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Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves
- bigyabai 3mo agoThe original GPTK was mostly comprised of forked code. This bump likely includes a lot of the upstream optimizations that other ARM gamers have been using for a while now.
- bakoo 3mo agoThe high pixel response time on macbook displays means you'll want an external monitor for multiplayer shooters etc., which most gamers are already fine with, but annoying if you want to game while travelling.
- JSR_FDED 3mo agoNot a “Gamer” so I’m always surprised small things like this make a difference. As a rule of thumb, what is a minimum frame rate a game needs? From there how much does each extra fps make a difference, and at what point do you hit diminishing returns?
- WaxProlix 3mo agoPixel response time is a related concept to framerate but more about how long it takes a pixel to change from one color to the next. Usually measured in cycle time from grey to grey again, a low rate just means that images will be smooshy looking, have unclear boundaries, and end up with a 'motion blur' effect. So even if your mbp supports a reasonable sounding 120hz (8.33ms for a full frame sweep), some of those pixels will still be in transition when the next frame hits. At least, my take on it as a somewhat casual gamer.
- shoo 3mo agoIt depends wildly on the type of game. e.g. if you're playing a single player turn-based strategy game, you might be taking a few seconds between each decision & UI interaction. Some hard turns you might step away from the computer to think things through for minutes without touching the controls. 30fps for a game like that could be fine. 15-20fps might even be fine, especially if the game engine manages to avoid adding unnecessary input latency & is able to process input events at a faster rate even if the render runs at a low framerate. If you're playing competitive FPS games, where reflexes matter, you'd want to get input, network & video latency as low as possible, within reason. Not high-frequency trading low. I have no idea at what point it stops making a competitive difference. If you have +100ms more latency than I do, I suspect that'd give me a noticeable advantage. If you have +10ms more latency than I do, I'm not sure that matters. Dan Luu wrote an article about input latency [1] in 2017 where he measured latency by running experiments pressing a key & measuring how long it takes to see a response on the screen. New computers from 2017 would have around 70ms-170ms latency, depending on the model. [1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
- thot_experiment 3mo agoI very much don't trust that article as a baseline. YMMV but I measured with a 240hz camera with a mid-high tier computer and a 144hz monitor in 2018 and a nice computer w/ 165hz in 2025 and I never got the huge latencies he experienced, I had click to photon of something like 10 frames max, so 42ms, with the average IIRC being closer to 5 frames.
- try-working 3mo agoinput lag is a minor part of it. it depends on the game, but for example in CS2, refresh rate changes game mechanics like recoil, movement, even trajectories of thrown grenades. i went from 60hz to 240hz, with <100fps average, and the difference was still immense. refresh rate is more important than fps, that's how big it is.
- thefz 3mo agoFrame rate has absolutely nothing to do with the screen you project the frames on. In competitive multiplayer shooters, frame rate matters a lot.
- archagon 3mo agoI don’t think it matters. My Studio Display XDR has pretty bad motion performance (similar to Macbook, maybe a touch better) and you can still play first-person shooters perfectly fine. In the general case you don’t notice it much. It’s only a problem with fast planar movement, e.g. strafing along a wall and trying to read some text that’s written on it. (Spelunky 2 is much worse than CS in this regard, but still not a massive issue. Just a bit ugly.)
- bparsons 3mo agoThe example they give is a frame rate boost on GTA V - a game released 16 years ago.
- fragmede 3mo agoIt's not the author's fault that GTA VI hasn't come out yet.
- Nursie 3mo agoYeah, but at 176 FPS, at first glance it seems competitive with the abilities of some fairly recent dGPUs from nvidia/AMD, though obviously we don't have benchmark-level details here. I think this is an article allowing quiet optimism rather than all-out celebration.
- lostmsu 3mo agoThe boosted framerate picture seems to show noticeably less of the rain effect.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- m463 3mo agoDo macs really have GPUs though? Or are they like intel integrated graphics?
- weikju 3mo agoAn on-board GPU is not a GPU?
- Y-bar 3mo agoIt’s only a GPU if it’s made in the RTX region of Silicon Valley, otherwise it’s just sparkling floating point calculations.
- lalaithion 3mo agoYes they have GPUs.
- wtallis 3mo agoYou might want to not only re-evaluate what you consider a real GPU, but also take a look at what the latest Intel integrated graphics is capable of (Panther Lake laptop chips with 12-core GPU chiplet fabbed by TSMC). Intel is still way behind NVIDIA and AMD in the discrete graphics card market, and their drivers don't have the decades of accumulated hacks to work around badly-written games, but their good iGPUs aren't a nightmare of incompatibility and missing features like they were 15 years ago.
