Honestly you have no idea what you’re talking about. The only gamers that care about iOS/mac os games are casual gamers at best
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Apple Announces 'Game Mode' in macOS Sonoma for Better Mac Gaming Performance
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Alternatively, you could just get a steam deck
Please stick to your statement instead of moving goalposts. Again you want to change the subject to hardcore PC gamers/gaming which was never the subject of the discussion. The fact remains that you were wrong about the number of Mac gamers being only 3 and ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of Mac gamers, casual or not. So if you are in that group you should be happy for progress, if not buy a gaming PC or console and be happy but don't try to twist facts.
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And with this news comes a new Wrapper/GoAnimate Mac vs. PC commercial parody! (I also added subtitles for if you can't understand the text-to-speech voices.)
Agreeing with you here a thousand.
The interesting messages, like one user asking (and then commenting) how and where Game Mode happens (what this article is about) gets relegated to second and third pages.
The forums always tend to get flooded with bad jokes or insufferable impulsive quick-to-manufacture complain comments extrapolating impossible information from a short few characters message, screenshot or a short video on a mostly marketing showcase video presentation…
We got people today showcasing Cyberpunk, Diablo IV (one of the very complaints here even), GTA, etc and dozens others within hours of announcements on MacBook Airs. Sure, maybe not with the full “8K Extreme Raytrace Quality 240fps or die dude bro” on those low end iGPUs, but it’s something and quite good on higher end even with all the expensive architecture translation layers happening.
We got people enhancing their own developed programs (like the Wine SwiftUI wrapper “Whisky”) to support DirectX12 also within hours.
We got people here showing a list of games from a couple years ago to still unreleased titles…
All of those things that could see an use for Game Mode but it’s just not enough, complaining on something unreleased or that they don’t even use or need… we are totally in the insufferable “TLDR; generation” with a bunch of made up or self inflicted ailments to be able to scream about something as soon as possible. That “something” sometimes even quite inaccurate (or still to be determined or just not true).
But hey, maybe it’s their “my truth” so it’s all factual from their point of view.
It poisons the well quite heavily.
I have brew installed but I haven't gotten around to just skinning Steam in and then trying to install games.
About time Apple put in more efforts to improve the Mac gaming market!
Yeah, I feel like it responds faster with game mode so I'll probably use it every time I play but I'm not sure it's that big of a change.
It’s like an All-You-Can-Eat restaurant with no customers.
Apple at WWDC today announced Game Mode, a new gaming feature for Macs that's exclusive to macOS Sonoma.
With Game Mode enabled in macOS 14, the Mac prioritizes CPU and GPU power for the running title, thereby improving gaming hardware performance across the board. For example, Game Mode makes gaming on Mac even more immersive by dramatically lowering audio latency with AirPods.
Apple says it has also doubled the Bluetooth sampling rate for paired Xbox and Playstation controllers, while a new Game Porting toolkit for developers makes it easier to port games from other platforms.
Game Mode works with any game, including all of the recent and upcoming Mac games, according to Apple.
The developer beta of macOS Sonoma is available through the Apple Developer Program at developer.apple.com starting today, and a public beta will be available through the Apple Beta Software Program next month at beta.apple.com. The release will be available as a free software update this fall.
Article Link: Apple Announces 'Game Mode' in macOS Sonoma for Better Mac Gaming Performance
I wonder how many AAA developers are actually interested in porting to a Mac. Apple made a push to get gaming on the Mac about 3ish years after the iMac saved the company. They even had the late author Douglas Adams as part of that push—it fizzled.
It seems improbable that any AAA developer tries to make this work. The Steam Deck proved that Windows-free gaming has a market. But many of those SteamDeck owners will use the deck on-the-go and spend 2k on a beast of a desktop Linux computer that they can repair and upgrade incrementally vs. an set desktop that gets hardware upgraded every 2-3 years.
Side rant: Sonoma supports 2019 iMacs and later. That’s only 2 iMacs.
Um… it was months between the PC release of StarCraft 1 and the Mac release (Pentium ii/iii vs G3 era). I have owned a Mac for 30 years: gaming has always been an unfulfilled dream.
It’s worse now. We at least got D3 for macOS. No hint of anything about D4 coming to Mac.
I think Warcraft III was the first to have a simultaneous release, a policy which lasted for about a decade.
Apple doesn't care about gaming on the Mac as it doesn't need to care about it. When Apple wants to get in the "game" I'd bet they will introduce a console to open yet another revenue stream/service. Apple is worth the vast sum of money on the market today not because of being lazy and stupid by any means.
Once Apple see's the right opportunity in the market it will grow it's gaming business outside of IOS rapidly. Right now it's probably making more than the biggest AAA studios with it's control of IOS gaming while needing to little to no dev work....and that's smart.
Q-6
Once Apple see's the right opportunity in the market it will grow it's gaming business outside of IOS rapidly. Right now it's probably making more than the biggest AAA studios with it's control of IOS gaming while needing to little to no dev work....and that's smart.
Q-6
Well until Apple intercedes nothing much will change as it's just a numbers game. Apple being Apple will do as they see fit on their own terms and they have the money to do so if they want. They clearly dont and just want to keep the interest at a simmer...
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Thank you for the correction. It still illustrates the larger issue about iterative upgrades being a practice embraced from about 1999 to 2012. It was abandoned as they allowed 2+ years to pass before releasing the un-upgradable 2014 mini.
And that feeds the larger theme that Apple has not made meaningful efforts to facilitate gaming.
After my 30 years on Apple, I am switching to Ubuntu when I purchase in a month.
If you knew anything about game development, you’d know creating Metal isn’t exactly “meeting them halfway”.
First of all, you have to understand Metal was much later to the party than DirectX and way before Apple Silicon. Windows has always been a more mature gaming platform.
iMacs had a very high resolution screen but a weak GPU, and laptops aren’t traditionally a gamer setup to begin with (both Windows and macOS).
The actual market share of Apple, and its subset of viable gaming devices, has been so small traditionally it’s not worth porting a game for. You don’t just release something and ignore; you need a team of dedicated people to support each operating system, in various degrees depending on the genre.
Lastly, making a game for a platform isn’t a matter hitting “compile”. Yes, Unity or Unreal might do the heavy lifting translating GPU calls/shaders to the applicable software platform (e.g directX, Metal, OpenGL, …) but many games are created with proprietary engines. To support macOS, a developer would need to write a significant portion of the code again, but towards Metal. They’d have to create an abstraction layer as well, or use Vulkan.
And that’s just the Metal layer. Don’t forget all the other code, OS-specific optimization, shaders, etc…
The QA, devOps, customer support… all impacted by having to support a new OS.
So, no, Apple is not “meeting them halfway”. Not by a long shot.
Balder's Gate 3 now running (apparently well) on the M Macs is an excellent full-on AAA game. IMO this says good things about Macs and future gaming.
I recall playing loads of games on the 68k and ppc macs , not so many on intel
Wonder what happened ?
Wonder what happened ?
Well there was boot camp so most of us dual booted windows to game. Now that option is gone going forward, the developers have make Mac specific ports again.