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I wish they made computers that ran software like games again. Seems like the last few iterations they’ve been working hard on making computers that are able to

I wish they made computers that ran software like games again. Seems like the last few iterations they’ve been working hard on making computers that are able to run ai models a little faster. Are people really asking for that? I would think far more people would like to play a video game over rolling their own matrix multiplication, but I guess that’s why they pay the people at apple the big bucks because they must know best.

jwells89 2y ago
Overall, GPU strength is the best it's ever been in portable Apple devices by a significant margin. The problem isn't the hardware, it's that game developers are reticent to support anything that's not x86 Windows+DirectX or one of the consoles. It's often said that macOS/iOS supporting Vulkan would help and while I think that's true to an extent, native Vulkan support is still rare enough that it's not going to change all that much in terms of ease of porting. It might improve things on the front of running games through WINE (DirectX → Vulkan translation), but unless developers produce ARM builds of their games there's always going to be the overhead of being run through an x86 translator, which varies depending on how CPU heavy the game is.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Anything other than metal will be a big win. It's just a non-starter for developers of desktop quality games. Mobile ports sure. But Apple has never really cared about gaming. During the powerpc era they had a short phase of paying aspyr to make some ports (most notably CoD 4 modern warfare and some battlefield ports) but it was over within a year. Then about a decade later they had a phase around the 320M chipset where they promoted game releases. And again within a year they dropped the efforts and also let their OpenGL go totally stagnant. This caused for example elite dangerous to drop support. Now we're stuck with metal. Apple is just too small in gaming for desktop game devs to bother with metal. Not sure if Vulkan will be best but metal surely isn't. And the added complexity of building for arm doesn't help either (arm on windows is non-existent on any hardware aimed at gaming) I don't think Apple and Mac gaming will ever really become serious. I'm sure that if they do partner with studios like the last few times they'll just abandon the efforts like they always have. I think the biggest problem is just Apple's total lack of interest (save for the few half-hearted efforts above) to make Mac gaming real.
  - jwells89 2y ago
    I think a bit in the first sentence in your first post is key. They don't want devs to think as Macs and iDevices as separate targets, but rather as one big platform. They don't Mac ports, they want Apple platform ports. It makes some amount of sense. App Store revenue split aside, iDevices massively outnumber Macs and the gap in graphics horsepower between Macs and iDevices shrinks every year. Devs and to a lesser extent users don't really think that way though.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      It doesn't really make sense. iOS games are built to be played directly on the touchscreen. That rules out a lot of types of games (imagine playing WoW without a keyboard). It's not just about horsepower. I do think Apple thinks that way but there's a good reason for Devs not doing so.
samatman 2y ago
Are you under the impression that fast matrix operations in the CPU are useless for,, games? Where did you get that idea?
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  What matters for games is apple rebuilding bridges with game devs and creating a developer environment that supports game dev on the platform once again.
naming_the_user 2y ago
Modern Apple Silicon based laptops have fantastic graphics performance, manufacturers just aren't that interested in supporting them. It's probably a bit of a chicken and egg thing at this point, plus the fact that most "serious" gamers are going to have desktop PC's anyway.
- Detrytus 2y ago
  I thought one of the reasons to bring Apple Silicon to Mac was that all the iPhone games can now be easily ported?
- lxgr 2y ago
  > manufacturers just aren't that interested in supporting them AAA games are starting to show up on Steam for macOS these days. Baldur's Gate 3 runs pretty well, for example! The real shame is that some older indie games are disappearing just as easily, given Apple's deprecation strategy – while Microsoft basically never breaks backwards compatibility, Apple recently cut off 32 bit games (killing about half my Steam library), and presumably Intel-only binaries are next.
  - wtallis 2y ago
    Apple dropped support for 32-bit Mac applications five years ago; recent only by comparison to Microsoft's theoretical backwards compatibility. Apple dropped support for 32-bit Mac hardware, firmware, and drivers in 2012, so there was a period of seven years where game developers had every reason to make their Mac releases 64-bit, but to a disappointingly large degree they didn't. This was probably due in large part to a lack of pressure on the Windows side. It was absolutely absurd that even a big budget (and memory-hungry) game like Skyrim was released in 2011 as a 32-bit only game, and didn't get a 64-bit release until 2016. I didn't enjoy macOS killing compatibility with so much of my Steam library either, but I do at least respect that Apple had some solid reasons, and save some of my ire for the game devs that shipped outdated binaries.
    - diebeforei485 2y ago
aseipp 2y ago
You can spend a small amount of die space on something that will yield 10x performance benefits for some things, and you can spend a lot of die space on something that will only yield a general 5% improvement. Which you choose depends on a lot of factors. In other words, the relationship between the "things on the chip" and general performance, or specific application performance, is not a strictly linear relationship. The 20 series Nvidia GPUs with RTX were a good example. RT cores were added and took up significant die space, people said "why not more CUDA cores", but given the design of consumer GPUs it's extremely unlikely that just replacing those with more CUDA cores would have had a proportional uplift. In Nvidia's case, they realized RT cores were a better bet and served their customer bases (industrial graphics, gaming) better than just more raw numbers. As it stands, specialization like this is a key element of new designs on leading edge processes. You're going to see more of it, not less. > I guess that’s why they pay the people at apple the big bucks because they must know best. Well I don't know about "best", they almost certainly know ~infinitely more about their customers and workloads than random people like us do, I can at least say that much.
- wmf 2y ago
  The 20 series Nvidia GPUs with RTX were a good example. RT cores were added and took up significant die space, people said "why not more CUDA cores" Or they could have had the same number of CUDA cores without RT at a lower price (the fabled "1180")...
fragmede 2y ago
They are! The graphics for video games are just a series of matrix multiplications. Before it can get shown to the screen, the graphics are a bunch of triangles, represented by matrices, and in order to do anything in game, those matrices need to be multiplied in order to move them around in 3d space, before getting rendered out to the screen. Making computers better at matrix math means better rendering for video games.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  Apples issue is not whether it is a powerful enough device to run games, but an issue of software compatibility with modern games.
TOMDM 2y ago
Apple literally marketed the new iPhone running Death Stranding
lxgr 2y ago
Are you implying that recent Apple SoCs can't run games? While there's the ML-centric "Neural Engine", the GPU really isn't stagnating by any means: Just in the iPhone 16 presentation this week, ray tracing and a 20% faster GPU were among the headline features. Gaming got its own section in the video presentation! The fastest GPU I own is in my Mac; the second fastest is in my iPhone. My dedicated (last-gen) game consoles are a distant third and forth, respectively.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  The issue isn’t the hardware its the software.
astrange 2y ago
Higher AI performance actually means higher game performance, because you can render the game at lower resolution and use ML upscaling. Very popular technique now, especially because people prefer higher frame rates over higher resolutions.

