OS X: Battlefield 3 and 4 coming to Mac?

[Jeffylew77]

DICE (Studio that created Battlefield 3 and Mirrors Edge) has a job posting for a "Mac OS X Engineer." This means there is a HUGE chance that battlefield 4(when it comes out) will be coming to Mac!

Link: http://dice.se/jobs/mac-os-x-engineer/

"Frostbite is looking for developers who want to join us in taking our engine to the next level. You will be part of a team focusing on bringing Frostbite to Mac and work closely with game team customers and the Frostbite team to deliver an engine as great on OS X as it is on Windows and traditional console platforms.

We want creative, committed and communicative people who want to be part of developing the best platform for some of the industry’s most talented game teams. We encourage our employees to be involved and have a strong go-ahead spirit. In return we provide great individual freedom and autonomy, true influence and a flat hierarchy.

Qualifications:
• Excellent C/C++ knowledge and a passion for programming
• 5+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on OS X
• Expert knowledge in OS X platform specific details
• Self-motivated with a strong sense of quality
• Strong language skills – excellent spoken and written English

We prefer applicants with:
• Rendering programming experience (OpenGL preferred)
• Experience working with content pipelines
• Experience of porting Windows applications to OS X
• Low level programming with a good grasp of memory/performance optimization

General Information

As part of the application process we might ask you to perform a practical work test. The position is permanent and applications will be selected continuously. Apply online or by mail to jens.backbom@ea.com with a combined CV and Introduction letter in English."

[Syndra]

This is rather interesting news, I dare say.

[Kissaragi]

Hopefully battlefield 4 will come to mac. Not sure they would bother porting 3 now.

[TheGreatWumpus]

This news is a good week or two old. Wasn't there already another thread on it?

[Jeffylew77]

I'm not sure if it has been posted or not. I was just randomly browsing DICE's website, and I came across this. I thought I would put it up in the forums to see what your opinions are.
I think there is still a chance for battlefield 3 to be ported. Call of duty 4 was at least 2 years old before it was ported to the mac

[Jeffylew77]

Originally Posted by TheGreatWumpus

This news is a good week or two old. Wasn't there already another thread on it?

After further research, I found this http://www.cultofmac.com/212930/ea-owned-game-studio-dice-looking-for-engineer-to-port-frostbite-engine-to-mac-os-x/

[Cougarcat]

The Frostbite engine is also being used for future Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, if anyone still has any faith left in Bioware these days...

[BornAgainMac]

Battlefield 3 is my favorite game. I never get bored of it.

[El Awesome]

Is there any Mac apart from hackintoshes that will be able to play BF4 in a high resolution with high details?

Most Macs have very high solutions (retina MBPs or 27" iMacs). I have a hackintosh that has a GTX680, which is one of the most powerful GPUs out there, and it plays BF3 on Ultra with 45-60FPS. In BF4, I'll probably have to cut down the settings.

And this GTX680 is still way better than any vanilla Mac GPU including the GTX680MX.

I'm an Apple Fan boy, but I must say that for gaming Windows is just better.

[Jeffylew77]

Originally Posted by El Awesome

Most Macs have very high solutions (retina MBPs or 27" iMacs). I have a hackintosh that has a GTX680, which is one of the most powerful GPUs out there, and it plays BF3 on Ultra with 45-60FPS. In BF4, I'll probably have to cut down the settings.

OpenGL is known to be faster and better optimized than DirectX, but DirectX has been used for so long that it is cheaper to make games/hire developers that already know DirectX, rather that training them to use OpenGL. Valve released a statement about the two, saying "with an Nvidia GTX 680, Intel i7-3930k, and 32GB of RAM, Windows 7 and DirectX, Left 4 Dead 2 maxes out at 270.6 fps. With the same hardware, but different software — Ubuntu 12.04 and OpenGL — L4D2 scores 315 fps, almost 20% faster than Windows These figures are remarkable, considering Valve has been refining the Source engine’s performance under Windows for almost 10 years, while the Valve Linux team has only been working on the Linux port of Source for a few months.

