5 ms·

Now, if only Unreal Engine builds were available M1 native, I could get rid of my huge and heavy desktop entirely! Interestingly, some improvements to Rosetta

by sk0g 5y ago

Now, if only Unreal Engine builds were available M1 native, I could get rid of my huge and heavy desktop entirely! Interestingly, some improvements to Rosetta were mentioned, extremely briefly.

out_of_protocol 5y ago
Apple very much against games, they've even broken OpenGL just because. Don't expect any type of gaming ecosystem around Apple anytime soon.
- dewey 5y ago
  > Apple very much against games They are not against games, they just don't care about supporting anything else that's not coming through their frameworks and the app store. This can easily verified by the way-too-long segments of game developer demos at the annual WWDC.
  - out_of_protocol 5y ago
    Thats not how industry works, thats not how any of this works. iPhone ecosystem is big enough to move itself forward, but desktop market plays by different rules.If you don't follow what majority of the market do, it's much cheaper to just ignore that tiny customer segment which requires totally alien set of technologies
    - GeekyBear 5y ago
      >If you don't follow what majority of the market do, it's much cheaper to just ignore that tiny customer segment which requires totally alien set of technologies iOS and Macs both use Metal. You can't refuse to support Metal without missing out on a very big slice of total gaming revenue.
      - out_of_protocol 5y ago
        On mobile devices - definitely On desktop - missing what, 2% or less? Checked Steam stats - yep, about 2%
        boardwaalk 5y ago
        That Steam stat is probably a chicken and the egg situation. I know I don’t run Steam on my Macbook because there’s nothing I want to play — but I would if there was. Still the Mac marketshare is not that high (~15%?) but might start looking attractive to developers looking to “get in first” when hardware that can actually run games becomes available (cough).
        noahtallen 5y ago
        I mean, it’s similar to Linux, right? Linux has about 2% on Steam, and that’s with compatibility layers like wine allowing many windows games to run cross platform. This [0] puts Mac at 9.5% of operating systems overall and Linux at 2.4%. But games with native Linux support are not very common compared to Windows, even though it’s mainly a matter of supporting Vulkan, which many modern games already do. My point is that even though Linux should be relatively easy to support natively (compared to mac not supporting cross-platform graphics APIs out of the box), devs aren’t putting the effort in. I really hope this changes, and hopefully mac “gaming-level” hardware could help push cross-platform work along. - 0: https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.asp...
        GeekyBear 5y ago
        Metal is Metal. Once you support Metal for iOS games they also work under MacOS when running on Apple's chips. You can support traditional MacOS application chrome with little additional effort.
        terafo 5y ago
        Desktop games and mobile games are not the same. On mobile pretty much every heavy game uses either UE or Unity. High end PC games use custom engines that are heavily tuned for x86 and use different APIs. Metal port would be expensive and not worth it.
    - dewey 5y ago
      Which is precisely what I said. They don't care that the larger gaming market ignores their platform. Apple Arcade and other gaming related endeavours all aim at the casual mobile gamer market.
- aroman 5y ago
