16 ms·

> "...pretty much all Macs are capable of running Triple-A titles, which is not what it was like five years ago.” It's interesting that Apple keeps making this

by TillE 3y ago

> "...pretty much all Macs are capable of running Triple-A titles, which is not what it was like five years ago.” It's interesting that Apple keeps making this point, and that they released the Game Porting Toolkit. I don't think we're going to see like an Apple Switch device, but they do seem to care about console/PC-quality games in a way they never have before.

fsloth 3y ago
Games have reached IP prestige parity with movies, music & books. Before they were perceived as some combination of ’geeky waste of time’ and ’unhealthy obsession’.
- adastra22 3y ago
  Still are…
  - fsloth 3y ago
    Not sure what you mean. People like me (40+ male) are a huge segment and plausibly spend much more time in games than movies and music. By revenue games are possibly bigger than movies and music combined (global revenue). Not everyone needs to like games buy many do and the industry revenue is quite massive compared to any other entertainment.
    - adastra22 3y ago
      Still perceived as 'geeky waste of time' and 'unhealthy obsession'. Just an economically successful one.
      - fsloth 3y ago
        That sentiment is strongly waning, imo. Chess was similarly dismissed at one point when it became a fad. Gaming is fairly mainstream nowadays. But probably depends who you ask.
baz00 3y ago
The thing is they probably will run triple-A titles but how well and how modern a triple-A title? Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077, GTA 6 when it comes out? I doubt it.
izacus 3y ago
> I don't think we're going to see like an Apple Switch device, but they do seem to care about console/PC-quality games in a way they never have before. I think we see this sentence said every few years (or at least a similar one, related to iOS). It'll slowly be as evergreen as "the year of Linux desktop". Meanwhile, the amount of games that actually are available and running in ARM64 mode on macOS is still miniscule. Honestly, Game Porting Toolking doesn't seem like a product built by company that's serious about gaming - it's a developer tool that still needs the developer to do extra work to actually publish the game for Macs. Compare this to approach Valve took on Steam Deck and you'll see just how a company that takes games seriously works.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Exactly. Game Porting Toolkit is an awesome showing, but the intention is in the name; it's not a compatibility layer, it's a porting tool. Eventually it will go away, and you'll be stuck with the same Mojave/Catalina-style cutoff for all your old games. Apple could make things so much easier by just shipping MacOS with a native Vulkan driver and letting the community maintain the DXVK translator like all the other GPUs. It wouldn't diminish the demand for Metal (it's still the only option on many platforms) and it would bring Mac back up to parity with other OSes. Maybe a renewed commitment to supporting Rosetta would also help seal the deal.
- DistractionRect 3y ago
  Things like Proton aren't something that shipped overnight, it's a teething process. In fairness, Valve originally did take the same approach. Proton was born from the ashes of Steam Machines - Linux boxes that developers had to create a port for. Similarly, WSL, WSL2, WSLg, and WSA are born from the ashes of Windows Phones and Project Astoria. They aren't quite there yet, but I expect another shot at mobiles in the future. Apple will have to go through the same teething process. Their rendering pipeline is wanting in some ways, and that'll only be sorted through painful experience. Console emulators (E.g. Yuzu/Ryujinx) are in the same vein as Proton, so if you want a health check on what problems something like Proton for Apple would face, you can see what problems the emulators are currently dealing with//hacking around.
vlovich123 3y ago
I don’t know. They’ve always touted games from time to time. The key limitation is that AAA games are expensive, game developers don’t have experience targeting Mac, and until Apple starts shelling out serious money to seed that market, it’s probably not going to happen. Look at what happened with Google and their failed strategy (there was a lot else wrong, but title availability and porting difficulty was definitely an issue)
GeekyBear 3y ago
They finally have a gaming strategy that makes sense. Now that iOS devices and Macs have the same CPU cores, GPU cores, and APIs, targeting Apple hardware gives you a much bigger user base that you can target than you've ever seen previously with Intel/Power PC based Macs.
- polyomino 3y ago
  This is the same failed strategy that Microsoft tried with windows 10 uwp. The control schemes and form factors matter so developers don’t get much benefit.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    Windows PCs can have such a wide range of hardware that this seems like an attempted software solution to a pretty difficult to solve problem. Compare that to Apple, where there isn't such a disparity between two separate computers, and it makes more sense to try to target MacOS under that logic than it does. Whether it will play out different is for consumers and developers to decide.
