13 ms·

More and more I see the M1 chips and I wish Mac worked seriously well for gaming. Would love too see something like Proton but for Mac (given up hopes for nativ

More and more I see the M1 chips and I wish Mac worked seriously well for gaming. Would love too see something like Proton but for Mac (given up hopes for native support). I hate that I have my gaming PC and then my Mac for everything else. I have to wonder though what their plan is for the M2. Are they laying the groundwork for when the M2 comes out all of these variants will be ready at the same time? Or a gradual upgrade but the same series (Normal, Pro, Max, and then Ultra) for each.

ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
Same. That chunky PC serves only one purpose now and rest of the time is unused.
- nerdjon 5y ago
  The unused part is what bothers me, like I actively make sure I use windows for as little outside of gaming for various reasons. But for the price to use it, ok not rarely since I game a lot... but considering I also have consoles. I would say I use my Mac more. I just wonder if this is ever going to be a realistic alternative or am I just always going to have 2 personal computers.
  - tannedNerd 5y ago
    What Im hoping for is with fiber/5G things like GeforceNow become more popular. I used it recently thanks to 6 free months from ATT when I had an unscheduled layover due to a missed flight, and it was actually playable with 7 Days to Die (a FPS). Granted it wasn't as good as my home machine, but this was also over hotel wifi so not bad
nouveaux 5y ago
I don't feel the need to play cutting edge games anymore. Playing Windows games in Parallel on my M1 is pretty good. I was shocked to see how well it worked. It's unlikely to run Elden Ring well. However, the vast majority of games are fine.
- ar_lan 5y ago
  Technically, I think this is illegal (Microsoft doesn't have a license for ARM support that isn't Qualcomm based). So for the pirating community this might not be an issue, but for long term survivability of the industry that would need to change.
  - antifa 5y ago
    It would be unethical to respect Microsoft's licensing rights.
- cube2222 5y ago
  It'd be cool to see some gaming-oriented benchmarks of the M1 Ultra with Parallels.
hammock 5y ago
Mac is going back to their most successful niche - creators.
- Tiktaalik 5y ago
  Game developers are creators! Additionally all the creators, musicians, artists, etc that are making assets for and working with the game industry are having to use PCs to interface with the game.
  - nkozyra 5y ago
    Almost all of those assets can be created entirely independently, though. There's no need to use a PC to interface.
    - neoberg 5y ago
      Yes but to try and experiment with those assets "in game", they'd need to use a PC.
    - Tiktaalik 5y ago
      Yeah but in game dev increasingly the tooling is integrated in the engine and so doing assets on a mac, then bringing them over to a PC and putting them into the game is an incredible unnecessary and annoying friction point. Increasingly rare to find an artist that only works in photoshop and isn't working in the engine, directly putting their work into the game. Accordingly even the art side is using PCs.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  Creators is not one group but many groups who create different things.
- satsuma 5y ago
  and it makes total sense! computers are slowly transitioning back to professional/enthusiast/educational focused as casual internet browsing continues to move onto mobile devices. you don't have people buying laptops to browse the internet on their couch anymore.
mshockwave 5y ago
Same, I want to run AAA games using these crazy Mac hardwares. A more interesting question will be: how hard it will be to implement such Proton for Mac? Is there any previous project?
- Thaxll 5y ago
  Well crazy mac hardware is actually not very good compared to PC graphic cards.
  - yurishimo 5y ago
    The comparison chart for the high spec M1 Ultra was using a 3090. So even if it "only" reaches 3060 levels of performance in games, I think many people would be okay with that. Reality will likely place it somewhere between a 3060 and the 3090.
    - borodi 5y ago
      So 3090 price for 3060 performance, doesn't sound very promising. I wish we could exploit those gpus easier for compute, but compute with metal is simply not there, at least for now.
      - yurishimo 5y ago
        It's not priced like a 3090 though? There's an entire computer there and the CPU performance is no slouch, even if the GPU may be lacking for what gamers want today.
        brimble 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure the gamers who're always rocking high-end video cards are a small minority of PC gamers, anyway, even if we only count "serious" gamers (not just Candy Crush or whatever) to remove that potential objection. A lot more probably find a best-bang-for-the-buck midrange card and hang on to it for ~3 years, before upgrading to another midrange card.
Tiktaalik 5y ago
Seriously. If Apple supported gaming more I'd be able to drop this PC. Could be the sort of thing that could cause an avalanche of switchers. You'd also pull over the entire games industry into the Apple space. Right now we code on PCs. As Apple silicon gets better, it's gonna be more and more painful to not be able to make use of that.
- jachee 5y ago
  > If Apple supported gaming more You mean if gaming supported Apple more, right? The industry's reliance on DirectX and the frameworks that build on it are largely what keep gaming so PC-centric. If we saw AAA studios embrace macOS-compatible (or better yet Open Source) graphics architecture, the need to have separate gaming PCs (and the insanely expensive GPUs associated therewith) would evaporate.