  They literally had a Unity developer in the showcase during the keynote.
  - saijanai 5y ago
    Where in the showcase?
    - aroman 5y ago
      https://youtu.be/exM1uajp--A?t=1644 https://youtu.be/exM1uajp--A?t=1644 and https://youtu.be/exM1uajp--A?t=1701 https://youtu.be/exM1uajp--A?t=1701
- spacedcowboy 5y ago
  So against games that they just became a Patron supporter of Blender [1]... [1] https://www.blender.org/press/apple-joins-blender-development-fund/ https://www.blender.org/press/apple-joins-blender-developmen...
  - manquer 5y ago
    Blender has strong use case in the animation and movie ecosystems. RenderMan, Pixar has some strong connections with Jobs and in turn with Blender, games may not really be in their radar for Blender sponsorship. Besides supporting creator workflows (Final Cut Pro, best in class laptop graphics, Blender etc) doesn't mean they want to directly support gamers as buyers, just that they believe creators who produce games (or other media) are strong market for them go after. The marketing is designed strongly towards the WFH post pandemic designer market. They either had to ship their expensive Mac desktops to their home or come in and work at office last year. This laptop's graphics performance pitch is for that market to buy/upgrade now.
    - saijanai 5y ago
      The M1 Pro & Max CPUs are approaching dedicated Laptop GPU levels, so Minis will be a reasonable low/mid-end game machine, comparable to the best PC gaming laptops. The M* Mac Pros will start out with built-in graphics starting at the M1 Max level and going 4 or perhaps 8x higher, still using integrated graphics. The fact that Apple now supports $5K dedicated graphics cards on the pro series suggests that the pro M* Macs will be able to use any graphics card (that supports Metal) that you can buy. The fact that Apple's store was crashing continually after the new laptops were announced suggests that the market for Mac games is going to grow a lot faster than anyone thinks...
      - manquer 5y ago
        It is a good machine yes, although I wouldn't go too much store crashing as an indicator of popularity, that could just be poorly managed web services at Apple. Delivery dates are even now within 1 week after shipping starts (Nov 3-10), so demand seems within their initial estimates. Hardware is not only reason gaming is not strong on Mac. Microsoft had a decent hardware and software offering for their Nokia phones in the later years, that didn't help them. It will take ecosystem of developers investing years of effort in building a deep catalog. Game publishers are not going to risk spending that kind of effort unless there is already enough of market for large titles to recover the money, while this can grow organically, to compete with MS who have XBox as well as dominance in PC gaming, Apple will need to be active in their attempt. A lot of effort in dev community engagement, incentivize publishers to release on their platform, get exclusive deals etc. After all this, it still may fail. Apple has not shown any interest in even trying to do that so far.
tehnub 5y ago
Same wish here. Last I tried a few months ago, I was unable to compile UE4 as well. These machines would be great for UE4 dev if only the compatibility was there. I wonder if the politics between Epic and Apple has made efforts in this area a lower priority.
- sk0g 5y ago
  Tim Sweeney seems to have confirmed that efforts are under way still. Fingers crossed! https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1450163607778611201 https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/145016360777861120...