    - filoleg 3y ago
      Wow, this is a really good point I haven’t thought of before. And the thing is, it could work. Because that’s pretty much the main relative advantage consoles have over gaming PCs - extremely narrow range of hardware, which allows consoles squeeze out better performance than a gaming PC with comparable hardware specs (of course the PC will likely be cheaper, but that’s beside the point) on most games, because those games were extremely heavily optimized for that hardware. MacOS, under that logic, would come through somewhere in-between those two extremes - less disparity than between two random PCs, but more disparity than between two models in a single given console generation. Even funnier, I just realized that macOS major update support for any given mac is 6 years (and 10 for security updates iirc, but don’t quote me on that), which is about as many years as a single console generation lasts.
      - 3y ago
polyomino 3y ago
Because the Vision Pro has no compelling use case. Games is what you do when you don’t know what to do.
- extrememacaroni 3y ago
  Or anime chatrooms.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  You're telling me "ignore my son's birthday party to watch Youtube videos on my face" isn't a compelling use case?? Staring awkwardly at my wife and saying "Yes sweetie I am definitely giving you my full attention" while I definitely am not is out too? Face computers have a lot of convincing to do before they are adopted widely.
  - filoleg 3y ago
    > You're telling me "ignore my son's birthday party to watch Youtube videos on my face" isn't a compelling use case?? > Staring awkwardly at my wife and saying "Yes sweetie I am definitely giving you my full attention" while I definitely am not is out too? You just described two scenarios that are already very common in the present day, if you swap the headset for a smartphone in them. Not saying it is a good thing at all, it isn’t. But given how many people currently don’t mind doing it with their phones (where their actions are on a clear display), I think significantly more people would be into those use cases with AR headsets (and in the future, glasses). It is literally the same thing as with phones, but more concealed/private. So it would capture both the existing group doing it with phones and plenty of new people. Note: I am aware that Vision Pro isn’t intended to be worn outside or for prolonged periods of time due to battery and just general headset thing, so no, I am not trying to claim it is going to replace smartphones for people. I was talking more about where this is headed, which will only be possible once the technology gets us to the point of a “regular looking glasses” type of a form factor (or something similarly unobstructive).
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
crazygringo 3y ago
I'm curious -- is there an ~objective comparison of how modern Macs (M1, M2, M3) compare to PS5, Xbox X/S, PS4, and Xbox One? And how it differs between passive cooling (MacBook Air) and active (Pro, Mini)? In terms of GPU and CPU and memory? I mean, could a M1 MacBook Air or Pro run a hypothetical native version of GTA V as well as the PS4 did? I'm assuming it can't match a PS5, but how close could it get?
- adastra22 3y ago
  It’s really hard to compare because to exploit the Apple hardware to the fullest you have to rearchitect your code to run on Metal. That has been done for ~0% of the game code out there. So real world comparisons are rare.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  By nominal TFLOPS, the GPUs in the M1 Max, M2 Max, and M3 Max are in the same neighborhood as PS5 and Xbox Series X. On the CPU side, even the base M1 is faster than any console. Apple pricing model creates artificial scarcity with memory and storage, which makes the base models poorly suited for gaming. Consoles ship with 16 GB memory and 1 TB SSD, while reaching the same numbers is still a $600 upgrade to the base M2/M3 Macs.
bloopernova 3y ago
I recently tried arm64 Factorio on an M1 Mac, and it's smooth as silk. It also loads within a couple of seconds even with dozens of Bob+Angels mods. The Mac seems to be only slightly warm while playing. I haven't yet played to the point of building enormous 4 lane railway squares, I'm intrigued to see just how much the M1 can handle. Great for entertainment, absolutely terrible for my productivity!
corysama 3y ago
Steve Jobs started out working on arcade games with Woz. Despite that, I got the impression he didn't care at all for video games. From what I've heard, the person who was originally in charge of the iOS App Store completely dismissed videogames altogether. He believed music was the only art form worthy of Apple. Rumor has it he actively sabotaged the effort to make Apple TV into a market-competitive game console. When he was moved to the iTunes team, iOS suddenly appreciated games. Between the two of them, Apple has been actively steered into not being a platform for games. Maybe that's finally (very slowly) changing.
SuchAnonMuchWow 3y ago
Honestly, given the crappy direction that windows is taking, I'm ready to abandon it the minute apple can run games seamlessly. And I doubt I'm the only one.

