4 ms·

Besides the fact that apple demands far too much money from developers to "access their platform" they have also failed to deliver cross platform tooling so you

Besides the fact that apple demands far too much money from developers to "access their platform" they have also failed to deliver cross platform tooling so you need some fiddly Mac machines to be able to even build for their platform. Then there's the fact they broke backwards compatibility by using their own obscure processors so that makes developing for them a non-starter for many shops. Sadly this is a problem of Apple's own making.

giantrobot 3y ago
Those damn obscure ARM processors. Nobody uses those!
- mminer237 3y ago
  I don't believe Valve currently targets any ARM systems with any of its games.
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    That's not the same as saying ARM processors are obscure. You've probably got at least a dozen of them in your house right now if not several on your person.
    - coldpie 3y ago
      This entire conversation is taking place in the context of desktop/laptop PC gaming, where ARM is definitely obscure.
  - goosedragons 3y ago
    Portal 1 and 2 are on the Switch. They had a HL2 port to the Nvidia Shield too IIRC.
    - jamesfinlayson 3y ago
      Did they do the Portal ports? I thought the nVidia Shield ports were done externally.
  - piyh 3y ago
    I was playing CSGO on my m1 until a month ago
- ubertaco 3y ago
  I mean, nobody else uses Apple's _custom_ ARM-_ish_ processor, no.
  - kennywinker 3y ago
    M1/M1 chips aren’t arm-ish. they’re 100% arm, plus some proprietary extras.
    - JAlexoid 3y ago
      Didn't they deprecate OpenGL or something to that extent?
      - kennywinker 3y ago
        OpenGL isn't a part of the ARM instruction set. There are plenty of arm chips that don't even have a GPU (e.g. name any embedded arm processor).
        JAlexoid 3y ago
        This subthread of people being just anal about a comment that we should all understand the meaning of. Apple switched to ARM ISA and moved away from an open graphics abstraction layers. Those two things go hand-in-hand. ARM ISA isn't the problem, being a proprietary API on a platform that isn't of value for major game devs - that's the problem. (FFS - Blizzard left MacOS, the one that released their titles on OSX one of the first.) Arguing over what ARM ISA includes or not, is besides the point.
        seec 3y ago
        Yeah Apple should have realised something was wrong when blizzard went out with Overwatch and no mac version in sight because the numbers of macs that could run it decently well was so small even though it's not that demanding of a game. Since then Apple has only made more excuse and even raised the price of their weak-ass proprietary hardware. They made their bed they deserve no efforts from anyone ; not developers not users. If they come out with competent hardware at a decent price then we will see...
- lowbloodsugar 3y ago
  The issue is more likely the very different graphics implementation. There is a reason both major console platforms settled on the same hardware (AMD CPU & GPU). Sony's own teams crying out "stop with the fucking proprietary bullshit like cell". Now Sony even publishes its games on Windows! It's top selling MLB The Show ships on Xbox! The Apple GPU is actually more like the Cell idea that Sony had to give up on (and add a GPU) before the PS3 shipped. It's not as slow as Cell, but it's different enough from a regular GPU that games optimized for one aren't that great on the other. I love my M1 Max and M2 Max for Civ and Factorio, but I've got a windows gaming rig for playing the kind of games that need show stopping graphics, and a PS5 for convenience.
  - seec 3y ago
    Yeah pretty much everyone who tried some sort of RISC implementation for graphics has let go in favor of the modern GPU architecture. Apple seems to think it knows better but the actual performance getting out of their hardware says otherwise. The base was pretty good to scale stuff at first and was(is) enough in a mobile phone but it really shouldn't be applied to a console and even less to a full size computer...