  - minimaxir 5y ago
    Even games running on engines like Unity and UE4 that support macOS/Metal don't support macOS because the userbase size isn't worth the overhead. It's a chicken and egg problem, although Apple Arcade is a good approach to try and bridge that gap.
    - nightski 5y ago
      There is no chicken and egg. Apple has tens of billions of dollars. If they wanted to support games it could be done really quickly. They straight up are anti-gaming unless it is of the exploitative micro-transaction mobile kind where they can reap that store tax.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        Yeah, it's pretty sad to see them pimping the likes of Genshin Impact. Even among the people who do play and enjoy it, I've yet to meet anyone who will defend it as anything other than a Breath of the Wild ripoff with a slot machine-shaped tumor attached to it's hip.
otterley 5y ago
Tell the game developers! They need to hear from you that the demand is there.
- NorwegianDude 5y ago
  Giving Apple more power by making software for their products for free that Apple wants a large cut from doesn't sound like a good idea. Make games for Linux, and let Apple figure out a compatability layer to make it work on their products. That's the way it should be.
  - otterley 5y ago
    Apple doesn't get a cut of software that's sold outside the App Store on MacOS. And the most performant MacOS APIs for graphics rendering aren't on Linux AFAIK. Besides, game developers generally eschew compatibility layers because they harm performance.
  - criddell 5y ago
    > Apple wants a large cut from doesn't sound like a good idea It sounds like a good idea if it leads to higher profits. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all charge game developers similar fees.
    - NorwegianDude 5y ago
      Maybe short term. Helping a company grow that is know to lock down their products and force developers to pay them for access might not be the best long term plan overall.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  There's more demand for streaming games, than games for Macs. Desktop Macs with GPUs even remotely capable of gaming are not that plentiful.
GeekyBear 5y ago
The good news is that optimized iPhone, iPad, and Mac games now share most of their code and run on the same CPU and GPU cores. There aren't many Mac games that have been ported over to both Metal and ARM, but World of Warcraft is an example.
- lwkl 5y ago
  > but World of Warcraft is an example. Blizzard games are or were probably the outlier. They supported Macs even back in the PowerPC days. As a kid with a PowerBook G4 Blizzard games were the only good games I was able to play (Warcraft 3, WoW, Diablo). I have no idea if this is still the case for their newer games though.
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    Given the sheer size of the market for iOS games, having Mac games share most of the same code makes a Mac port downright cheap.
  - mcphage 5y ago
    > I have no idea if this is still the case for their newer games though. Diablo 2 Remastered doesn't run on a Mac :-(
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Sure as hell won't get better now that they're owned by Microsoft. You can expect DirectX to take center stage for their upcoming releases.
      - GeekyBear 5y ago
        Blizzard isn't the only company capable of supporting both Metal and ARM. All the iOS games do both today.
        smoldesu 5y ago
SamuelAdams 5y ago
There is a lot of support for M1. See these lists. Please note though that "playable" does not mean "on par with other platforms", ie, Windows and Xbox / Playstation. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3S_BzA_lZT5z3Z-CxQZ-uPVs/htmlview#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3... https://applesilicongames.com/ https://applesilicongames.com/
- lelandfe 5y ago
  I believe OP meant Mac, not M1 - I.e. that there are many multitudes of AAA games that still have not hit macOS. You’re right, though, that M1 has pretty decent parity with Intel Macs for games now.
- neogodless 5y ago
  Games I've played over the past two years: Valheim - not in database ARK: Survival Evolved - "game won't launch" Conan: Exiles - not in database Grounded - not in database Civ V and Civ VI - each shows one record and seems it ran for that person (30-60 fps - for comparison, both run 144 fps on my $1000 Lenovo laptop.) It Takes Two - not in database That's all anecdotal, i.e. the games this one person likes to play are not supported, or don't play very well, and some of them are 5+ years old. Overall the point being, it's hard to shell out all that money for a device that won't play your games. (If this sort of gaming is part of your computer use case). So to that original comment's point "I wish Mac worked seriously well for gaming."
  - sprkwd 5y ago
    Not sure why you need a turn based game to run at 144fps. But I guess that’s a different conservation.
    - kronks 5y ago
- jamesy0ung 5y ago
  X-Plane is great on M1.
code_witch_sam 5y ago
- [x] RGB'd out PC with RTX 3090 for playing Minecraft and Elden ring - [x] Decent wired network in-home - [x] Connect via Moonlight from Mac Mini M1 to Gaming PC - [x] Best of both worlds It's wonderful. I only wish my Mac Mini had a 120hz display attached.
- joemi 5y ago
  Minecraft runs great on M1 Macs, btw.
ralfd 5y ago
> More and more I see the M1 chips and I wish Mac worked seriously well for gaming. I guess Apple will never play the console game, with having their own game developer studios and buying exclusives. But I wish they would put a M1 in an Apple TV, releasing their own controller and just do something!