- numpad0 3mo agoPeople say they think it's faster than top of the line RTX 3070[1] and hands down the fastest GPU ever for local LLM purposes, and OTOH they're like Intel integrated graphics with RAM shared VRAM for ultra thin laptops, so the truth is either of that, or somewhere between those two. Probably wherever its TDP suggests. 1: (Laptop)
- Havoc 3mo ago> hands down the fastest GPU ever for local LLM purposes Not really. On pure speed a 5090 will still comfortably beat a top end Mac configuration. Just constrained to 32gb mem ofc Top Mac has mem throughput around the 900 mark while a 5090 is at 1800
- t-3 3mo agoIsn't the translation layer going away soon though?
- mcraiha 3mo agoRosetta will go away. Game support won't. "Starting with computers using macOS 28, Rosetta functionality will be available only for certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks." https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527
- krackers 3mo agoDo they plan to have a whitelist of games? I guess they could remove rosetta support for most Cocoa frameworks while keeping OpenGL translation layer.
- klipklop 3mo agoI would assume people would switch to using FEX which is tuned for game performance for the x86 emulation bit.
- Jyaif 3mo agoI don't think the Game Porting Toolkit is useful these days: LLMs one-shot ports from one graphics API to another. Just like programming languages, graphical API choice is irrelevant now.
- seabrookmx 3mo agoYou're going to need a source for an LLM one-shotting a port of a AAA title from one graphics API to another...
- Jyaif 3mo agoI one-shotted non trivial software from OpenGL to Metal with a cheap (=non state of the art) LLM. That was 6 months ago. Anything in Unreal Engine that you think Fable wouldn't be able to adapt on its own to a different graphics API?
- charcircuit 3mo agoThe binary is the source.
- zer0zzz 3mo agoThe game porting toolkit allows windows DX shaders to get runtime translated to high performance metal shaders. It provides a path for Rosetta and Wine to handle what they are good at while letting Apple handle the shader lowering in many cases better then dxvk -> moltenvk -> metal (or whatever the new state of the art thing is, I forget the name). It’s not JUST for helping with manual porting of the cpu side code.
- keyle 3mo agoThis, once again, misses the elephant in the room. The fact is simple, there isn't enough of a Mac gaming market for the game developers to go through the effort. The hardware has been good enough for a while now. I'm not saying this will never change but the developers that shipped games on PC and Mac report something along the lines of 6-11% of users use a Mac. That isn't worth the effort unless you have a very strong IP and you've already targeted the switch2, the PS5 and XBox.
- Nursie 3mo agoI don't get this attitude. It'll never be enough until it is. Making porting lower-effort and higher performance can only help.
- AnthonyMouse 3mo agoApple is getting kind of a PR problem with developers. In theory they don't do all the same things on Mac as they do on iOS, but as long as they continue to do them on iOS and keep feature creeping the gatekeeper stuff, people are hesitant to end up stuck with Apple taking 30% of their revenue or denying their app for opaque reasons after they've spent big money to develop it. At which point who is going to spend development resources helping the platform of the company they're most afraid of screwing them if it becomes more popular? Half the reason more game developers are targeting Linux is a hedge against Microsoft doing that sort of thing, and Apple is on the opposite side of where they want to move.
- puelocesar 3mo agoThat really doesn’t make any sense. Do you really think Apple will ban steam on macOS overnight?
- AnthonyMouse 3mo agoThat's not how you boil a frog. If it gets popular enough then they start trying to get games to use their app store instead of Steam, gradually make it easier to use that and harder to use anything else, then the gate closes only after the herd is where they want it. Better, then, if it never gets popular enough to begin with.
- altairprime 3mo agoThe corresponding WWDC video for toolkit v4 is at https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/357 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/357
- reedf1 3mo agoIt is, and has been for a long time, a concious choice for apple to avoid gaming.
- cousin_it 3mo agoOh, who gives a damn. Half the games in my Steam library don't work since Apple killed 32bit. When they fix it, I'll know they care about Mac gaming.
- zer0zzz 3mo agoMost of those are gonna work using Rosetta, crossover, and the game porting toolkit. You really don’t need Apple to support 32Bit x86 macOS games when it’s not much more overhead to run windows x86 games (which is easily the better library to spend time Optimizing for).
