5 ms·
Besides obvious gripes like price these seems pretty perfect in the Verge's eyes, speed, battery life, good screen and keyboard.One interesting sore spot is gam
by marricks 5y ago
Besides obvious gripes like price these seems pretty perfect in the Verge's eyes, speed, battery life, good screen and keyboard.One interesting sore spot is gaming.
These have good GPUs but poor gaming performance. They perform as good as the best for work related tasks but closer to midrange AMD/Nvidia products.
I wonder if this is a "if they build it they will come" and more games will be optimized for these chips? Obviously Apple also made some design decisions in focusing on "pro" work rather than gaming too.
- tziki 5y agoOr maybe Apple is just waiting for game streaming to become the norm.
- germinalphrase 5y agoGaming on Macs has always been second class.
- marricks 5y agoExactly! So Macs now have some capable GPUs, will the games come? Will easy ports of iPhone games make gaming a thing? Future still unclear but there's some GPU horsepower in every mac now.
- konart 5y agoI don't think this is a major problem. Metal and ARM are.
- gigglesupstairs 5y agoI am not too up to date technically on this, but since iOS apps can run now on M1 Macs so shouldn’t it be some way possible to hook joysticks to Macs and play those iOS games? Is it possible right now, or has Apple said something about such a scenario?
- ascagnel_ 5y agoIt's possible right now -- there are a handful of Apple Arcade games that run across iOS/iPadOS/tvOS/macOS and support controllers, touchscreens, and keyboard+mouse. To name a few I've played and enjoyed: - The Pathless - The Last Campfire - Cozy Grove - Alba: A Wildlife Adventure - FANTASIAN - Mutazione The games don't _have_ to ship via Apple Arcade to take advantage of the cross-platform tools, but most of the ones that have done the work have come out on AA.
- smoldesu 5y agoThird-class, now that Proton isn't supported...
- hajile 5y agoCrossover is commercial wine and works decently enough. The real issue is the combination of lacking native 32-bit support, restricted metal API, translation layer overhead, and Rosetta all taking a piece of the performance pie.
- smoldesu 5y agoCrossover isn't free and doesn't have DXVK or professional support from Valve, though. The difference is pretty obvious when you compare compatibility lists: I'd consider Proton's 85%+ coverage of the Steam store to be 'decent enough', but the patchwork support Crossover offers is more along the lines of 'barely justifiable' from a price perspective. I agree about the other issues you bring up though. The lack of 32-bit support is going to be a real stability challenge for anyone who wants to take Mac gaming seriously, and without a decent graphics API like Vulkan it will be exceptionally hard to court developers. Interestingly, it seems like Rosetta's overhead could be the bottleneck for a lot of these games too: if you watch the performance of GPU-light games like CS:GO, people struggle to surpass 90fps even at 720p on the new machines. Since ARM will always be punching up the abstraction layer to emulate x86, I suspect this may always be the case for Apple Silicon.
- slg 5y agoSure in OS X/macOs, but Macbook Pros have generally been decent gaming machines if you went the Boot Camp route which is no longer an option on Apple silicon.
- rsynnott 5y agoThe gaming should get at least somewhat better. Most games available on Mac today are x86 ports. New ports will start targeting arm instead, and that’ll be a help. But ultimately the Mac will never be a first-class platform for most game devs.