abstract over Vulkan/DX12/Metal. As I understood it, this could be a pure library solution which wouldn't require support from the platform and so would be less vulnerable to blockage by the usual walled-garden merchants. It was also mooted as a possible basis for WebGL-TNG.
Unfortunately I've seen nothing but tumbleweed ever since, which makes me suspect that this is one of those Khronos initiatives that never makes it out of the hangar, much less off the ground.
My Mac gaming experience over the past decades has mostly been "fuck it, buy a console". Every time I try to play something on the Mac it's an uphill battle to get it to talk to any of my various controllers.
I lose mods, and I lose genres that really do work a lot better on keyboard and mouse - I've been having an on and off urge to find some kind of Settlers retread lately, for instance, and this really doesn't exist on consoles - but I gain a lot of time not spent swearing at incompatibilities.
The one game I play regularly on my Mac is Hearthstone. It's great that Blizzard made a Mac version, and it runs well enough (it should, since it's also a mobile game), but after 3 years it still doesn't support retina monitors. The Windows version does, of course. It's built on Unity, so I don't know what the problem is.
At this point, after having been a gamer (though I've never really been fanatical about it) ever since childhood in the 1980s... I just don't care if my Mac plays big-budget AAA games at this point.
Like most software professionals, I work a lot of hours, and my time is limited.
So when it comes to leisure-time, I generally want my games to "just work."
I don't want to see a game on the Mac App Store and then spend a bunch of time Googling forums and stuff to see if the port's any good and if it will actually run decently on my Mac hardware, and then do some more experimentation with settings and everything to actually get it to run acceptably.
A little bit of console hacking can be fun; sometimes I enjoy tinkering with old consoles to get better video output or whatever. But that stuff is 100% optional.
Besides, these days, I'm more into indie-style 2D games than 60-hour immersive "epics" that cost $40mil to make but still have the same basic game mechanics as Daikatana. And a lot of those Unity-based 2D-ish games run pretty well on MacOS.
Plus, I don't know. I think I actually like having my Mac be my "dedicated work machine." It's hard enough to get work done with the Internet beckoning; it'd probably be even harder if all my favorite games were just a click away too. Then again, maybe that's just the Stockholm syndrome talking.
It used to be a good strategy, especially after upgrading my MBP 2011 with an SSD and more RAM.
Not so much with my last MBP, a mid 2015 model.
I have heard that the thermic paste used by Apple is of very low quality and degrades over time.
It seems to be the case for me.. this laptop used to be able to run GTAV on windows, now it crawls even when I try a simple compilation.
I have mostly renounced to play on a mac (whether it is on windows or osx) and I mostly play on a switch now.
It would be really nice if Apple decided to work with some player like Steam, who also has an interest in gaming on Unix-y systems. I would be really interested in the overlap between Steam's work on Ubuntu and Apple's OS X.
A large part of the problem sounds like Apple's commitment to Metal, but if it drops and and seeks to work with Steam, then they could stand to make a really great experience on their platforms, and perhaps in the living room, too.
It's not about software. It's not about Cider or Bootcamp or which OS you're using. The problem is bigger than that; it's about suitability of form factor.
There's a key difference between gaming and other tasks - like graphic design and software development - that I think the article misses. Work demands portability, for being productive both in the office and while traveling away from it. But barring a few edge cases, gaming doesn't demand portability at all. There's no pressing reason you can't keep your gaming machine in one place, your home. That's the entire philosophy behind the console market. What these systems do demand is physically larger hardware and a slew of peripherals (displays, graphics cards, cooling, speakers, controllers).
Apple has been doing extremely well in the notebook market, but it has steadily lost ground in desktop. When the redesigned Mac Pro finally comes out, that might change. But until then, PCs will continue to dominate the desktop. And I do not see the desktop losing its spot as the best form factor for gaming.
Gaming on OSX for me is hit and miss. Many of the games I have recently played have been advanced Wine wrappers and they work out pretty well. One company, Wargaming, has done pretty good with this model but they don't provide true support as the wrapper itself does introduce a lot of variable. Blizzard was a mainstay for my buying but even though I have not tried Overwatch the fact it was not made available for OSX does not bode well. If one of your longest supporters suddenly drops off, what does that say?
Was there some scare introduced with suggestions they may move off Intel? I never put any real faith into it and to be honest it might be the straw for me if it ever did happen.
Still a lot comes down to Apple really doesn't push their desktops and laptops as being used for games. They will put a "performance" claim on their website showing improvement over past models but not much beyond that. I rely on sites like barefeats to see if performance has ticked up enough to warrant a new purchase; as you can see for me my system is fine for what is there.
the saving grace has always been, just use bootcamp. It works, I don't need a new machine, and it can use the latest video drivers from the manufacturers site.