xyst 5y ago
In reality though would you really want your games to be installed on the same machine as your daily driver? Game companies and their parent companies tend to install some shady spyware on your machine in the name of "anti-cheat software" (ie, installed in the ring0/kernel space). I am kind of relieved that I have 2 separate machines. Although if they develop virtualized environments to sandbox games from the host machine (similar to QEMU) then I suppose that might work.
- bart_spoon 5y ago
  > In reality though would you really want your games to be installed on the same machine as your daily driver? Yes. The vast majority of people that I'm aware of don't buy multiple desktops. If I spend $1000+ for a gaming machine, I don't want to spend hundreds more to have multiple machines to jump between and to manage connections to and to take up space in my office.
smoldesu 5y ago
It's important to note that Apple cut off the Proton devs; not the other way around. It would indeed be pretty cool to see that sort of thing running on Apple Silicon, but the plethora of architectural changes that came along with Catalina stopped Mac support from being a viable target for Valve. Not very surprising though; Mac native games don't really work that well either. If it relies on 32-bit libraries, it won't launch. If it uses outdated OpenGL, you can expect a plethora of errors to accompany you to an instantaneous crash. Apple has their work cut out for them, I just doubt they'll have the "courage" to bring back the features they so courageously threw away.
- olliej 5y ago
  "if it relies on 32 bit libraries" the last 32bit only Mac system shipped a decade prior to Catalina. 32bit was dropped a decade after support for the last 32bit only Macs. Apple Silicon in both iOS and Mac is 64bit only, on iOS it has been for years. Despite that, macOS supports everything required for proton - the mechanisms that allow wine to run 32bit x86 apps on both intel and under rosetta exist pretty much purely for the purpose of things like wine (and so proton). So I'm not sure where you get "apple cut off the proton devs" from that work
  - month13 5y ago
    I was trying to find the original justification for why macOS was removed from Proton, but could not find any official word apart from some comments here https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1344 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1344. It was quite odd because the original herald of Steam Play had macOS front and center, even with exclusive cosmetics if you launched the game on macOS. I do remember a large kerfuffle over the very poor state of OpenGL on macOS, which if I remember correctly was stuck on 3.2 for a long while, before being completely deprecated.
madrox 5y ago
Having worked with Apple on games, I can tell you that as an engineer they work fine. Metal isn't bad. The problem isn't technical. The problem is how Apple approves apps and thinks about the gaming experience. For example, a game I worked on got rejected from the App AND Mac store because (in Apple's opinion) the texture download was too large. There's no analogue for this in other game ecosystems. As a developer, if your secondary ecosystem is demanding a lot of changes your primary ecosystem don't require you'll decide it isn't worth the effort. It's why the games on apple products are fundamentally different. Apple may say it's about protecting the integrity of the user experience, but the best and the brightest would rather learn directly from users themselves and not use Apple as a go-between.
- quadcore 5y ago
  Thing is, as a former engine and graphics programmer, I have to say I agree with them, we got gaming software wrong. It took me years to actually see it but we do it wrong. A game like all software should be incredibly light and fast. A game that examplaries that is World of Warcraft which is incredibly light for a game of its stature. It took me years to understand that, you can picture a performance red line, and instead of approaching it from above (that is, optimising a lagguy game) we should approach it from below. I havent work for a single game developer which use that approach and yet Im now convinced its the right one. Approaching the line from above almost always gives you a bloated heavy erring-on-the-wrong-side software.
  - madrox 5y ago
    If that was really a consideration that correlated strongly to success, the market would've shown that a while ago and the most successful projects would sail through Apple approvals. However, this is not reality, and when our philosophy fails to describe reality, only one of those two things is capable of changing.
    - ruined 5y ago
      parent did not suggest that good and correct correlated with market success. we all know a market only demands profitable, which is a distinctly different objective.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
I agree that just M1 MacBook Pro is not great for gaming. However my M1 iPad Pro is very nice for some types of games. Lots to enjoy in Apple Arcade that takes advantage of motion detection in the tablet, developer support for VR/AR, etc. I worked on Nintendo video games about 22 years ago, but I am not much of a gamer now because my iPad and Quest just about do it for me.
mekster 5y ago
> I hate that I have my gaming PC and then my Mac for everything else. Why do you hate it? I also have this setup and I just play games, watch movies occasionally and play music on it unattended and I don't mind it's running Windows as I have no other use for it.

ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago

Same. That chunky PC serves only one purpose now and rest of the time is unused.

nerdjon 5y ago
The unused part is what bothers me, like I actively make sure I use windows for as little outside of gaming for various reasons. But for the price to use it, ok not rarely since I game a lot... but considering I also have consoles. I would say I use my Mac more. I just wonder if this is ever going to be a realistic alternative or am I just always going to have 2 personal computers.
- tannedNerd 5y ago
  What Im hoping for is with fiber/5G things like GeforceNow become more popular. I used it recently thanks to 6 free months from ATT when I had an unscheduled layover due to a missed flight, and it was actually playable with 7 Days to Die (a FPS). Granted it wasn't as good as my home machine, but this was also over hotel wifi so not bad

nouveaux 5y ago

I don't feel the need to play cutting edge games anymore. Playing Windows games in Parallel on my M1 is pretty good. I was shocked to see how well it worked. It's unlikely to run Elden Ring well. However, the vast majority of games are fine.

ar_lan 5y ago
Technically, I think this is illegal (Microsoft doesn't have a license for ARM support that isn't Qualcomm based). So for the pirating community this might not be an issue, but for long term survivability of the industry that would need to change.
- antifa 5y ago
  It would be unethical to respect Microsoft's licensing rights.
cube2222 5y ago
It'd be cool to see some gaming-oriented benchmarks of the M1 Ultra with Parallels.

hammock 5y ago

Mac is going back to their most successful niche - creators.

