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Comment by _cenw | Hacker News Reader

If you want to know how neglected Steam on macOS is... it's an Intel binary (now using 100% CEF for its UI) and about 2/3 of the catalog doesn't work because they targeted x86 (not-_64). If you're looking for native Apple Silicon games it gets even more grim.

I was hoping for that trend to reverse with game porting toolkit, but it doesn't seem like that's happening. Whoever pushes for Gaming at Apple doesn't seem to have massive internal support. Metal VR died almost as soon as it released and somehow they thought making Game Porting Toolkit license incompatible with Wine/Proton/CrossOver was a great move, because all you need to convince a game developer to invest in a dead (to your audience) platform that will likely deprecate your API in a year or two is a proof of concept of how well it can run.

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I don't really ever see Mac gaming growing unless a radical shift in philosophy happens at Apple. Similar things have been said about Linux but the reason gaming has been growing on Linux is because no one body lords over it and Valve and others have made a concerted effort to help Linux gaming. Apple LOVES to have control and unless they can create a controlled environment that can make them money off gaming (i.e. selling games off the app store and taking a % of the sale) we won't see them make a serious effort. There might be a few within who are passionate and make things like GPT that give people hope but higher ups will inevitably ask WHY?

I agree that gaming on mac is fairly grim, but I've been quite happy playing games on my 13" M1 macbook (air i think?). This excludes most AAA games, but I've certainly enjoyed Victoria 3 (and other paradox games). They don't seem to run much slower than on intel (which, granted, is typically worse than through wine or windows). Baldurs Gate 3 should be on it soon, I think. The mac market itself should shift pretty rapidly.

Edit: factorio and oxygen not included have both been pretty solid, too. I think factorio is even native.

Well, yes, at the end of the day Macs are still general purpose computers and despite all the hoops Apple puts in place that developers have to jump through, you can still release programs - including games - for them. So they do have and - unless Apple really screws up things somewhere - will always have games.

But what you're writing is basically what Linux gamers were writing for many years - even before Valve started focusing on it too.

> Baldurs Gate 3 should be on it soon, I think

That's the one bad experience I had with the game - in Steam it is already marked as available on Mac OS but after downloading the 100GB it tells you that it's actually still the Early Access version (with incompatible save files!) and you have to wait till September for the actual game. Which meant another 110GB download on my fallback device.

Rimworld is also great on an M1 MBP.

Whatever Steam is using to render that CEF to the screen in MacOS, it's not presenting it to the OS as a window, and as such, blithely ignores things like Stage Manager, responding only to things they manually reimplemented, like resizing.

I've seen better-behaved Mac GTK apps.

For me Steam on the Mac has an important purpose, which is Remote Play - have an ITX box running Windows somewhere, and connect to it using Steam on a MBP. Now you can play everything from the comfort of your couch. Works pretty well if the wifi is good.

But at least you got some earbuds in Team Fortress 2 for your trouble?

GPT is barely two months old, I wouldn't expect any impact it has to be very visible yet.

That's not the point. GPT will never be easily accessible to consumers. As stated in this thread, Linux thrives as a platform for games by running Windows binaries very well, and macOS would do well to do the same.

That Apple made GPT but then ignores this obvious route, instead thinking it will somehow mobilize game developers to port their games natively to their bespoke low-level graphics API is ridiculous - "you see, they just didn't know about the graphics capabilities of Apple Silicon before!". Yeah, right.

Lots of game developers can barely be convinced to release usable Windows binaries, see also the mess of badly performing DX12 games (which is more like a low-level console API that needs optimization to perform) vs yeet the pixels out DX11.

> Linux thrives as a platform for games by running Windows binaries very well, and macOS would do well to do the same.

No. Linux gaming thrives because Valve embedded Wine directly, branded as Proton, into the Steam launcher. GPT is the same, only for the Mac target of wine rather than Linux, and obviously Apple can't integrate it into Steam.

In terms of compatibility I've been using Whisky (a wine UI wrapper) + GPT for a few weeks now and window steam loads fine (albeit slowly), and all the windows games I play work fine (certainly far better than wine - GPT).

Of course the problem here is that it's not cleanly integrated into native Steam, so it's (1) requires a separate launcher installed, (2) requires a separate steam install, and (3) if the game ever does get ported you'd need to migrate your saves from the windows container wine uses.

This ignores all the attendant performance thrown away by shader translation (that linux also suffers) and cpu translation (that any non-intel code suffers, but in practice that's just Mac)

Let me restate: Apple does not consider GPT a consumer-facing product. It's meant to entice game developers do "see the power of metal". Proton being well embedded and all sure helps, but it's not the basic prerequisite, which Apple is withholding from being integrated by anyone but themselves, and it doesn't look like they have much interest in it beyond being a cool demo.

The point of GPT is that game developers don't have to target Metal, they can stick with DirectX or Vulkan and let Apple's translation layer do the rest.

Apple has been pretty clear that GPT is there so you can get an idea of how well your game would run on macOS, not to actually ship games with it. The license doesn't allow for that.

GeForce NOW has solved my problems with gaming on Mac. I get that it's not ideal for everyone, but for me it's perfect.

I got the 6 months deal and I regret it. GeForce Now has now several times simply not synced back my savegames (Steam claims "upload not started"), including several hours of Baldurs Gate 3.

This has happened only in BG3 with GFN for me. All other titles run perfectly or OK-ish.

It appears that there is some problem with BG3 on GFN. The game’s launcher constantly complains about “corrupt data files” and cloud saves take some time to sync from and to Steam.

Try living a substantial fraction of a light-second away from the servers, lol

Does it support Retina displays?

Yes. Steam is more or less a good Mac citizen aside from not being fully Apple Silicon native. But, as previously stated, the entire catalog was 32-bit and it evaporated overnight when Catalina ended support for 32-bit executables.

Unfortunate that everything was built for 32-bit, there was literally one year worth of 32-bit Intel Macs before the Core 2 Duo came out.

I think the reason is that the 32bit games were first developed as 32bit for Windows. When porting it over to Mac, switching to 64bit would be a big amount of work that wasn’t needed.

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