In terms of the typical Mac that makes up the install base, rather than us more demanding users, the skew is toward several year old laptops which often only shipped with <= 8GB RAM. PC gamers skew toward having lots of RAM, big-fat GPUs and CPUs. That was covered by Aspyr's blog post very nicely.
Sure, but that's comparing an average user to a gamer. Compare average Mac user to average PC user, and the RAM situation, I'd wager, leans towards Mac users having more RAM in general. But I have done no study to back this up. Of course this argument circles right back to the business argument with the install base problem
On the ports I've worked on there's often a memory requirement increase as a consequence of having to keep copies of data in system memory to optimise around weaknesses in OpenGL vs. D3D. Some Mac ports are also 64bit rather than the Windows version's 32bit which can increase memory usage. Plus there's usually some other odds and ends that are tricky to account for without going into the nitty-gritty of a particular project.
That makes sense. Keeping more stuff in memory generally seems like a good thing to do as well, as long as the memory is there of course. But loading it from disk or going to swap is pretty much the same, so no real downside the way I see it.
For PC games the NV 750M is now actually low-end and often unsupported! The Intel Iris Pro is generally slower still... not many AAA games support Intel on PC at all - those that do are outliers.
Oh - that's actually a surprise to me. My MacBook Pro has the Iris Pro (I think it's 5300? Maybe it's 5200? The Crystal Well (Haswell) one) and I am actually very impressed with what Intel has done. Remember the days of GMA... Oh God GMA. I guess that the fact that even when I Bootcamp I only play older games helps in that I haven't noticed.
Yep, the UE4 Editor has run on Mac since the first 4.0 release way back in 2014 - day and date with PC. Originally it used OpenGL but in 4.11, Metal became the default.
Super bloody cool that is. Pretty unrelated, but is there some way of getting to mess about with it, without licensing for comercial use, if you just want to dick about with it for fun?
Look at it from a business stance, why would you develop your own API and then go and support a competitors? That looks like unnecessarily duplicated effort and potentially negates any competitive advantage you might achieve with your own API if no-one adopts it. Apple have historically been much more controlling of their OS and what APIs appear on it than Microsoft, for good (yes, there is good in this) and ill - this is an example.
Well, the way I see it, Khronos and Vulkan isn't as much a competitor really. I mean, Apple is a member of the Kronos Group afterall. And it's not like having Swift means Apple won't support compiling apps that've been written in C++, right? i get the business argument, but here's another one - Who's the end customer? Probably someone who doesn't care if it's Metal or Vulkan if it runs well, right? Would supporting both bring more interested developers and thereby more software to the platform and ecosystem? Probably, right? Going by that, it'd be smart to support both.
I don't feel that you are, but there's an underlying sense to this thread that Apple aren't trying. That's not true. I was also trying to reinforce the point that not all bugs are their fault - I've been the most guilty party at Epic for Metal support and I've made my fair share of mistakes in the code that caused problems
Sure that's fair enough. I don't think the tone against Apple is entirely fair, but I also doubt you'll dispute that Apple doesn't prioritise games in the same way that MS does, right? And I'm not saying Apple isn't doing anything, but it's just not their field in the same way. I mean, Microsoft makes games and they've got the Xbox and all that, so it's a no brainer it'd be more of a concern for them. But for people who love the Mac and also love games, it can understandably be frustrating to see the favourite platform be less competitive in that area.
The system UI and a game are very different beasts.
Very true. Used to even be two different GPUs for 2D and 3D stuff, so yeah. But surely then a subset of Metal that related to the UI, Apple felt was more suited for the iGPUs? Or do you wager it had more to do with them needing the performance to run Retina displays more, and thereby getting prioritised for what you might call beta-testing?
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Also keep in mind that this does not account for DRAM - or rather, that Macs seldom have it. That means that in practice, you have less memory to utilise on Macs - and a lot less memory bandwidth.
What on Earth do you mean? DDR is DRAM. Double Data Rate Dynamic Random Access Memory. Maybe you meant VRAM for the Macs without dGPUs?
About 1/3rd of macs currently using Steam are equipped with 4GB or less. Most of the remainder are 8GB. With Macs, they're often the only Mac the user has. The actual Gaming PC market moved to 8GB minimums around the time DDR3 came out.
How many Steam PC users have 4 gigs or less? As I said earlier, comparing gamers and average users I don't think is entirely fair. And the comment about 8gigs being minimum from when DDR3 came out, that I don't really buy at all. That's way back in 2007, and game developers did not aim for 8gigs as a minimum back then. To give some context, Crysis 1 was released 2007 and for Vista and newer it required 1.5gigs of RAM or more