AFAIK Blizzard's WoW works faster on Windows on the same machine. I'm playing it on my Macbook with dedicated GPU (GT 650M), it's quite terrible, basically I have to play on lowest settings with 720x450 resolution (1440x900 with half resolution and upscaling) to have some playable FPS (10-30, drops to single digit sometimes). And WoW uses Metal API, not some wrapper.
It is both a Hardware and Software problem. Apple's choice of GPU is always lacking behind in performance, and it was only 2017's update of Mac that got them the GPU they deserve for their price range.
OpenGL wasn't updated for years. Making any work to port Games to Mac much more difficult.
With Apple working on its own GPU, and Metal 2 they finally have the groundwork to moving Mac Gaming forward. Of course that is if Apple decide to so.
Anyone have any experience with any cloud computing solutions (like https://www.paperspace.com) with their MacBook? Was thinking about trying it since it's cheap to try out.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|8 years ago|reply
Cider has both been a great boon to Mac gaming — it makes it cheap and quick to port Windows-only titles to the Mac without having to make them internally cross-platform — and also a great detriment: its Windows translation layer imposes a performance penalty and prevents true native feel, and crucially, many such games are using Cider's slow Direct3D-to-OpenGL translator, which is not only slower than real Direct3D (thus why such games will always run better under Windows in Boot Camp on the same hardware), and limits you to the Direct3D 9 featureset, but it is also translating to a graphics API Apple basically don't care about now (OpenGL).
The good news is that more and more games are using commodity engines, and those engines usually have proper native macOS support, and ideally Metal support. Nonetheless, Cider ports are very much a thing that must still be contended with.
For a recent high-profile case of Cider causing trouble, Square Enix went the cheap route when they ported their MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, to the Mac, and used Cider. The result was infamously bad and they had to pull it from the shelves. They did of course fix it up and re-release it, but even then, the resulting port is slower than and graphically inferior to simply running the game under Windows, because it's stuck with fake Direct3D 9. On Windows you get to choose between Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 11.
[+] [-] dkersten|8 years ago|reply
This means that, even though 1/3rd of my steam library has mac versions, half of these games don't actually run well.
(Disclaimer: since switching to mac, I typically game only on PS4 nowadays, which I guess probably doesn't have better hardware, but at least has well optimised games and lots of awesome exclusives)
[+] [-] alikoneko|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thehardsphere|8 years ago|reply
I thought Cider's performance and feature set had fallen dramatically behind Wine years ago, in part because some parts of their stack do rendering in software instead of hardware (the D3D to OpenGL translation is not the slow step in the process).
[+] [-] Yhippa|8 years ago|reply
I haven't tried the new version but I'm okay with getting these versions that are degraded instead of not having a game. Which makes me wonder how they're doing this nearly flawlessly on consoles. There has to be some performance hit due to making the game work with the various translation layers but in reality I hardly notice them. Would be nice if they could get it that performant with Mac.
[+] [-] MayeulC|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legohead|8 years ago|reply
Development time is better spent on internationalization than getting a working Mac build.
And I say this being a Mac user myself. Games actually run really well on my MacbookPro. But from a business standpoint, I wouldn't develop for Mac.
[1] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=combined
[+] [-] lobster_johnson|8 years ago|reply
There's a reason lots of people dual-boot into Bootcamp. I would love to play more games on my Mac, as opposed to under Windows or on my console, but the selection is terrible. Even when the engine the developers have used compiles for Mac, developers often don't do a port. That extends to indie games, too; still no Downwell for Mac, for example, despite the fact that it was made with GameMaker, which supports macOS as a target. Wadjet Eye, which produces a lot of technologically basic point and click adventure games, are very inconsistent about their releases; some games are releases on macOS, but most aren't.
Mac is also treated as a black sheep by the Steam app, to the extent that it's its own distinct item [1] in the genre list, next to "Action", "Adventure" and so on, and if you're a Mac Steam will still happily bury you in Windows games, despite the fact that they aren't playable.
Apple may be blamed on the AAA game situation, but for everything else (and most games aren't AAA), it's squarely on publishers, developers, and Steam.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/lE4NZsj.png
[+] [-] CountSessine|8 years ago|reply
It also doesn't help that Apple's commitment to video games on the Mac has been inconsistent at best. They insist on developing their own perpetually out-of-date OpenGL front end rather than leaving this to Nvidia and AMD - I don't know how well those two would do as the user-space maintainers of OpenGl on MacOS, but it couldn't be much worse than Apple. Considering this, maybe its a good thing Apple isn't providing a Vulkan front-end?
