Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

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It's not a function of capability. I spent $4,000 on a 2019 MBP, including $750 for a Vega 20. It plays Elder Scrolls Online WORSE than a friend's 2020 with INTEGRATED graphics. (I guess Bethesda gave some love to the integrated chipset, and didn't optimize for the Vega. It hitches badly every couple of seconds like it's texture thrashing.)

Whatever AAA games that might have gotten some love on the Mac (and there are some), it's going to be even harder to get game companies to commit to proper support to the M1 models. Bethesda has said they won't even compile ESO for M1. So I will continue to run it on a 12-year-old computer running an ATHLON 64 and a nVidia 9xx-series video card. (This works surprising well, making the fact that my Mac effectively can't play it all the more galling.)

I'm never going to try tricking out a Mac for gaming again. I should have learned my lesson with eGPU's, but no. I thought, if I want a proper GPU, it's going to be built in. Well, that doesn't work either. I've wasted a lot of money in this arena.

Well, Apple is selling M1 Macs like hotcakes, so it won't be too long until it'll be stupid not to support them. Also, texture thrashing isn't really an issue when you've got a shared CPU/GPU memory with 64 GB of space. Just cache like half the game in it lol

There is 0% chance that game dev supports mac, it's a dead platform for gaming.

The downvote police is there, am I missing something? are they any modern game on mac?

https://applesilicongames.com/

EVE Online now supports M1. But regardless, now that MacBooks are capable gaming machines (definitely not the case in the past), and a core demographic of Mac users overlap with the gaming demographics (20-40 yo), I really think it’s just a matter of time now.

I would argue that Macs with PC-shared Intel CPU's and AMD GPU's should have been much EASIER to support than the new, completely-different architecture, and that hasn't really happened.

Sure, it's candy for tech people, but the average person is going to scoff at a $2000 laptop. They can buy a functional laptop and a better gaming for that price. It's not going to change the gaming market.

Apple had a shot at making Mac gaming a reality around 2019. They decided to axe 32-bit library support though, which instantly disqualifies the lion's share of PC games. You could still theoretically update these titles to run on MacOS, but I have little hope that any of these developers would care enough to completely rewrite their codebase to be compatible with 15% of the desktop market share.

Yeah, and they also deprecated OpenGL, which would have wiped out most of those games even if the 32-bit support didn't. I'm not expecting to see much backwards compatibility, I'm expecting forwards compatibility, and we're starting to see new titles come out with native Apple Silicon support, slowly, but surely.

I wouldn't hold your breath. Metal is still a second-class citizen in the GPU world, and there's not much Apple can do to change that. Having powerful hardware alone isn't enough to justify porting software, otherwise I'd be playing Star Citizen on a decommissioned POWER9 mainframe right now.

The major factor Apple has working in their favor with regards to the future of gaming on Macs is iOS. Any game or game engine that wants to support iPhone or iPad devices is going to be most of the way to supporting ARM Macs for "free".

My older Intel Macs I'm sure are more or less SOL but they were never intended to be gaming machines.

That won't get the top 10 Steam games running on MacOS. There's just too great of a disparity in the tooling, a 'convergence' like you're describing would take the better half of a decade, conservatively speaking. And even if they did converge, that's only guaranteeing you a portion of the mobile market, and just the new games at that. Triple-A titles will still be targeting x86 first for at least the next 5 years, and everything after that is still a toss-up. There's just too much uncertainty in the Mac ecosystem for most games developers to care, which is why it's a shame that Proton doesn't run on Macs anymore. Apple's greatest shot at a gaming Mac was when MacOS had 32-bit support.

Your older Intel Macs are probably just fine for gaming, too. I play lots of games on my 2016 Thinkpad's integrated graphics, Minecraft, Noita, Bloons Tower Defense 6, all of these titles work perfectly fine, even running in translation with Proton. If you've got a machine with decent Linux support, it's worth a try.

> That won't get the top 10 Steam games running on MacOS.

Top 10 Steam games according to https://store.steampowered.com/stats/

* New World - Amazon Lumberyard

* Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - Source

* Dota 2 - Source 2

* Team Fortress 2 - Source

* Apex Legends - Source

* PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS - Unreal

* Destiny 2 - Custom

* Rust - Unity

* Dead by Daylight - Unreal

* MIR4 - Unreal

Unreal, Unity, Lumberyard, and Source 2 all support iOS and thus Metal on ARM already. A game developer using one of those engines should generally be able to just click a few buttons to target an additional platform unless they've gone around the engine's framework in ways that tie their title to their existing platform(s). Obviously in all but the most trivial cases there will still be work to be done, but those game developers using a major commercial engine are doing so because someone else has already done most of the hardest work in platform support for them.

That means six of the top 10 could add native MacOS support with relative ease (as in significantly less work than doing it from scratch) if they wanted to. The three Source titles are likely stuck on DX/OGL platforms forever because it doesn't really make sense to rework such an old engine, but at least the two Valve in-house titles have had persistent rumors of a Source 2 update for years.

I mean…the “tooling” these days is usually just Unity3D. And Unity supports Apple silicon as a compile target. Tell me if I’m wrong, but it seems like the ability to support multiple platforms and architectures in gaming has never been easier.

AAA games are developed using in house engines, not Unity.

iPhone games are an entire different beast however, and likely not what people “want”.

At least we still have Minecraft.

> iPhone games are an entire different beast however, and likely not what people “want”.

Most of those mobile games you're thinking of are made with Unity, Unreal, or one of a few other general purpose game engines. Those same engines are used for a significant chunk of PC games as well. The AAA developers who have in-house engines like to reuse them as well. It doesn't matter if a given game does or does not support mobile if it uses an engine that does.

Metal is 4th class:

1. Vulkan 2. DirectX 3. OpenGL 4. Metal

IIRC, there are some efforts to translate Vulkan to Metal similar to how the WINE project translates DirectX into OpenGL/Vulkan, but that's still an imperfect workaround.

Yeah, I was living with gaming on a Mac when that happened, and watched 2/3rds of my Steam library get greyed out.

That's why the 2015 Macbook Pro I'm writing this on is still running Mojave.

After committing to Metal and then killing 32-bit support and then switching to ARM, Apple has made it clear that video games are dead on MacOS. I don't know what people are going to do with these new GPUs but it's not going to be gaming.

Dedicated GPUs has always been just selling point. The real limit is the thermal throughput.

There has never been a reason to put separate GPU into a laptop, because a laptop can only handle so much juice before frying itself.

I love that game. Wonder why it gets some much hate online.

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