Tiktaalik 5y ago
Game developers are creators! Additionally all the creators, musicians, artists, etc that are making assets for and working with the game industry are having to use PCs to interface with the game.
- nkozyra 5y ago
  Almost all of those assets can be created entirely independently, though. There's no need to use a PC to interface.
  - neoberg 5y ago
    Yes but to try and experiment with those assets "in game", they'd need to use a PC.
  - Tiktaalik 5y ago
    Yeah but in game dev increasingly the tooling is integrated in the engine and so doing assets on a mac, then bringing them over to a PC and putting them into the game is an incredible unnecessary and annoying friction point. Increasingly rare to find an artist that only works in photoshop and isn't working in the engine, directly putting their work into the game. Accordingly even the art side is using PCs.
LegitShady 5y ago
Creators is not one group but many groups who create different things.
satsuma 5y ago
and it makes total sense! computers are slowly transitioning back to professional/enthusiast/educational focused as casual internet browsing continues to move onto mobile devices. you don't have people buying laptops to browse the internet on their couch anymore.

mshockwave 5y ago

Same, I want to run AAA games using these crazy Mac hardwares. A more interesting question will be: how hard it will be to implement such Proton for Mac? Is there any previous project?

Thaxll 5y ago
Well crazy mac hardware is actually not very good compared to PC graphic cards.
- yurishimo 5y ago
  The comparison chart for the high spec M1 Ultra was using a 3090. So even if it "only" reaches 3060 levels of performance in games, I think many people would be okay with that. Reality will likely place it somewhere between a 3060 and the 3090.
  - borodi 5y ago
    So 3090 price for 3060 performance, doesn't sound very promising. I wish we could exploit those gpus easier for compute, but compute with metal is simply not there, at least for now.
    - yurishimo 5y ago
      It's not priced like a 3090 though? There's an entire computer there and the CPU performance is no slouch, even if the GPU may be lacking for what gamers want today.
      - brimble 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure the gamers who're always rocking high-end video cards are a small minority of PC gamers, anyway, even if we only count "serious" gamers (not just Candy Crush or whatever) to remove that potential objection. A lot more probably find a best-bang-for-the-buck midrange card and hang on to it for ~3 years, before upgrading to another midrange card.

Tiktaalik 5y ago

Seriously. If Apple supported gaming more I'd be able to drop this PC. Could be the sort of thing that could cause an avalanche of switchers. You'd also pull over the entire games industry into the Apple space. Right now we code on PCs. As Apple silicon gets better, it's gonna be more and more painful to not be able to make use of that.

jachee 5y ago
> If Apple supported gaming more You mean if gaming supported Apple more, right? The industry's reliance on DirectX and the frameworks that build on it are largely what keep gaming so PC-centric. If we saw AAA studios embrace macOS-compatible (or better yet Open Source) graphics architecture, the need to have separate gaming PCs (and the insanely expensive GPUs associated therewith) would evaporate.
- minimaxir 5y ago
  Even games running on engines like Unity and UE4 that support macOS/Metal don't support macOS because the userbase size isn't worth the overhead. It's a chicken and egg problem, although Apple Arcade is a good approach to try and bridge that gap.
  - nightski 5y ago
    There is no chicken and egg. Apple has tens of billions of dollars. If they wanted to support games it could be done really quickly. They straight up are anti-gaming unless it is of the exploitative micro-transaction mobile kind where they can reap that store tax.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Yeah, it's pretty sad to see them pimping the likes of Genshin Impact. Even among the people who do play and enjoy it, I've yet to meet anyone who will defend it as anything other than a Breath of the Wild ripoff with a slot machine-shaped tumor attached to it's hip.

otterley 5y ago

Tell the game developers! They need to hear from you that the demand is there.