by TillE 3y ago

fsloth 3y ago

Games have reached IP prestige parity with movies, music & books. Before they were perceived as some combination of ’geeky waste of time’ and ’unhealthy obsession’.

adastra22 3y ago
Still are…
- fsloth 3y ago
  Not sure what you mean. People like me (40+ male) are a huge segment and plausibly spend much more time in games than movies and music. By revenue games are possibly bigger than movies and music combined (global revenue). Not everyone needs to like games buy many do and the industry revenue is quite massive compared to any other entertainment.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Still perceived as 'geeky waste of time' and 'unhealthy obsession'. Just an economically successful one.
    - fsloth 3y ago
      That sentiment is strongly waning, imo. Chess was similarly dismissed at one point when it became a fad. Gaming is fairly mainstream nowadays. But probably depends who you ask.

baz00 3y ago

The thing is they probably will run triple-A titles but how well and how modern a triple-A title? Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077, GTA 6 when it comes out? I doubt it.

izacus 3y ago

> I don't think we're going to see like an Apple Switch device, but they do seem to care about console/PC-quality games in a way they never have before. I think we see this sentence said every few years (or at least a similar one, related to iOS). It'll slowly be as evergreen as "the year of Linux desktop". Meanwhile, the amount of games that actually are available and running in ARM64 mode on macOS is still miniscule. Honestly, Game Porting Toolking doesn't seem like a product built by company that's serious about gaming - it's a developer tool that still needs the developer to do extra work to actually publish the game for Macs. Compare this to approach Valve took on Steam Deck and you'll see just how a company that takes games seriously works.

smoldesu 3y ago
Exactly. Game Porting Toolkit is an awesome showing, but the intention is in the name; it's not a compatibility layer, it's a porting tool. Eventually it will go away, and you'll be stuck with the same Mojave/Catalina-style cutoff for all your old games. Apple could make things so much easier by just shipping MacOS with a native Vulkan driver and letting the community maintain the DXVK translator like all the other GPUs. It wouldn't diminish the demand for Metal (it's still the only option on many platforms) and it would bring Mac back up to parity with other OSes. Maybe a renewed commitment to supporting Rosetta would also help seal the deal.
DistractionRect 3y ago
Things like Proton aren't something that shipped overnight, it's a teething process. In fairness, Valve originally did take the same approach. Proton was born from the ashes of Steam Machines - Linux boxes that developers had to create a port for. Similarly, WSL, WSL2, WSLg, and WSA are born from the ashes of Windows Phones and Project Astoria. They aren't quite there yet, but I expect another shot at mobiles in the future. Apple will have to go through the same teething process. Their rendering pipeline is wanting in some ways, and that'll only be sorted through painful experience. Console emulators (E.g. Yuzu/Ryujinx) are in the same vein as Proton, so if you want a health check on what problems something like Proton for Apple would face, you can see what problems the emulators are currently dealing with//hacking around.

vlovich123 3y ago

I don’t know. They’ve always touted games from time to time. The key limitation is that AAA games are expensive, game developers don’t have experience targeting Mac, and until Apple starts shelling out serious money to seed that market, it’s probably not going to happen. Look at what happened with Google and their failed strategy (there was a lot else wrong, but title availability and porting difficulty was definitely an issue)

GeekyBear 3y ago

They finally have a gaming strategy that makes sense. Now that iOS devices and Macs have the same CPU cores, GPU cores, and APIs, targeting Apple hardware gives you a much bigger user base that you can target than you've ever seen previously with Intel/Power PC based Macs.