20% may not sound like much, but in this case, it is an extra ~45 fps!

Link:http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/13...ven-on-windows

[El Awesome]

Originally Posted by Jeffylew77

OpenGL is known to be faster and better optimized than DirectX, but DirectX has been used for so long that it is cheaper to make games/hire developers that already know DirectX, rather that training them to use OpenGL. Valve released a statement about the two, saying "with an Nvidia GTX 680, Intel i7-3930k, and 32GB of RAM, Windows 7 and DirectX, Left 4 Dead 2 maxes out at 270.6 fps. With the same hardware, but different software — Ubuntu 12.04 and OpenGL — L4D2 scores 315 fps, almost 20% faster than Windows These figures are remarkable, considering Valve has been refining the Source engine’s performance under Windows for almost 10 years, while the Valve Linux team has only been working on the Linux port of Source for a few months.

20% may not sound like much, but in this case, it is an extra ~45 fps!

Link:http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/13...ven-on-windows

I've heard of that before.
The big problem is, similar as in the link, 95% of all gamers are running on a Windows rig. Therefore, to get good sells, you need to develop for Windows and therefore for DirectX. If you only port these games to OpenGL, you won't see much of the 20% speed gain from OpenGL because it's ported from DirectX. This means to actually see this 20% speed gain, you need to develop the game TWICE, one for DirectX, one for OpenGL. This means probably something around 50% more costs for a target market of... how many percent are gaming on OS X/Linux?

Second problem are drivers. Mafia II runs with around 30FPS on my hackintosh - ridiciously, isn't it?
In the Mafia II-Thread in this forum, the responsible guy from Feral said it's driver related (The CPU has to do lots of things that should be done by the GPU)

Third problem: Even if OpenGL is 20% faster my statement in your quote is still true. Most of the Mac's GPUs aren't made for gaming, a GTX650M might play BF3 on high settings at non-retina resolution.
The GTX680MX of an iMac would also struggle with highest settings - and they are the top notch GPUs for Macs!


But still, this is good news and I hope that at some stage, you will be able to play good games on OS X. From this point on, OS X would be a pretty much perfect OS.

[adildacoolset]

Originally Posted by El Awesome

I've heard of that before.
The big problem is, similar as in the link, 95% of all gamers are running on a Windows rig. Therefore, to get good sells, you need to develop for Windows and therefore for DirectX. If you only port these games to OpenGL, you won't see much of the 20% speed gain from OpenGL because it's ported from DirectX. This means to actually see this 20% speed gain, you need to develop the game TWICE, one for DirectX, one for OpenGL. This means probably something around 50% more costs for a target market of... how many percent are gaming on OS X/Linux?

Second problem are drivers. Mafia II runs with around 30FPS on my hackintosh - ridiciously, isn't it?
In the Mafia II-Thread in this forum, the responsible guy from Feral said it's driver related (The CPU has to do lots of things that should be done by the GPU)

Third problem: Even if OpenGL is 20% faster my statement in your quote is still true. Most of the Mac's GPUs aren't made for gaming, a GTX650M might play BF3 on high settings at non-retina resolution.
The GTX680MX of an iMac would also struggle with highest settings - and they are the top notch GPUs for Macs!


But still, this is good news and I hope that at some stage, you will be able to play good games on OS X. From this point on, OS X would be a pretty much perfect OS.

But they need to include OpenGL 4.3 support

[quagmire]

Hopefully they will fix the tank, flares, IR smoke, etc. They are way too weak right now....

But, who am I kidding? DICE wants to attract the idiot COD players that don't have any skill who complain that a tank is overpowered when a shell can kill a human with one shell.......

[Jeffylew77]

Originally Posted by El Awesome

Second problem are drivers. Mafia II runs with around 30FPS on my hackintosh - ridiciously, isn't it?