NorwegianDude 5y ago
Giving Apple more power by making software for their products for free that Apple wants a large cut from doesn't sound like a good idea. Make games for Linux, and let Apple figure out a compatability layer to make it work on their products. That's the way it should be.
- otterley 5y ago
  Apple doesn't get a cut of software that's sold outside the App Store on MacOS. And the most performant MacOS APIs for graphics rendering aren't on Linux AFAIK. Besides, game developers generally eschew compatibility layers because they harm performance.
- criddell 5y ago
  > Apple wants a large cut from doesn't sound like a good idea It sounds like a good idea if it leads to higher profits. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all charge game developers similar fees.
  - NorwegianDude 5y ago
    Maybe short term. Helping a company grow that is know to lock down their products and force developers to pay them for access might not be the best long term plan overall.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
JAlexoid 5y ago
There's more demand for streaming games, than games for Macs. Desktop Macs with GPUs even remotely capable of gaming are not that plentiful.

GeekyBear 5y ago

The good news is that optimized iPhone, iPad, and Mac games now share most of their code and run on the same CPU and GPU cores. There aren't many Mac games that have been ported over to both Metal and ARM, but World of Warcraft is an example.

lwkl 5y ago
> but World of Warcraft is an example. Blizzard games are or were probably the outlier. They supported Macs even back in the PowerPC days. As a kid with a PowerBook G4 Blizzard games were the only good games I was able to play (Warcraft 3, WoW, Diablo). I have no idea if this is still the case for their newer games though.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  Given the sheer size of the market for iOS games, having Mac games share most of the same code makes a Mac port downright cheap.
- mcphage 5y ago
  > I have no idea if this is still the case for their newer games though. Diablo 2 Remastered doesn't run on a Mac :-(
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Sure as hell won't get better now that they're owned by Microsoft. You can expect DirectX to take center stage for their upcoming releases.
    - GeekyBear 5y ago
      Blizzard isn't the only company capable of supporting both Metal and ARM. All the iOS games do both today.
      - smoldesu 5y ago

SamuelAdams 5y ago

There is a lot of support for M1. See these lists. Please note though that "playable" does not mean "on par with other platforms", ie, Windows and Xbox / Playstation. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3S_BzA_lZT5z3Z-CxQZ-uPVs/htmlview#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3... https://applesilicongames.com/ https://applesilicongames.com/

lelandfe 5y ago
I believe OP meant Mac, not M1 - I.e. that there are many multitudes of AAA games that still have not hit macOS. You’re right, though, that M1 has pretty decent parity with Intel Macs for games now.
neogodless 5y ago
Games I've played over the past two years: Valheim - not in database ARK: Survival Evolved - "game won't launch" Conan: Exiles - not in database Grounded - not in database Civ V and Civ VI - each shows one record and seems it ran for that person (30-60 fps - for comparison, both run 144 fps on my $1000 Lenovo laptop.) It Takes Two - not in database That's all anecdotal, i.e. the games this one person likes to play are not supported, or don't play very well, and some of them are 5+ years old. Overall the point being, it's hard to shell out all that money for a device that won't play your games. (If this sort of gaming is part of your computer use case). So to that original comment's point "I wish Mac worked seriously well for gaming."
- sprkwd 5y ago
  Not sure why you need a turn based game to run at 144fps. But I guess that’s a different conservation.
  - kronks 5y ago
jamesy0ung 5y ago
X-Plane is great on M1.

code_witch_sam 5y ago

- [x] RGB'd out PC with RTX 3090 for playing Minecraft and Elden ring - [x] Decent wired network in-home - [x] Connect via Moonlight from Mac Mini M1 to Gaming PC - [x] Best of both worlds It's wonderful. I only wish my Mac Mini had a 120hz display attached.

joemi 5y ago
Minecraft runs great on M1 Macs, btw.

ralfd 5y ago

> More and more I see the M1 chips and I wish Mac worked seriously well for gaming. I guess Apple will never play the console game, with having their own game developer studios and buying exclusives. But I wish they would put a M1 in an Apple TV, releasing their own controller and just do something!

xyst 5y ago

In reality though would you really want your games to be installed on the same machine as your daily driver? Game companies and their parent companies tend to install some shady spyware on your machine in the name of "anti-cheat software" (ie, installed in the ring0/kernel space). I am kind of relieved that I have 2 separate machines. Although if they develop virtualized environments to sandbox games from the host machine (similar to QEMU) then I suppose that might work.