polyomino 3y ago
This is the same failed strategy that Microsoft tried with windows 10 uwp. The control schemes and form factors matter so developers don’t get much benefit.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  Windows PCs can have such a wide range of hardware that this seems like an attempted software solution to a pretty difficult to solve problem. Compare that to Apple, where there isn't such a disparity between two separate computers, and it makes more sense to try to target MacOS under that logic than it does. Whether it will play out different is for consumers and developers to decide.
  - filoleg 3y ago
    Wow, this is a really good point I haven’t thought of before. And the thing is, it could work. Because that’s pretty much the main relative advantage consoles have over gaming PCs - extremely narrow range of hardware, which allows consoles squeeze out better performance than a gaming PC with comparable hardware specs (of course the PC will likely be cheaper, but that’s beside the point) on most games, because those games were extremely heavily optimized for that hardware. MacOS, under that logic, would come through somewhere in-between those two extremes - less disparity than between two random PCs, but more disparity than between two models in a single given console generation. Even funnier, I just realized that macOS major update support for any given mac is 6 years (and 10 for security updates iirc, but don’t quote me on that), which is about as many years as a single console generation lasts.
    - 3y ago

polyomino 3y ago

Because the Vision Pro has no compelling use case. Games is what you do when you don’t know what to do.

extrememacaroni 3y ago
Or anime chatrooms.
I_Am_Nous 3y ago
You're telling me "ignore my son's birthday party to watch Youtube videos on my face" isn't a compelling use case?? Staring awkwardly at my wife and saying "Yes sweetie I am definitely giving you my full attention" while I definitely am not is out too? Face computers have a lot of convincing to do before they are adopted widely.
- filoleg 3y ago
  > You're telling me "ignore my son's birthday party to watch Youtube videos on my face" isn't a compelling use case?? > Staring awkwardly at my wife and saying "Yes sweetie I am definitely giving you my full attention" while I definitely am not is out too? You just described two scenarios that are already very common in the present day, if you swap the headset for a smartphone in them. Not saying it is a good thing at all, it isn’t. But given how many people currently don’t mind doing it with their phones (where their actions are on a clear display), I think significantly more people would be into those use cases with AR headsets (and in the future, glasses). It is literally the same thing as with phones, but more concealed/private. So it would capture both the existing group doing it with phones and plenty of new people. Note: I am aware that Vision Pro isn’t intended to be worn outside or for prolonged periods of time due to battery and just general headset thing, so no, I am not trying to claim it is going to replace smartphones for people. I was talking more about where this is headed, which will only be possible once the technology gets us to the point of a “regular looking glasses” type of a form factor (or something similarly unobstructive).
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago

crazygringo 3y ago

I'm curious -- is there an ~objective comparison of how modern Macs (M1, M2, M3) compare to PS5, Xbox X/S, PS4, and Xbox One? And how it differs between passive cooling (MacBook Air) and active (Pro, Mini)? In terms of GPU and CPU and memory? I mean, could a M1 MacBook Air or Pro run a hypothetical native version of GTA V as well as the PS4 did? I'm assuming it can't match a PS5, but how close could it get?

adastra22 3y ago
It’s really hard to compare because to exploit the Apple hardware to the fullest you have to rearchitect your code to run on Metal. That has been done for ~0% of the game code out there. So real world comparisons are rare.
jltsiren 3y ago
By nominal TFLOPS, the GPUs in the M1 Max, M2 Max, and M3 Max are in the same neighborhood as PS5 and Xbox Series X. On the CPU side, even the base M1 is faster than any console. Apple pricing model creates artificial scarcity with memory and storage, which makes the base models poorly suited for gaming. Consoles ship with 16 GB memory and 1 TB SSD, while reaching the same numbers is still a $600 upgrade to the base M2/M3 Macs.

bloopernova 3y ago

I recently tried arm64 Factorio on an M1 Mac, and it's smooth as silk. It also loads within a couple of seconds even with dozens of Bob+Angels mods. The Mac seems to be only slightly warm while playing. I haven't yet played to the point of building enormous 4 lane railway squares, I'm intrigued to see just how much the M1 can handle. Great for entertainment, absolutely terrible for my productivity!

corysama 3y ago

Steve Jobs started out working on arcade games with Woz. Despite that, I got the impression he didn't care at all for video games. From what I've heard, the person who was originally in charge of the iOS App Store completely dismissed videogames altogether. He believed music was the only art form worthy of Apple. Rumor has it he actively sabotaged the effort to make Apple TV into a market-competitive game console. When he was moved to the iTunes team, iOS suddenly appreciated games. Between the two of them, Apple has been actively steered into not being a platform for games. Maybe that's finally (very slowly) changing.

SuchAnonMuchWow 3y ago

Honestly, given the crappy direction that windows is taking, I'm ready to abandon it the minute apple can run games seamlessly. And I doubt I'm the only one.