No iOS device can run a game like Demon Souls or Returnal without some massive downgrades.
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A gamer's lament: Apple please let us game on the Mac!
- Thread starter groove-agent
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No iOS device can run a game like Demon Souls or Returnal without some massive downgrades.
Apple is all about prestige. Just take alook at the heavy amount of interviews and published books by past and present Apple employee's and they all talk about one thing when it comes to Apple, they are a company that design computers for education, science, engineering and the arts.
The latest Mac Pro is a hardware beast and is more than capable of playing the latest AAA games but the game software houses do not appear to see any financial advantage in converting their windows based games to osx, because if there was they would have done it already.
The latest Mac Pro is a hardware beast and is more than capable of playing the latest AAA games but the game software houses do not appear to see any financial advantage in converting their windows based games to osx, because if there was they would have done it already.
If we want to talk metal performance here are some Civ VI benchmarks at 5120x2880 (5K), maxed graphics + 84 mods (including improved graphics, extended camera etc.) on a 2020 iMac with the 5700 XT 16Gb:
Vanilla graphics test: 40-120fps (flying around on medium zoom on a late game map)
Gathering Storm stress test: Max zoom out on a huge map packed with a truly mindboggling amount of assets you'd never see in a real game: 17-40fps
Macs do not have a performance bottleneck, it's simply up to the developers to gauge if the market is worth spending development effort on or not. This is a much more complicated calculation than you might think. It's part historical performance of the genre of the game you are developing, part developer bias, part pure numbers.
Vanilla graphics test: 40-120fps (flying around on medium zoom on a late game map)
Gathering Storm stress test: Max zoom out on a huge map packed with a truly mindboggling amount of assets you'd never see in a real game: 17-40fps
Macs do not have a performance bottleneck, it's simply up to the developers to gauge if the market is worth spending development effort on or not. This is a much more complicated calculation than you might think. It's part historical performance of the genre of the game you are developing, part developer bias, part pure numbers.
Demons Souls was on the PS3 originally, of course a modern iOS device can run it. I may conceed the point on Returnal though. To be fair to keep a locked 60 with all the effects the PS5 isn't running the game at a native 4K either, so maaaaaaybe with checkerboard rendering (which I admit I am not sure if iOS even supports) it could be made to run.
IIRC Civ 6 is more CPU dependent, than GPU. Usually the safe assumption is most RTS games are more CPU than GPU dependent.
Civ 6 is CPU dependent, but it also uses the GPU more than one might think. Geometry is simple, but there are some fairly advanced shaders in the game.
Since you referenced Bluepoint, I assumed you were talking about the PS5 version of Demon Souls which is not the same as the PS3 version. The PS5 version of Demon Souls is a remake of the original. iOS won't be able to run that version anymore than Returnal.
Most PS5 games are not native 4K. Typically games are using dynamic resolution to achieve 60 fps and the resolution is upscaled to 4K. Metro Exodus Enhanced on PS5 has resolutions as low as 1008p. Demon Souls on PS5 is running at 1440p natively. And this is with a 10TF RDNA 2 GPU.
I think the closest iOS is going to get as far as a console game are games like Genshin Impact.
Stop being a party pooper.
Next you are going to tell me there is no way iOS can run Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart. We don't need that negative energy here!
Both require 40 GB of storage space. It's a bit too high for iPhones and iPads.
Not indefinitely, but MMOs have given me much more than any single-player game for the same price.
Does iOS need 4k resolution textures? That is probably the bulk of the space right?
I am not sure about iPad though, since it has higher resolution screen. Besides Apple claims to have the best texture compression in the industry so it shouldn’t be an issue either way right? (Or am I mistaken @leman )
God, yes!
Listening to actors speaking is So Slow! Unbearably so if you’ve already heard the dialogue once. I read almost an order of magnitude faster than people speaking. Hell, I skip dialogue even the first time because it takes so long, when I want to spend my leisure time actually playing the game.
Don’t get me started on unskippable ”cinematic” cutscenes….
Mac Pro is a very poor example. 99% of people don't have the need nor the money to buy that thing.
No, the Mac Pro is a very very good example, it's you, you do not see the point. The point is Apple is not interested in making a gaming computer but yet they have a machine that is more than capable of playing AAA games but it is priced so high the average gamer would not be able to afford it, hence the point of Apple putting barriers in place to prevent people thinking their machines can be a dedicated gaming machine when they are not and that barrier tends to be price.
Also, people should not be focusing their complaints at Apple, they should be focusing their complaints on Apple customers because for it is them that will drive the demand for a Mac gaming machine and the demand is just not there.
There is something a bit strange here: "..to prevent people thinking their machines can be a dedicated gaming machine when they are not..".
Be that as it may, you're right, Macs don't make sense as dedicated gaming machines from either a price or a catalogue perspective. Having gaming as a supplementary function seems quite reasonable, provided the titles are available.
Well, that is the thing that is likely to be shifting a bit. How much? Nobody knows.
But as long as consumers with an interest in gaming could just fire up Windows and have access to the entire library there, well, what demand would you expect?
* That is no longer possible.
* The new consumer Macs sell well.
* The new consumer Macs actually are quite decent performance wise.
So the landscape will change. And while we don't know just how, we pretty much DO know in which direction, because all changed factors point in the direction of an increase in native gaming. It can still be from "modest" to "still pretty modest" though. That remains to be seen.
And you have a good point in that Mac users need to actually buy stuff in order to drive a change. If they preferentially support other platforms, well, "still pretty modest" would probably be the outcome.
Not sure that I follow your logic here. Mac Pro is a dedicated workstation, and that it can play games is just a side effect of it being a dedicated workstation. Other high-end workstations cost the same or more, and they can also play games, it's just not there primary purpose.
At any rate you are right that Apple is not interested in making a dedicated gaming machine. That's not their business. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Did you mean to say that Bethesda is generally okay in offering support for the Mac platform since they acquired id?
if so, I beg to differ. We haven’t had a new id game since Rage.
IIRC id, on PC/Mac, only users OpenGL/Vulkan. With the most recent games using Vulkan (as far as I can tell).
So, would you disagree that M1 Macs offer ludicrously great performance for the money?
And yet, 4A Games (the developers of the Metro series) have offered native Mac versions of all 3 parts of that trilogy, for a total of 5 Mac versions (counting the Redux versions of 2033 and Last Light), and they're in Ukraine. They have every reason to ignore the Mac platform, but they've stepped up, 5 times!
Mac gamers can be forgiven for feeling better taken care of by 4A than Epic, Aspyr or Feral or Blizzard or id, all combined.
I sense a ban coming soon… ;-)
And you absolutely know 100% as a fact that Doom 2016 would be on Mac without Bethesda? Do you have a source to back that up?
It’s certainly A way, assuming as you seem to be that Apple needs saving. 2 Trillion of market cap would seem to argue that they’re not in need of saving.
Speaking of which, what’s the barrier to Vulkan support on Mac? I know there’s been complaints for awhile now and I’m clueless about the technical details