jwells89 2y ago

Overall, GPU strength is the best it's ever been in portable Apple devices by a significant margin. The problem isn't the hardware, it's that game developers are reticent to support anything that's not x86 Windows+DirectX or one of the consoles. It's often said that macOS/iOS supporting Vulkan would help and while I think that's true to an extent, native Vulkan support is still rare enough that it's not going to change all that much in terms of ease of porting. It might improve things on the front of running games through WINE (DirectX → Vulkan translation), but unless developers produce ARM builds of their games there's always going to be the overhead of being run through an x86 translator, which varies depending on how CPU heavy the game is.

wkat4242 2y ago
Anything other than metal will be a big win. It's just a non-starter for developers of desktop quality games. Mobile ports sure. But Apple has never really cared about gaming. During the powerpc era they had a short phase of paying aspyr to make some ports (most notably CoD 4 modern warfare and some battlefield ports) but it was over within a year. Then about a decade later they had a phase around the 320M chipset where they promoted game releases. And again within a year they dropped the efforts and also let their OpenGL go totally stagnant. This caused for example elite dangerous to drop support. Now we're stuck with metal. Apple is just too small in gaming for desktop game devs to bother with metal. Not sure if Vulkan will be best but metal surely isn't. And the added complexity of building for arm doesn't help either (arm on windows is non-existent on any hardware aimed at gaming) I don't think Apple and Mac gaming will ever really become serious. I'm sure that if they do partner with studios like the last few times they'll just abandon the efforts like they always have. I think the biggest problem is just Apple's total lack of interest (save for the few half-hearted efforts above) to make Mac gaming real.
- jwells89 2y ago
  I think a bit in the first sentence in your first post is key. They don't want devs to think as Macs and iDevices as separate targets, but rather as one big platform. They don't Mac ports, they want Apple platform ports. It makes some amount of sense. App Store revenue split aside, iDevices massively outnumber Macs and the gap in graphics horsepower between Macs and iDevices shrinks every year. Devs and to a lesser extent users don't really think that way though.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    It doesn't really make sense. iOS games are built to be played directly on the touchscreen. That rules out a lot of types of games (imagine playing WoW without a keyboard). It's not just about horsepower. I do think Apple thinks that way but there's a good reason for Devs not doing so.

