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Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

>Really just drives home how big of a mistake it was ignoring Vulkan for the past decade on Apple's behalf, but lord knows they won't admit that until it's too late.

Even if Apple supported Vulkan that doesn't mean AAA games would be ported to Mac soon. AAA require beefy GPUs and Apple silicon isn't going to match Nvidia.

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AAA can make use of beefy GPUs, but equally it can run on more pedestrian hardware.

If AAA games sold only to those with desktops and high end graphics cards, PC gaming would have died a long time ago. Even today, many games run fine on Pascal era graphics cards, and they certainly run fine on mid range laptop versions of Nvidias 4050 & 4060.

Apples silicon can keep up with those, plus the simpler, less diverse hardware on Mac would probably lead to better optimisation if the market was big enough.

I'm not saying Vulkan is the only thing holding gaming from Apple computers, because I think the control Apple has over software distribution on Mac is also something that scares large publishers away from investing in the platform.

I don't think I know a single AAA game released in the past decade that requires a beefier GPU than Apple ships. It would be complete financial suicide for a studio whose development budget runs in the tens and even hundreds of millions these days) to limit their customer base to the relative handful of gamers who have their hands on the latest and greatest graphics cards.

You've got it backwards. Before M1, most Macs that regular consumers owned were incredibly bad GPU-wise. M1 was an enormous upgrade and finally made Mac usable for gaming for the average Mac owner. But years of most Macs being useless for gaming drove the game devs away.

Unfortunately, I don't think simply having a powerful GPU is enough to make people care. The M1 is almost 5 years old now, and I haven't seen a single major games studio go out of their way to target Apple Silicon. If anything, people are giving up on the platform now that OpenGL is more or less entirely broken and Metal is mandatory. Porting to MacOS is like committing to a console ecosystem where things constantly change and you're expected to pay the price. Windows developers don't like that; they want to push one build out and support it for the next decade.

Hope springs eternal, but there's a reason we want Vulkan. Native gaming on Mac is awful; it is quite literally the worst gaming experience you can have between Linux and Windows, both of which can run DirectX games without issue. If we had functioning Vulkan drivers on Mac, we wouldn't be begging and grovelling for games to work; they just would, like on Steam Deck.

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