[+] [-] pentae|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jogjayr|8 years ago|reply
Wow I really should consider myself fortunate that all the games I like are on Mac. I'd hate to have to get a separate gaming PC.
[+] [-] arwineap|8 years ago|reply
I won't play a game unless it'll somehow run on linux. I guess this means I've been playing a lot of unity / wine games :)
[+] [-] ryandrake|8 years ago|reply
Why would one take a cross platform game engine and make the rest of the game logic Windows-only?
[+] [-] ouid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fej|8 years ago|reply
Apple's hubris is starting to catch up with them. They're trying to pull devs in with Metal but are instead pushing them away by making it harder or impossible to use APIs that devs actually want. To add insult to injury, the games market on Mac is small anyway, even relative to its market share. Windows has been absolutely dominant in this space for so long that I can't believe that Apple would try to get developers working on their platform by making it harder, not easier, to develop for.
[+] [-] simonh|8 years ago|reply
If anything, their hubris has paid off. It's hard to see how mediocre gaming support has significantly hurt Apple until now. Mac gaming isn't exactly great, but it's far and away better than it was 10 years ago when I got my first Mac, and there's good reason to believe it will continue to get better. That's good for Apple and Mac users.
There's this persistent meme about Apple that their contrariness and spurning of received wisdom and practices in the rest of the industry will imminently bite them in the ass and hammer the company. It just persistently fails to actually happen.
[+] [-] hacker_9|8 years ago|reply
[1] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
[+] [-] martijn_himself|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Impossible|8 years ago|reply
There are a couple of games with Vulkan renderers that don't support Metal that I can see this being an issue in (Doom being a good example), but id is still a AAA studio that could have someone write a Metal backend if Mac made sense to them (same way they have DX12 and gnm backends for ps4 and xbox one).
Another thing is people often assume the only cost involved in porting a game to a new platform is graphics API, which is strange, but makes sense if your exposure to graphics programming is NeHe tutorials or something. All modern engines use thin wrappers over the system graphics API and low level code that directly calls OpenGL, DX, Vulkan, Metal, etc is a very small percentage of total code. Rants about graphics API being the main bottleneck to game portability annoy me a little bit also because they ignore portability challenges that are not graphics related, and even graphics portability challenges that are not directly related to API. It's naive to think if everyone just supported Vulkan all games could be instantly compiled to every platform or even that low level graphics API calls are the hardest thing to port. I agree that metal makes things a little harder by introducing a new shading language, but cross compiling to other shader languages from hlsl or glsl is standard and mostly a solved problem by now. If you're a small developer that doesn't or can't write a thin low level graphics wrapper for your game there are good opensource libraries that will do this for you (bgfx, oryol).
[+] [-] bmh_ca|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|8 years ago|reply
That said, it's nice that we're experiencing a renaissance in indie game development, which seems to rely more on cross-platform frameworks like Unity. It's possible to have a full life of gaming if you're into puzzlers/strategy games like Factorio, Rimworld, and the Fireaxis library (Civ, XCOM).
[+] [-] mikeash|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mpg33|8 years ago|reply
Though now with thunderbolt 3 and external gpu's I think some of that excuse is gone away.
[+] [-] kabdib|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbehrends|8 years ago|reply
I think people overestimate the size of the AAA video game market with high hardware requirements. That's more the domain of a minority of gaming aficionados.
[+] [-] digi_owl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cableshaft|8 years ago|reply
Personally I haven't bought a Steam game that hasn't had the Mac symbol on it for several years, and I used to be a heavy Windows user (still am at work and on my 'get work done' laptop). Generally requires me to get mostly indie games, but that's okay, I have consoles for the rest.
[+] [-] desireco42|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shroom|8 years ago|reply
- Pay per hours played
- 200fps with a 20-30ms delay
If you live in the U.S. you can try beta for free https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/ma...
Video of Apple Insider testing the beta https://youtu.be/XbVFemjaeP0
[+] [-] Eric_WVGG|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_tristan|8 years ago|reply
Given that the trashcan Mac Pro was a mess when it came to upgrading, it's clear that Apple just didn't prioritize high end workstation environments. We'll see what the next Mac Pro brings, it might be a nicer platform, but it'll be such a minuscule part of the market, I find it hard to believe many game studios will jump on it.
Otherwise, you're left with the typical Mac which often prioritizes good battery life, mobility, etc. So Macs are best left for casual gaming, but... well, phones are great at that too.
I do notice that cross platform mobile games on iPhones are significantly better performing then Android devices. So it's not that Apple doesn't prioritize gaming, just hard core "workstation style" gaming environments.
[+] [-] jamesgeck0|8 years ago|reply
Raw power isn't the issue. It's Apple's poor drivers and API support.