Third problem: Even if OpenGL is 20% faster my statement in your quote is still true. Most of the Mac's GPUs aren't made for gaming, a GTX650M might play BF3 on high settings at non-retina resolution.
The GTX680MX of an iMac would also struggle with highest settings - and they are the top notch GPUs for Macs!

I think steam only releases true ports of a game and that's probably why Mafia II isn't in the steam store. Additionally, the low "30 FPS" is also due to bad drivers. AMD and Nvidia are still in the process of releasing properly optimized drivers for such games. The current low-end iMac comes with a Nvidia 640m GPU, 8gb of RAM, and an i5 processor. Not amazing, but still pretty good. With an optimized engine and optimized drivers for a properly ported mac game on OpenGL, the lowest-end iMac is well-equipped to run current gen games at high settings. You can't really know for sure because the only way to test most games is on windows, yet windows contains DirectX which won't give you the best performance.

[Cougarcat]

Originally Posted by Jeffylew77

I think steam only releases true ports of a game and that's probably why Mafia II isn't in the steam store.

Mafia II is a native port. It's not on steam due to business reasons. There are cider ports on steam, though not many.

[Jeffylew77]

Originally Posted by Cougarcat

Mafia II is a native port. It's not on steam due to business reasons. There are cider ports on steam, though not many.

Must be a driver issue then. How can you tell if a game is native or a cider port? Is there a site?

[Cougarcat]

Originally Posted by Jeffylew77

Must be a driver issue then. How can you tell if a game is native or a cider port? Is there a site?

http://transgaming.com/cider/games

Feral and Aspyr only do native ports.

[Jeffylew77]

Originally Posted by Cougarcat

http://transgaming.com/cider/games

Feral and Aspyr only do native ports.

That is very interesting. We can also add Valve onto that list.

[El Awesome]

Mafia II is definately driver related. DiRT2 for example works fine, but it is a known issue that even native ports don't work with the same performance as the games would do under Windows. There are several reviews confirming that on nearly every Feral/Aspyr game the original Windows version runs about 20% faster. This may not be critical for newer Macs as mist games for Mac don't have high system requirements, but e.g. on my 2008 MacBook Pro with the Nvidia 9600GT I'm better off using BootCamp.
Have you seen that the minimum system requirements for a Mac port are slightly higher than for the Windows version?

I suppose this is because games are optimized for DirectX, not for OpenGL. Although they have the same functions, they work differently. You might compare it with GIMP and Adobe Photoshop - both have the main image editing features, but have a different workflow.

[Nightarchaon]

Originally Posted by Cougarcat

The Frostbite engine is also being used for future Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, if anyone still has any faith left in Bioware these days...

Its not bioware i lost faith in, its EA owning them that is the problem (That and all the talent left when EA bought them)

[gmanist1000]

This is great news! I would love to have Battlefield 4 on my Mac.

[Raima]

Originally Posted by El Awesome

The GTX680MX of an iMac would also struggle with highest settings - and they are the top notch GPUs for Macs!

Does this mean you haven't validated the performance?

I'm interested in this test and will test Battlefield 3 in bootcamp when I get my iMac i7 with 680MX

[Jindra12]

Originally Posted by Raima

Does this mean you haven't validated the performance?

I'm interested in this test and will test Battlefield 3 in bootcamp when I get my iMac i7 with 680MX

I just played BF3 on my late 2012 iMac with i7, 16gbram, 680MX, etc. It run really smooth at Ultra setting. There were few frames lag in the most intense battle with lots of smoke, explosions, blood spraying all over in that specific area, LOL.

[Kissaragi]

BF3 looks great, even on medium settings. It runs fine on my 2009 Mp with a 4870.

[Raima]

Originally Posted by Jindra12

I just played BF3 on my late 2012 iMac with i7, 16gbram, 680MX, etc. It run really smooth at Ultra setting. There were few frames lag in the most intense battle with lots of smoke, explosions, blood spraying all over in that specific area, LOL.

Nice Thanks for the feedback