samatman 2y ago

Are you under the impression that fast matrix operations in the CPU are useless for,, games? Where did you get that idea?

kjkjadksj 2y ago
What matters for games is apple rebuilding bridges with game devs and creating a developer environment that supports game dev on the platform once again.

naming_the_user 2y ago

Modern Apple Silicon based laptops have fantastic graphics performance, manufacturers just aren't that interested in supporting them. It's probably a bit of a chicken and egg thing at this point, plus the fact that most "serious" gamers are going to have desktop PC's anyway.

Detrytus 2y ago
I thought one of the reasons to bring Apple Silicon to Mac was that all the iPhone games can now be easily ported?
lxgr 2y ago
> manufacturers just aren't that interested in supporting them AAA games are starting to show up on Steam for macOS these days. Baldur's Gate 3 runs pretty well, for example! The real shame is that some older indie games are disappearing just as easily, given Apple's deprecation strategy – while Microsoft basically never breaks backwards compatibility, Apple recently cut off 32 bit games (killing about half my Steam library), and presumably Intel-only binaries are next.
- wtallis 2y ago
  Apple dropped support for 32-bit Mac applications five years ago; recent only by comparison to Microsoft's theoretical backwards compatibility. Apple dropped support for 32-bit Mac hardware, firmware, and drivers in 2012, so there was a period of seven years where game developers had every reason to make their Mac releases 64-bit, but to a disappointingly large degree they didn't. This was probably due in large part to a lack of pressure on the Windows side. It was absolutely absurd that even a big budget (and memory-hungry) game like Skyrim was released in 2011 as a 32-bit only game, and didn't get a 64-bit release until 2016. I didn't enjoy macOS killing compatibility with so much of my Steam library either, but I do at least respect that Apple had some solid reasons, and save some of my ire for the game devs that shipped outdated binaries.
  - diebeforei485 2y ago

aseipp 2y ago

You can spend a small amount of die space on something that will yield 10x performance benefits for some things, and you can spend a lot of die space on something that will only yield a general 5% improvement. Which you choose depends on a lot of factors. In other words, the relationship between the "things on the chip" and general performance, or specific application performance, is not a strictly linear relationship. The 20 series Nvidia GPUs with RTX were a good example. RT cores were added and took up significant die space, people said "why not more CUDA cores", but given the design of consumer GPUs it's extremely unlikely that just replacing those with more CUDA cores would have had a proportional uplift. In Nvidia's case, they realized RT cores were a better bet and served their customer bases (industrial graphics, gaming) better than just more raw numbers. As it stands, specialization like this is a key element of new designs on leading edge processes. You're going to see more of it, not less. > I guess that’s why they pay the people at apple the big bucks because they must know best. Well I don't know about "best", they almost certainly know ~infinitely more about their customers and workloads than random people like us do, I can at least say that much.

wmf 2y ago
The 20 series Nvidia GPUs with RTX were a good example. RT cores were added and took up significant die space, people said "why not more CUDA cores" Or they could have had the same number of CUDA cores without RT at a lower price (the fabled "1180")...

fragmede 2y ago

They are! The graphics for video games are just a series of matrix multiplications. Before it can get shown to the screen, the graphics are a bunch of triangles, represented by matrices, and in order to do anything in game, those matrices need to be multiplied in order to move them around in 3d space, before getting rendered out to the screen. Making computers better at matrix math means better rendering for video games.

kjkjadksj 2y ago
Apples issue is not whether it is a powerful enough device to run games, but an issue of software compatibility with modern games.

TOMDM 2y ago

Apple literally marketed the new iPhone running Death Stranding

lxgr 2y ago

Are you implying that recent Apple SoCs can't run games? While there's the ML-centric "Neural Engine", the GPU really isn't stagnating by any means: Just in the iPhone 16 presentation this week, ray tracing and a 20% faster GPU were among the headline features. Gaming got its own section in the video presentation! The fastest GPU I own is in my Mac; the second fastest is in my iPhone. My dedicated (last-gen) game consoles are a distant third and forth, respectively.

kjkjadksj 2y ago
The issue isn’t the hardware its the software.

astrange 2y ago

Higher AI performance actually means higher game performance, because you can render the game at lower resolution and use ML upscaling. Very popular technique now, especially because people prefer higher frame rates over higher resolutions.