[+] [-] wjakob|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrec|8 years ago|reply
Unfortunately I've seen nothing but tumbleweed ever since, which makes me suspect that this is one of those Khronos initiatives that never makes it out of the hangar, much less off the ground.
[1] https://www.khronos.org/3dportability
[+] [-] tnoeu7nthoae|8 years ago|reply
[0]https://moltengl.com
[+] [-] egypturnash|8 years ago|reply
I lose mods, and I lose genres that really do work a lot better on keyboard and mouse - I've been having an on and off urge to find some kind of Settlers retread lately, for instance, and this really doesn't exist on consoles - but I gain a lot of time not spent swearing at incompatibilities.
[+] [-] jonny_eh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnBooty|8 years ago|reply
Like most software professionals, I work a lot of hours, and my time is limited.
So when it comes to leisure-time, I generally want my games to "just work."
I don't want to see a game on the Mac App Store and then spend a bunch of time Googling forums and stuff to see if the port's any good and if it will actually run decently on my Mac hardware, and then do some more experimentation with settings and everything to actually get it to run acceptably.
A little bit of console hacking can be fun; sometimes I enjoy tinkering with old consoles to get better video output or whatever. But that stuff is 100% optional.
Besides, these days, I'm more into indie-style 2D games than 60-hour immersive "epics" that cost $40mil to make but still have the same basic game mechanics as Daikatana. And a lot of those Unity-based 2D-ish games run pretty well on MacOS.
Plus, I don't know. I think I actually like having my Mac be my "dedicated work machine." It's hard enough to get work done with the Internet beckoning; it'd probably be even harder if all my favorite games were just a click away too. Then again, maybe that's just the Stockholm syndrome talking.
[+] [-] on_and_off|8 years ago|reply
It used to be a good strategy, especially after upgrading my MBP 2011 with an SSD and more RAM.
Not so much with my last MBP, a mid 2015 model.
I have heard that the thermic paste used by Apple is of very low quality and degrades over time. It seems to be the case for me.. this laptop used to be able to run GTAV on windows, now it crawls even when I try a simple compilation.
I have mostly renounced to play on a mac (whether it is on windows or osx) and I mostly play on a switch now.
[+] [-] michelb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cosinetau|8 years ago|reply
A large part of the problem sounds like Apple's commitment to Metal, but if it drops and and seeks to work with Steam, then they could stand to make a really great experience on their platforms, and perhaps in the living room, too.
[+] [-] etjossem|8 years ago|reply
There's a key difference between gaming and other tasks - like graphic design and software development - that I think the article misses. Work demands portability, for being productive both in the office and while traveling away from it. But barring a few edge cases, gaming doesn't demand portability at all. There's no pressing reason you can't keep your gaming machine in one place, your home. That's the entire philosophy behind the console market. What these systems do demand is physically larger hardware and a slew of peripherals (displays, graphics cards, cooling, speakers, controllers).
Apple has been doing extremely well in the notebook market, but it has steadily lost ground in desktop. When the redesigned Mac Pro finally comes out, that might change. But until then, PCs will continue to dominate the desktop. And I do not see the desktop losing its spot as the best form factor for gaming.
[+] [-] Shivetya|8 years ago|reply
Gaming on OSX for me is hit and miss. Many of the games I have recently played have been advanced Wine wrappers and they work out pretty well. One company, Wargaming, has done pretty good with this model but they don't provide true support as the wrapper itself does introduce a lot of variable. Blizzard was a mainstay for my buying but even though I have not tried Overwatch the fact it was not made available for OSX does not bode well. If one of your longest supporters suddenly drops off, what does that say?
Was there some scare introduced with suggestions they may move off Intel? I never put any real faith into it and to be honest it might be the straw for me if it ever did happen.
Still a lot comes down to Apple really doesn't push their desktops and laptops as being used for games. They will put a "performance" claim on their website showing improvement over past models but not much beyond that. I rely on sites like barefeats to see if performance has ticked up enough to warrant a new purchase; as you can see for me my system is fine for what is there.
the saving grace has always been, just use bootcamp. It works, I don't need a new machine, and it can use the latest video drivers from the manufacturers site.
[+] [-] vbezhenar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|8 years ago|reply
OpenGL wasn't updated for years. Making any work to port Games to Mac much more difficult.
With Apple working on its own GPU, and Metal 2 they finally have the groundwork to moving Mac Gaming forward. Of course that is if Apple decide to so.
[+] [-] germainelol|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sudomake|8 years ago|reply
Unfortunately for multiplayer you are limited to playing against other OSX users - so windoze is the superior option again.
[+] [-] benologist|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fil_a_del_fee_a|8 years ago|reply