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    > The issue is more likely the very different graphics implementation. Metal and Vulkan are very conceptually similar. Most things you can write against Vulkan will work in Metal, only the API calls will differ. MoltenVK will even wrap Metal with Vulkan's API. But the OP isn't talking about graphics APIs, they're making the absurd claim that ARM CPUs are "obscure". It's so wrong it borders on asinine.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      > It's so wrong it borders on asinine. Only because you're complaining about their exact wording and ignoring context.
    - astrange 3y ago
      The M1's TBDR GPU is very different from an Nvidia-style GPU. The different API doesn't actually matter much, but for best performance you'd want to rewrite the renderer whether or not you used a different API.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  Apple uses custom processors with features that aren't available on other ARM chips, and they have a custom compiler as well.
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    That custom compiler is *checks notes* clang. Yup. Totally custom. Don't see that compiler anywhere else in the industry. As far as high level code is concerned Apple's chips are just ARM chips. They've got microarchitectural features that put them ahead of other ARM chips clock for clock. But if you want to call their implementation obscure then by that twisted logic then AMD chips are obscure because they operate differently than Intel chips despite the AMD64 ISA. It's a stupid distinction to justify an ignorant statement. Between iPhones, iPads, and Macs Apple has shipped a billion of their CPUs. At a billion units it's just dumb to suggest they're obscure. Different from Wintel PCs? Sure. But obscure? That's just asinine.
jwells89 3y ago
The thing here is if cross-platform tooling were available, it’d encourage the proliferation of “checkbox ports” which have barely been tested on actual Macs and never optimized for them, which one could argue is more damaging than not having ports at all.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  One could argue that, only if making it hard to make games resulted in better ports. In actuality it resulted in hardly any ports.
- xnickb 3y ago
  The bigger problem I see here is the required shift of paradigm: once users/developers are allowed such things it's no longer "Apple devices own their users", it's a more traditional "Devices belong to their users" which comes with a whole new level of problems that Apple can't possibly deal with.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  As a game dev I'm OK with having to set up a mac to do initial testing of my port and make sure it works, but I'm not OK with having to do that again every time Apple makes breaking changes to their APIs and threatens to pull my game off the app store unless I port and rebuild. I don't have to do that on Windows or Linux (or on game consoles).
  - jwells89 3y ago
    I assume that on Linux you ship with all dependencies included, because if you rely on whatever is supplied by the user’s distro’s package manager provided things will be breaking all the time. Long-reaching backwards compatibility has never been an Apple thing due to how it encumbers OS development. The longest period old apps were supported was probably in the classic Mac OS era stretching from System 7.5 or so up through OS 9, but that was mainly due to how little the OS changed in that timespan (relative to contemporary OSes and OS X in the the same length of time). With OS X the bits under the hood have always been in a state of flux even if the user facing bits barely changed at all, which makes backwards compatibility extremely challenging short of shipping virtualized old OS versions (which brings its own challenges, such as having to patch 0-days those old versions for however long you plan to keep compatibility for each version around). Windows’ backwards compatibility is good but has meant that many parts of the OS are effectively frozen in time which has complicated modernization efforts. I suspect that soon MS will bail and start telling people to virtualize software targeting anything older than Windows 8.1 or 10.