- out_of_protocol 3mo agoWhy bother with macos version at all then? Soon current version becomes unusable as well, and needs windows fallback to run since macos version is useless
- zer0zzz 3mo agoIf there's a macos port, it'll of course be better optimized. I play CS2 on mac from time to time. It runs really smoothly on my Studio, but if it were a native port I could run it on a macbook air.
- out_of_protocol 3mo ago*for a brief moment it actually runs. from the point of the dev - work done on the port will rot very soon, return of investment is really low. Also, the studio may not exist at all by time changes will be necessary - as fast as few days after public release nowadays :(
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- VCFundedGenYer 3mo agoKind reminder that Rosetta is being removed.
- nicce 3mo agoHow it is getting priority if they deprecated Rosetta? Or am I understanding it wrongly?
- zer0zzz 3mo agoThey claim enough of Rosetta will continue to exist for games and things like wine to work. I suspect the main thing they want to kill off are all the x86 slices in the mach-o fat binaries for all of the frameworks.
- inatreecrown2 3mo agoDo you have a source on that, them claiming continued support for "things like wine"?
- zer0zzz 3mo agoMy source is I know how they handled Intel 32-bit support for Wine the last time they deprecated it. They went out of their way to keep codeweavers happy even though they let all the 32bit games on steam straight up die.
- jimz 3mo agoWhat's all the fuss about? I've been gaming on my Mac just fine. https://files.catbox.moe/dfcfha.png https://files.catbox.moe/dfcfha.png
- SXX 3mo agoApple could easily make gaming on Mac feasible by contributing to Proton, Wine, DXVK and officially supporting Vulkan at least through translation layer. Or just partner with Valve to do exactly this for their platform. Instead they choose to build another proprietary solution nobody gonna use and that will die as soon as they lose interest.
- zer0zzz 3mo agoI agree with you on wine, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are doing this quietly (landing patches to make Wine better on Mac), but for the purposes of making directx shaders perform better I fail to see why it matters if they support dx to metal conversion or if they support vulkan (for the goals of making games run better for their customers)?
- SXX 3mo ago> landing patches to make Wine better on Mac AFAIK they dont contribute back to Wine. There some chance they quietly pay to CodeWeavers, but likely this wouldnt be kept secret. > I fail to see why it matters if they support dx to metal conversion or if they support vulkan It matters because if Apple embraced Vulkan it would give more market share to one standard API for non-Windows platforms. Their strategy trying to push proprietary solutions simply doesnt work when their OS have 2% of PC gaming market share. Apple announced game porting toolkit 3 years ago and no one uses it. Well, unless Apple fund ports as PR stunts. At the same time Valve released Steam Deck 4 years ago and by now nearly all Windows games are playable on Linux.
- zer0zzz 3mo ago> It matters because if Apple embraced Vulkan it would give more market share to one standard API for non-Windows platforms. How does this actually help Apple customers have a better experience in some unique way that live translation to Metal does not? Runtime GPU compilers already do plenty of runtime translation; having worked on several I could be convinced having a simpler interop layer would make things smoother but your argument comes across as ideological more than about shipping product. > Their strategy trying to push proprietary solutions simply doesnt work when their OS have 2% of PC gaming market share. Hardly anyone one uses their proprietary solution (Metal) directly. But that doesn't mean Vulkan is going to be some panacea of gamer/game-dev adoption. > Apple announced game porting toolkit 3 years ago and no one uses it. Well, unless Apple fund ports as PR stunts. While I agree its not that widely used for porting actual games, I think a lot more people probably do use D3DMetal to run Windows games on mac.
- VCFundedGenYer 3mo agoGame Porting Toolkit will be irrelevant unless it's as open and free to use as Proton is. Linux has far and away taken the lead here. It also doesn't help that x86 compatibility is being ejected, so you can't even run basic Wine in the near future. Due to all this, there's no reason to be excited for this misguided endeavor of Apple's.
- al_borland 3mo agoIf Apple wants to really show they are serious about gaming, they’d have some in-house game studios release some AAA games as Mac exclusives, that people actually want to play. System sellers. This is effectively how every other platform gets people in the door and builds the critical mass of gamers for 3rd parties to show up.
- fernie 3mo agoThe last time they tried that (Halo CE), Microsoft bought the studio from under them, after they had already announced it at MacWorld
- amai 3mo agoGeforce Now is my platform of choice for gaming on the Mac. It works pretty well, as long as you don't want to install mods for your games.