5 ms·

> ARM Macs are going to just be lost for any kind of gaming Every game I've tried with a Mac port runs great on the M1 under Rosetta. I've sunk many hours into

by xmodem 6y ago

> ARM Macs are going to just be lost for any kind of gaming Every game I've tried with a Mac port runs great on the M1 under Rosetta. I've sunk many hours into Factorio and Offworld Trading Company on my M1 mini, and if I gave you the same game running side by side on an Intel mac, I'd bet you could't tell which was which without quitting and checking the system profiler. If you meant triple-A gaming, then yeah, without a sizable increase in mac marketshare, it's probably lost for the foreseeable future.

cromwellian 6y ago
Macs in general are terrible for triple-A gaming. I doubt any Mac in existence can run a Bootcamp's version of Cyberpunk 2077, except maybe a Mac Pro with a top-end GPU, or maybe an eGPU would work, assuming you could get a top-end AMD or Nvidia eGPU. On top of that, there's a lack of raw mouse which Apple hasn't fixed despite over a decade of people begging. This really fubar's FPS games where absolute control over sensitivity, acceleration curves are crucial for mechanics (e.g. countering recoil and flick shots in Counter-Strike)
- xmodem 6y ago
  It's no Cyberpunk 2077, but I recently played through Control on medium-ish detail on the AMD GPU on my 4 year old Macbook Pro (in Bootcamp, obviously). It managed around ~50 FPS most of the time, only very occasionally dropping a little below 30 when there was a lot going on. I would try Cyberpunk 2077 on it out of curiosity but I'm not interested enough in the game to pay the launch price for it. Obviously no hardcore gamer is going to be happy with this, but in general I'm very happy with the trade-offs Apple has chosen for portable macs and when I do replace this with an Apple Silicon machine, I will be slightly disappointed at losing the ability to play the occasional triple-A game, but not enough so to seriously consider other options.
- mmcconnell1618 6y ago
  While not native on M1, you can play Cyberpuck 2077 streaming over stadia on a Mac: https://stadia.google.com/game/cyberpunk2077?hl=en https://stadia.google.com/game/cyberpunk2077?hl=en
  - 0xffff2 6y ago
    I keep seeing comments like this pop up, and I don't get it. Of course if you run the game on some other computer and only stream the video output to the client you can play any game on nearly any device. That's not what anyone's talking about when they say you probably can't run Cyberpunk 2077 on an M1 Mac.
  - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
    I've considered it, but I've tried Steam Link inside my local LAN, and Playstation NOW over my gigabit cable connection, and I find both to be too laggy for my taste.
cptskippy 6y ago
Those are very niche games with very low system requirements. It's a bit like saying the M1 handles emulating Solitaire and Minesweeper just fine.
kbenson 6y ago
Unreal Engine and Unity both have mobile ports, so already support ARM in some manner, and they provide much of the heavy lifting for the low-end stuff for many AAA games. That said, I'm not sure if Unity will have an advantage here because of its reliance on C# compared to UE's C++ (but I'm not sure how common it is to use C++ compared to UnrealScript). Then again, if you can trigger the X86 consistency mode on the M1 (or if it's always on?) for ARM instructions (if that makes sense), then maybe it's as simple as a compile/release for that target from each of those platforms since the memory model will be the same for the C++ code. Note: I'm not a game developer, and have only looked at/used minimally at those engines/suites, so there's a lot of assumptions in the above based on how I understand stuff to work, not how I know it to work from experience.

by xmodem 6y ago

cromwellian 6y ago

Macs in general are terrible for triple-A gaming. I doubt any Mac in existence can run a Bootcamp's version of Cyberpunk 2077, except maybe a Mac Pro with a top-end GPU, or maybe an eGPU would work, assuming you could get a top-end AMD or Nvidia eGPU. On top of that, there's a lack of raw mouse which Apple hasn't fixed despite over a decade of people begging. This really fubar's FPS games where absolute control over sensitivity, acceleration curves are crucial for mechanics (e.g. countering recoil and flick shots in Counter-Strike)

xmodem 6y ago
It's no Cyberpunk 2077, but I recently played through Control on medium-ish detail on the AMD GPU on my 4 year old Macbook Pro (in Bootcamp, obviously). It managed around ~50 FPS most of the time, only very occasionally dropping a little below 30 when there was a lot going on. I would try Cyberpunk 2077 on it out of curiosity but I'm not interested enough in the game to pay the launch price for it. Obviously no hardcore gamer is going to be happy with this, but in general I'm very happy with the trade-offs Apple has chosen for portable macs and when I do replace this with an Apple Silicon machine, I will be slightly disappointed at losing the ability to play the occasional triple-A game, but not enough so to seriously consider other options.
mmcconnell1618 6y ago
While not native on M1, you can play Cyberpuck 2077 streaming over stadia on a Mac: https://stadia.google.com/game/cyberpunk2077?hl=en https://stadia.google.com/game/cyberpunk2077?hl=en
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  I keep seeing comments like this pop up, and I don't get it. Of course if you run the game on some other computer and only stream the video output to the client you can play any game on nearly any device. That's not what anyone's talking about when they say you probably can't run Cyberpunk 2077 on an M1 Mac.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  I've considered it, but I've tried Steam Link inside my local LAN, and Playstation NOW over my gigabit cable connection, and I find both to be too laggy for my taste.

cptskippy 6y ago

Those are very niche games with very low system requirements. It's a bit like saying the M1 handles emulating Solitaire and Minesweeper just fine.

kbenson 6y ago

Unreal Engine and Unity both have mobile ports, so already support ARM in some manner, and they provide much of the heavy lifting for the low-end stuff for many AAA games. That said, I'm not sure if Unity will have an advantage here because of its reliance on C# compared to UE's C++ (but I'm not sure how common it is to use C++ compared to UnrealScript). Then again, if you can trigger the X86 consistency mode on the M1 (or if it's always on?) for ARM instructions (if that makes sense), then maybe it's as simple as a compile/release for that target from each of those platforms since the memory model will be the same for the C++ code. Note: I'm not a game developer, and have only looked at/used minimally at those engines/suites, so there's a lot of assumptions in the above based on how I understand stuff to work, not how I know it to work from experience.