6 ms·

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

by Fej 9y ago

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.

bmh_ca 9y ago
Vulcan was the answer imo. I haven't seen any evidence that Metal is catching on - but would like to.
martijn_himself 9y ago
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.
- Fej 9y ago
  You're absolutely right. Apple is trying to make it work on Macs, which is the real issue.
- potatolicious 9y ago
  Few devs work with Metal directly - iOS or otherwise. I think the play here is to get Metal adopted by popular middleware so that devs who use them get native Mac support "for free". And it appears that gaming in general is coalescing around Unreal and Unity, and both have strong native Mac support. Metal support I think is less of a problem than Apple's own hardware - the anemic GPUs in consumer Macs prevent most AAA titles from being playable, even if the middleware is completely abstracted out. Apple's focus on hi-dpi displays makes this even worse. Apple doesn't seem to have a coherent strategy around this. If you look at the Mac App Store right now, the games being most heavily advertised all have very marginal performance even on higher-end Macs, and likely straight up won't run on most of their (new!) laptops. It seems absurd that Apple is so heavily marketing games that will barely run on a typical Mac.
- shinymark 9y ago
  That may be true but tech-wise no casual game I'm aware of needs Metal so the logic doesn't follow. (Specifically casual games that I've played are not pushing performance so a more performant low level API doesn't help.)
simonh 9y ago
> 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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  What do you think would have happened if they had maintained really, really good OpenGL support?
  - simonh 9y ago
    * Metal wouldnt exist or would be years late - they diverted their top graphics talent from working on OpenGL to Metal. * Apple would be one of the few remaining platforms using OpenGL, this is why Mantle and Vulkan exist because they're not the only ones looking beyond OpenGL, so they'd still be a bit of a ghetto. * Battery life on Mac laptops would be worse, Macs would run a bit hotter and desktop performance on lower end Macs would be a bit slower still. * Finally any commercial difference in terms of game availability or Apple's bottom line would be a rounding error on a rounding error. This is a strategic move.
- cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
  People say the same thing about Nintendo, and it's odd that Nintendo and Apple are both swimming in pools of money like Scrooge McDuck despite their (so-called) "obvious missteps".
hacker_9 9y ago
The Steam Hardware Stats [1] also show the following abysmal market share: Windows 96.24% OSX 2.95% Linux 0.72% If you aren't Windows in the PC gaming space, you really don't have a leg to stand on when trying to force developers to work your way. [1] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
- lobster_johnson 9y ago
  On the other hand: There are very few Steam games for Mac.
- mahyarm 9y ago
  A bunch of us have both a mac and a windows pc for gaming, and would like to just use one computer for gaming. I wonder what the stats are for users that have both, and how much more / less they spend than windows PC only users.
- perryprog 9y ago
  As someone who games using Steam on a Mac (not a big gamer): ouch.
- X86BSD 9y ago
  I seem to recall a company called palm say almost the same thing about phones and a certain fruit company. Be careful what you believe in.
- tnoeu7nthoae 9y ago
  Sure, but Steam is a horrible experience on the Mac. When I find a game that looks cool, Steam is the last place I look for it because I hate using Steam. I go to the Mac App Store first (think about that!) because Steam is so awful. I'll even pay full price on the Mac App Store when Steam has the same game on sale because Steam is painful to use. It's only when a title can't be found outside of Steam that I use it.
Impossible 9y ago
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).

by Fej 9y ago

bmh_ca 9y ago

Vulcan was the answer imo. I haven't seen any evidence that Metal is catching on - but would like to.

martijn_himself 9y ago

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.

Fej 9y ago
You're absolutely right. Apple is trying to make it work on Macs, which is the real issue.
potatolicious 9y ago
Few devs work with Metal directly - iOS or otherwise. I think the play here is to get Metal adopted by popular middleware so that devs who use them get native Mac support "for free". And it appears that gaming in general is coalescing around Unreal and Unity, and both have strong native Mac support. Metal support I think is less of a problem than Apple's own hardware - the anemic GPUs in consumer Macs prevent most AAA titles from being playable, even if the middleware is completely abstracted out. Apple's focus on hi-dpi displays makes this even worse. Apple doesn't seem to have a coherent strategy around this. If you look at the Mac App Store right now, the games being most heavily advertised all have very marginal performance even on higher-end Macs, and likely straight up won't run on most of their (new!) laptops. It seems absurd that Apple is so heavily marketing games that will barely run on a typical Mac.
shinymark 9y ago
That may be true but tech-wise no casual game I'm aware of needs Metal so the logic doesn't follow. (Specifically casual games that I've played are not pushing performance so a more performant low level API doesn't help.)

simonh 9y ago

> 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.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
robotresearcher 9y ago
What do you think would have happened if they had maintained really, really good OpenGL support?
- simonh 9y ago
  * Metal wouldnt exist or would be years late - they diverted their top graphics talent from working on OpenGL to Metal. * Apple would be one of the few remaining platforms using OpenGL, this is why Mantle and Vulkan exist because they're not the only ones looking beyond OpenGL, so they'd still be a bit of a ghetto. * Battery life on Mac laptops would be worse, Macs would run a bit hotter and desktop performance on lower end Macs would be a bit slower still. * Finally any commercial difference in terms of game availability or Apple's bottom line would be a rounding error on a rounding error. This is a strategic move.
cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
People say the same thing about Nintendo, and it's odd that Nintendo and Apple are both swimming in pools of money like Scrooge McDuck despite their (so-called) "obvious missteps".

hacker_9 9y ago

The Steam Hardware Stats [1] also show the following abysmal market share: Windows 96.24% OSX 2.95% Linux 0.72% If you aren't Windows in the PC gaming space, you really don't have a leg to stand on when trying to force developers to work your way. [1] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

lobster_johnson 9y ago
On the other hand: There are very few Steam games for Mac.
mahyarm 9y ago
A bunch of us have both a mac and a windows pc for gaming, and would like to just use one computer for gaming. I wonder what the stats are for users that have both, and how much more / less they spend than windows PC only users.
perryprog 9y ago
As someone who games using Steam on a Mac (not a big gamer): ouch.
X86BSD 9y ago
I seem to recall a company called palm say almost the same thing about phones and a certain fruit company. Be careful what you believe in.
tnoeu7nthoae 9y ago
Sure, but Steam is a horrible experience on the Mac. When I find a game that looks cool, Steam is the last place I look for it because I hate using Steam. I go to the Mac App Store first (think about that!) because Steam is so awful. I'll even pay full price on the Mac App Store when Steam has the same game on sale because Steam is painful to use. It's only when a title can't be found outside of Steam that I use it.

Impossible 9y ago

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).