giantrobot 3y ago

Those damn obscure ARM processors. Nobody uses those!

mminer237 3y ago
I don't believe Valve currently targets any ARM systems with any of its games.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  That's not the same as saying ARM processors are obscure. You've probably got at least a dozen of them in your house right now if not several on your person.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    This entire conversation is taking place in the context of desktop/laptop PC gaming, where ARM is definitely obscure.
- goosedragons 3y ago
  Portal 1 and 2 are on the Switch. They had a HL2 port to the Nvidia Shield too IIRC.
  - jamesfinlayson 3y ago
    Did they do the Portal ports? I thought the nVidia Shield ports were done externally.
- piyh 3y ago
  I was playing CSGO on my m1 until a month ago
ubertaco 3y ago
I mean, nobody else uses Apple's _custom_ ARM-_ish_ processor, no.
- kennywinker 3y ago
  M1/M1 chips aren’t arm-ish. they’re 100% arm, plus some proprietary extras.
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    Didn't they deprecate OpenGL or something to that extent?
    - kennywinker 3y ago
      OpenGL isn't a part of the ARM instruction set. There are plenty of arm chips that don't even have a GPU (e.g. name any embedded arm processor).
      - JAlexoid 3y ago
        This subthread of people being just anal about a comment that we should all understand the meaning of. Apple switched to ARM ISA and moved away from an open graphics abstraction layers. Those two things go hand-in-hand. ARM ISA isn't the problem, being a proprietary API on a platform that isn't of value for major game devs - that's the problem. (FFS - Blizzard left MacOS, the one that released their titles on OSX one of the first.) Arguing over what ARM ISA includes or not, is besides the point.
        seec 3y ago
        Yeah Apple should have realised something was wrong when blizzard went out with Overwatch and no mac version in sight because the numbers of macs that could run it decently well was so small even though it's not that demanding of a game. Since then Apple has only made more excuse and even raised the price of their weak-ass proprietary hardware. They made their bed they deserve no efforts from anyone ; not developers not users. If they come out with competent hardware at a decent price then we will see...
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
The issue is more likely the very different graphics implementation. There is a reason both major console platforms settled on the same hardware (AMD CPU & GPU). Sony's own teams crying out "stop with the fucking proprietary bullshit like cell". Now Sony even publishes its games on Windows! It's top selling MLB The Show ships on Xbox! The Apple GPU is actually more like the Cell idea that Sony had to give up on (and add a GPU) before the PS3 shipped. It's not as slow as Cell, but it's different enough from a regular GPU that games optimized for one aren't that great on the other. I love my M1 Max and M2 Max for Civ and Factorio, but I've got a windows gaming rig for playing the kind of games that need show stopping graphics, and a PS5 for convenience.
- seec 3y ago
  Yeah pretty much everyone who tried some sort of RISC implementation for graphics has let go in favor of the modern GPU architecture. Apple seems to think it knows better but the actual performance getting out of their hardware says otherwise. The base was pretty good to scale stuff at first and was(is) enough in a mobile phone but it really shouldn't be applied to a console and even less to a full size computer...
- giantrobot 3y ago
  > The issue is more likely the very different graphics implementation. Metal and Vulkan are very conceptually similar. Most things you can write against Vulkan will work in Metal, only the API calls will differ. MoltenVK will even wrap Metal with Vulkan's API. But the OP isn't talking about graphics APIs, they're making the absurd claim that ARM CPUs are "obscure". It's so wrong it borders on asinine.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    > It's so wrong it borders on asinine. Only because you're complaining about their exact wording and ignoring context.
  - astrange 3y ago
    The M1's TBDR GPU is very different from an Nvidia-style GPU. The different API doesn't actually matter much, but for best performance you'd want to rewrite the renderer whether or not you used a different API.
kevingadd 3y ago
Apple uses custom processors with features that aren't available on other ARM chips, and they have a custom compiler as well.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  That custom compiler is *checks notes* clang. Yup. Totally custom. Don't see that compiler anywhere else in the industry. As far as high level code is concerned Apple's chips are just ARM chips. They've got microarchitectural features that put them ahead of other ARM chips clock for clock. But if you want to call their implementation obscure then by that twisted logic then AMD chips are obscure because they operate differently than Intel chips despite the AMD64 ISA. It's a stupid distinction to justify an ignorant statement. Between iPhones, iPads, and Macs Apple has shipped a billion of their CPUs. At a billion units it's just dumb to suggest they're obscure. Different from Wintel PCs? Sure. But obscure? That's just asinine.

jwells89 3y ago

The thing here is if cross-platform tooling were available, it’d encourage the proliferation of “checkbox ports” which have barely been tested on actual Macs and never optimized for them, which one could argue is more damaging than not having ports at all.

zarzavat 3y ago
One could argue that, only if making it hard to make games resulted in better ports. In actuality it resulted in hardly any ports.
xnickb 3y ago
The bigger problem I see here is the required shift of paradigm: once users/developers are allowed such things it's no longer "Apple devices own their users", it's a more traditional "Devices belong to their users" which comes with a whole new level of problems that Apple can't possibly deal with.
kevingadd 3y ago
As a game dev I'm OK with having to set up a mac to do initial testing of my port and make sure it works, but I'm not OK with having to do that again every time Apple makes breaking changes to their APIs and threatens to pull my game off the app store unless I port and rebuild. I don't have to do that on Windows or Linux (or on game consoles).
- jwells89 3y ago
  I assume that on Linux you ship with all dependencies included, because if you rely on whatever is supplied by the user’s distro’s package manager provided things will be breaking all the time. Long-reaching backwards compatibility has never been an Apple thing due to how it encumbers OS development. The longest period old apps were supported was probably in the classic Mac OS era stretching from System 7.5 or so up through OS 9, but that was mainly due to how little the OS changed in that timespan (relative to contemporary OSes and OS X in the the same length of time). With OS X the bits under the hood have always been in a state of flux even if the user facing bits barely changed at all, which makes backwards compatibility extremely challenging short of shipping virtualized old OS versions (which brings its own challenges, such as having to patch 0-days those old versions for however long you plan to keep compatibility for each version around). Windows’ backwards compatibility is good but has meant that many parts of the OS are effectively frozen in time which has complicated modernization efforts. I suspect that soon MS will bail and start telling people to virtualize software targeting anything older than Windows 8.1 or 10.