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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

Supporting a different 3D API is really not the complicated or time consuming part of porting a game to another platform, especially when the target API is Metal.

The poor game support on macOS is a mix of Apple apathy towards gaming and the low potential sales numbers.

Also, of the few new Vulkan apps being released (a whopping 9 in 2023), most actually only support a single platform:

https://carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/

Apple also offers a D3D12 porting toolkit now (basically D3D12 running on top of Metal, same thing like Proton is D3D running on top of Vulkan) which business-wise makes a lot more sense than native Vulkan support since there are many more D3D12 games than Vulkan games: https://developer.apple.com/games/

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> Apple also offers a D3D12 porting toolkit now

Now they do. After 5 years of people begging them for DXVK, Apple gives us... a downstream fork of DXVK retooled for Metal.

I really just feel bad for Mac owners. Like; you could be playing Apex Legends with us, but can't. Like I said, these changes to Asahi will likely make it easier than MacOS to play games on. Who would use MacOS for gaming when Steam Play works out-of-box on Linux? A masochist, I say.

I doubt anyone buys a Mac to install Asahi on it

We'll just have to see. Do you think that will still be true when compliant Vulkan 1.3 drivers exist, and Asahi users get to play anticheat-enabled online games?

I remember a lot of Mac users that paid for Bootcamp for this very purpose, back in the day. It might even be more appealing since Asahi is free.

Why not? The hardware is better than a Thinkpad or anything else I can think of. Only thing keeping me from running Asahi full time is battery/sleep. Hopefully they figure that out this year.

I did. And it's the first laptop I'm happy with in terms of power.

I would. Apple hardware is the best in the world while their software is so and so.

>Supporting a different 3D API is really not the complicated or time consuming part of porting a game to another platform, especially when the target API is Metal.

If you have a graphics programmer on hand, no. The vast majority of indie devs are powerless in that domain, though. I don't see many attempts out there to make it easier for them either.

Maintenance is always the time consuming part, be it simple or complex work. People aren't going to support Linux even if Vulkan theoretically makes it straightforward, because the time needed to maintain it isn't worth the lack of customers. Steam + Proton gives even less incentive to bother. So that advantage doesn't translate to much business value when evaluating DX12 vs. Vulkan.

This is an issue going all the way back to the OpenGL vs. D3D days. Nothing fundamentally changes as long as Microsoft completely swamps the PC gaming market.

If you have somebody on the team who was able to write a Vulkan rendering engine, then that same person can also easily pop out a Metal port ... just be careful, that person probably never wants to touch Vulkan again afterwards ;)

Otherwise I would expect that the game either uses a library which abstracts away the differences between the system 3D APIs (shameless plug: https://github.com/floooh/sokol, but also BGFX, WebGPU or AFAIK SDL3 is also getting a cross-platform 3D API), or uses a complete game engine like Godot, Unity or Unreal.

> Maintenance is always the time consuming part

This is the only thing that matters, it's not the initial port that's the problem, but the long term maintenance and customer support and that often doesn't make business sense on non-mainstream platforms like Linux or macOS. But a cross-platform 3D API doesn't make any of that easier (you'll still have to struggle with driver bugs for instance, or just plain weird configurations, especially on Linux systems - unless going through Proton which I'm sure works around a ton of compatibility issues and driver bugs under the hood).

> it's not the initial port that's the problem, but the long term maintenance and customer support

Which is why I ask; which should we prefer, a native port that Apple will depreciate for some reason or a community-supported translation layer that's based on a reasonable cross-platform standard?

I owned an iPhone, I know that the apps you pay for all eventually break, and instead of fixing it Apple will only tell you to complain to the developer. Compare that to Steam, where I can still play Far Cry 2 and Fallout: New Vegas in perfect emulation, likely for the foreseeable future.

> the low potential sales numbers

All sales are initially low before a market is grown.

If Apple wanted a machine that was also a great gaming machine, they could have that, and that market would then grow. The fact that they even have a gaming market at all left, shows that the appetite is there. (Of all the machines I have it installed on, Baldur's Gate 3 for example looks best on my Mac screen thanks to the HDR stuff)

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