bart_spoon 5y ago
> In reality though would you really want your games to be installed on the same machine as your daily driver? Yes. The vast majority of people that I'm aware of don't buy multiple desktops. If I spend $1000+ for a gaming machine, I don't want to spend hundreds more to have multiple machines to jump between and to manage connections to and to take up space in my office.

smoldesu 5y ago

It's important to note that Apple cut off the Proton devs; not the other way around. It would indeed be pretty cool to see that sort of thing running on Apple Silicon, but the plethora of architectural changes that came along with Catalina stopped Mac support from being a viable target for Valve. Not very surprising though; Mac native games don't really work that well either. If it relies on 32-bit libraries, it won't launch. If it uses outdated OpenGL, you can expect a plethora of errors to accompany you to an instantaneous crash. Apple has their work cut out for them, I just doubt they'll have the "courage" to bring back the features they so courageously threw away.

olliej 5y ago
"if it relies on 32 bit libraries" the last 32bit only Mac system shipped a decade prior to Catalina. 32bit was dropped a decade after support for the last 32bit only Macs. Apple Silicon in both iOS and Mac is 64bit only, on iOS it has been for years. Despite that, macOS supports everything required for proton - the mechanisms that allow wine to run 32bit x86 apps on both intel and under rosetta exist pretty much purely for the purpose of things like wine (and so proton). So I'm not sure where you get "apple cut off the proton devs" from that work
- month13 5y ago
  I was trying to find the original justification for why macOS was removed from Proton, but could not find any official word apart from some comments here https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1344 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1344. It was quite odd because the original herald of Steam Play had macOS front and center, even with exclusive cosmetics if you launched the game on macOS. I do remember a large kerfuffle over the very poor state of OpenGL on macOS, which if I remember correctly was stuck on 3.2 for a long while, before being completely deprecated.

madrox 5y ago

Having worked with Apple on games, I can tell you that as an engineer they work fine. Metal isn't bad. The problem isn't technical. The problem is how Apple approves apps and thinks about the gaming experience. For example, a game I worked on got rejected from the App AND Mac store because (in Apple's opinion) the texture download was too large. There's no analogue for this in other game ecosystems. As a developer, if your secondary ecosystem is demanding a lot of changes your primary ecosystem don't require you'll decide it isn't worth the effort. It's why the games on apple products are fundamentally different. Apple may say it's about protecting the integrity of the user experience, but the best and the brightest would rather learn directly from users themselves and not use Apple as a go-between.

quadcore 5y ago
Thing is, as a former engine and graphics programmer, I have to say I agree with them, we got gaming software wrong. It took me years to actually see it but we do it wrong. A game like all software should be incredibly light and fast. A game that examplaries that is World of Warcraft which is incredibly light for a game of its stature. It took me years to understand that, you can picture a performance red line, and instead of approaching it from above (that is, optimising a lagguy game) we should approach it from below. I havent work for a single game developer which use that approach and yet Im now convinced its the right one. Approaching the line from above almost always gives you a bloated heavy erring-on-the-wrong-side software.
- madrox 5y ago
  If that was really a consideration that correlated strongly to success, the market would've shown that a while ago and the most successful projects would sail through Apple approvals. However, this is not reality, and when our philosophy fails to describe reality, only one of those two things is capable of changing.
  - ruined 5y ago
    parent did not suggest that good and correct correlated with market success. we all know a market only demands profitable, which is a distinctly different objective.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

I agree that just M1 MacBook Pro is not great for gaming. However my M1 iPad Pro is very nice for some types of games. Lots to enjoy in Apple Arcade that takes advantage of motion detection in the tablet, developer support for VR/AR, etc. I worked on Nintendo video games about 22 years ago, but I am not much of a gamer now because my iPad and Quest just about do it for me.

mekster 5y ago

> I hate that I have my gaming PC and then my Mac for everything else. Why do you hate it? I also have this setup and I just play games, watch movies occasionally and play music on it unattended and I don't mind it's running Windows as I have no other use for it.