by sk0g 5y ago

Now, if only Unreal Engine builds were available M1 native, I could get rid of my huge and heavy desktop entirely! Interestingly, some improvements to Rosetta were mentioned, extremely briefly.

out_of_protocol 5y ago

Apple very much against games, they've even broken OpenGL just because. Don't expect any type of gaming ecosystem around Apple anytime soon.

dewey 5y ago
> Apple very much against games They are not against games, they just don't care about supporting anything else that's not coming through their frameworks and the app store. This can easily verified by the way-too-long segments of game developer demos at the annual WWDC.
- out_of_protocol 5y ago
  Thats not how industry works, thats not how any of this works. iPhone ecosystem is big enough to move itself forward, but desktop market plays by different rules.If you don't follow what majority of the market do, it's much cheaper to just ignore that tiny customer segment which requires totally alien set of technologies
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    >If you don't follow what majority of the market do, it's much cheaper to just ignore that tiny customer segment which requires totally alien set of technologies iOS and Macs both use Metal. You can't refuse to support Metal without missing out on a very big slice of total gaming revenue.
    - out_of_protocol 5y ago
      On mobile devices - definitely On desktop - missing what, 2% or less? Checked Steam stats - yep, about 2%
      - boardwaalk 5y ago
        That Steam stat is probably a chicken and the egg situation. I know I don’t run Steam on my Macbook because there’s nothing I want to play — but I would if there was. Still the Mac marketshare is not that high (~15%?) but might start looking attractive to developers looking to “get in first” when hardware that can actually run games becomes available (cough).
        noahtallen 5y ago
        I mean, it’s similar to Linux, right? Linux has about 2% on Steam, and that’s with compatibility layers like wine allowing many windows games to run cross platform. This [0] puts Mac at 9.5% of operating systems overall and Linux at 2.4%. But games with native Linux support are not very common compared to Windows, even though it’s mainly a matter of supporting Vulkan, which many modern games already do. My point is that even though Linux should be relatively easy to support natively (compared to mac not supporting cross-platform graphics APIs out of the box), devs aren’t putting the effort in. I really hope this changes, and hopefully mac “gaming-level” hardware could help push cross-platform work along. - 0: https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.asp...
      - GeekyBear 5y ago
        Metal is Metal. Once you support Metal for iOS games they also work under MacOS when running on Apple's chips. You can support traditional MacOS application chrome with little additional effort.
        terafo 5y ago
        Desktop games and mobile games are not the same. On mobile pretty much every heavy game uses either UE or Unity. High end PC games use custom engines that are heavily tuned for x86 and use different APIs. Metal port would be expensive and not worth it.
  - dewey 5y ago
    Which is precisely what I said. They don't care that the larger gaming market ignores their platform. Apple Arcade and other gaming related endeavours all aim at the casual mobile gamer market.
aroman 5y ago
They literally had a Unity developer in the showcase during the keynote.
- saijanai 5y ago
  Where in the showcase?
  - aroman 5y ago
    https://youtu.be/exM1uajp--A?t=1644 https://youtu.be/exM1uajp--A?t=1644 and https://youtu.be/exM1uajp--A?t=1701 https://youtu.be/exM1uajp--A?t=1701
spacedcowboy 5y ago
So against games that they just became a Patron supporter of Blender [1]... [1] https://www.blender.org/press/apple-joins-blender-development-fund/ https://www.blender.org/press/apple-joins-blender-developmen...
- manquer 5y ago
  Blender has strong use case in the animation and movie ecosystems. RenderMan, Pixar has some strong connections with Jobs and in turn with Blender, games may not really be in their radar for Blender sponsorship. Besides supporting creator workflows (Final Cut Pro, best in class laptop graphics, Blender etc) doesn't mean they want to directly support gamers as buyers, just that they believe creators who produce games (or other media) are strong market for them go after. The marketing is designed strongly towards the WFH post pandemic designer market. They either had to ship their expensive Mac desktops to their home or come in and work at office last year. This laptop's graphics performance pitch is for that market to buy/upgrade now.
  - saijanai 5y ago
    The M1 Pro & Max CPUs are approaching dedicated Laptop GPU levels, so Minis will be a reasonable low/mid-end game machine, comparable to the best PC gaming laptops. The M* Mac Pros will start out with built-in graphics starting at the M1 Max level and going 4 or perhaps 8x higher, still using integrated graphics. The fact that Apple now supports $5K dedicated graphics cards on the pro series suggests that the pro M* Macs will be able to use any graphics card (that supports Metal) that you can buy. The fact that Apple's store was crashing continually after the new laptops were announced suggests that the market for Mac games is going to grow a lot faster than anyone thinks...
    - manquer 5y ago
      It is a good machine yes, although I wouldn't go too much store crashing as an indicator of popularity, that could just be poorly managed web services at Apple. Delivery dates are even now within 1 week after shipping starts (Nov 3-10), so demand seems within their initial estimates. Hardware is not only reason gaming is not strong on Mac. Microsoft had a decent hardware and software offering for their Nokia phones in the later years, that didn't help them. It will take ecosystem of developers investing years of effort in building a deep catalog. Game publishers are not going to risk spending that kind of effort unless there is already enough of market for large titles to recover the money, while this can grow organically, to compete with MS who have XBox as well as dominance in PC gaming, Apple will need to be active in their attempt. A lot of effort in dev community engagement, incentivize publishers to release on their platform, get exclusive deals etc. After all this, it still may fail. Apple has not shown any interest in even trying to do that so far.

tehnub 5y ago

Same wish here. Last I tried a few months ago, I was unable to compile UE4 as well. These machines would be great for UE4 dev if only the compatibility was there. I wonder if the politics between Epic and Apple has made efforts in this area a lower priority.

sk0g 5y ago
Tim Sweeney seems to have confirmed that efforts are under way still. Fingers crossed! https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1450163607778611201 https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/145016360777861120...