Yeah not enough detail to say one way or another. There definitely a bottleneck somewhere on their PC with their Unity project.
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Apple CAN’T do AAA gaming [Merged Megathread]
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This whole comparison is utter bollocks. He claims it's a system of the same class, because he paid $3k street price for a GPU. The card is $699 and not $3k, just because he got ripped off doesn't make it a valid argument. I've bought several GPUs in the pandemic and was offered some same day for ridiculous prices and guess what, when ready to wait for two or three months, the price isn't a cent over retail. When ordering a Studio today, we're not looking at ~3 months until delivery, depending on model. So when I find one on ebay, craigslist or whatever and they're asking $15k for next day pickup, does that make the Studio a $15k machine? No it doesn't.
That being said, the guy seems to be developing simple smartphone type games, as he mentions "flipping the compile switch". So he doesn't seem to optimize for anything, Windows or macOS. So is that difference in the engine and how it handles the platform? He should run the same "benchmark" with UE or another engine and see what happens.
Unity perfectly fits what Apple wants, simple, somewhat cheap to make games. The engine is simple, easy to learn, so any Indie developer pushing out game after game is a good thing for Apple.
The guy is just expressing his opinion based upon his personal findings, I'm relaying what he said, and I see no serious fault with what he claims. That being said, your username checks out.
I know he's stating his findings. I've just pointed out that's it nonsense and explained why, so please don't cry about it.
The guy clearly doesn't know what he's talking about, he's learning Unity and clicked around a little, basically what a designer and not a game developer does. So it should be taken with a grain of salt as it's not a valid comparison for hardware performance.
Developers have been given the gift of the M1, probably the most important thing to happens since like Core i7 and no one seems to care? It at last is a capable integrated solution that doesn't throttle and doesn't use much battery.... But again no one seems to care. Apple don't seem to care either, they should be the ones making the push and they've done nothing. If anything they've just pushed developers away with the whole Epic Games thing....
Is gaming on MacBooks ever gonna happen? We used to be able to do the whole Bootcamp thing, but not anymore.
Is gaming on MacBooks ever gonna happen? We used to be able to do the whole Bootcamp thing, but not anymore.
Apple have chosen not to support key technologies used by the pc and console gaming industry.
The MacBook gaming market is tiny and not worth much money.
It takes years to develop game s
The MacBook gaming market is tiny and not worth much money.
It takes years to develop game s
Give it time. I think we'll start hearing about Apple Silicon native AAA games in 2023.
User base.
When a developer develops a game, they want to develop it for platforms with large userbase for maximum revenue. Currently, that's either Windows, the consoles, or mobile. A developer would be more willing to develop a game for iOS than for macOS, simply because there are more iOS users than mac users.
Plain business 101.
What Apple should've done is putting incentives for iOS game developers to tweak their games and allow it to be available for Apple Silicon macs as well. But I believe Apple's priority right now is to complete the transition.
As long as the major part of Mac users only have a low end GPU in their machine, which is what the M1s have, there won't happen much on the gaming market. It is better than we had before, yes, but the gaming field has also moved along, so we're still at the low end, and ports of older games that would run good on these machines, likely don't sell much, hence they don't come either.
At least we have Geforce Now at this point, which is kind of revolutionizing Mac gaming, and likely also the only thing we have going forward. There are practically no AAA ports coming at the moment.
At least we have Geforce Now at this point, which is kind of revolutionizing Mac gaming, and likely also the only thing we have going forward. There are practically no AAA ports coming at the moment.
I kinda feel like this is your answer. The entirety of it.
At this point we've had "capable integrated solutions" for decades, they're called "gaming consoles". They're cheap, popular, convenient and extremely focused as devices.
Then we have "capable modular solutions" called "gaming PCs". They're also very popular, and they're available at many price points, some of them significantly cheaper than Macs.
Then there are gaming laptops, already a niche and already priced competitively.
Personally I think that in a market this saturated, there simply isn't enough demand for AAA Mac games.
How long does it take to port to Metal?
In 3 years, 50% of all computers capable of playing AAA games will be Macs
Edit: December 13th, 2021: Apple will sell about 27 million Macs in 2021. Assume that 80% are M1/M1Pro/M1Max Macs, then Apple will have sold 21 million Macs capable of playing AAA games. According to IDC, the number of gaming computers (desktops and laptops) sold in 2021 is projected to be 47...
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This point has already been debunked. Developers of AAA games must make their games playable on a GPU as small as the M1.
The Nvidia 3080 of the world are a minority.
Just wait until 2023. That's when Apple Silicon Macs will have about 100 million units sold. That's probably around the time iOS/iPadOS developers will almost always make a macOS version and AAA developers will start porting their new games too.
Games will come from mobile and from PC AAA makers in the future, making macOS the only platform capable of both types of gaming. Just be patient. It's not going to happen for a few more years.
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Debunked what which of my points?
In 3 years, 50% of all computers capable of playing AAA games will be Macs
Edit: December 13th, 2021: Apple will sell about 27 million Macs in 2021. Assume that 80% are M1/M1Pro/M1Max Macs, then Apple will have sold 21 million Macs capable of playing AAA games. According to IDC, the number of gaming computers (desktops and laptops) sold in 2021 is projected to be 47...
This point has already been debunked. Developers of AAA games must make their games playable on a GPU as small as the M1.
It depends heavily on what their existing technology stack is and how throughly they want to port to Metal.
Porting a simple indie game with a nicely abstracted graphics layer could probably be done in a matter of weeks.
Realistically in 2022 most larger games are written using fairly large and fairly involved engines. Either commercially available ones like Unreal or Unity or private internal ones like Ubisoft's Snowdrop or EA's Frostbite.
Porting these engines to run well on Apple Silicon is going to be a fair amount (months to years) of work because of how large and specialised they are, but it will also be the pivot point towards gaming on the Mac.
The main roadblocks are that these larger engines generally exist on the very bleeding edge of PC graphics APIs, and often porting them to Metal is completely impossible at this point. For example it looks like Nanite is completely unportable at the moment due to Metal's lack of 64 bit atomics.
In addition Apple Silicon's GPU architecture is quite different from that of PC GPUs, which means that often you would need large structural changes and probably a completely new render path to get full performance in Metal.
I do think it will come eventually though.
Its what he wants, not what will happen. No sane big game developer will optimize their game for insanely small userbase. Most people dont use macs, most people who do use macs have intel macs and most people who use macs use them for work not for games
Steam HW data suggest that the average gaming PC is still running on a GTX10xx or 16xx, so no the M1 GPU ain‘t the problem here.
Macs are too expensive for gaming. No serious gamers will ever choose Macs and so won’t game developers. An M1 Max 32c device costs nearly twice the amount of a RTX 3060 (minus the ray-tracing capabilities) which has comparable performance even when playing a M1-optimized game.
I know the M-series chip is not optimized for gaming, but I think the situation will last because Apple doesn’t seem to care. And unless Apple decides to change, we won’t be any closer to Mac gaming.
I know the M-series chip is not optimized for gaming, but I think the situation will last because Apple doesn’t seem to care. And unless Apple decides to change, we won’t be any closer to Mac gaming.
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I think it would come gradually with every generation of processor, more specifically towards M3.
But something's also happening in parallel : games streamed in the cloud. And I think it will happen faster than dev interest in Apple Silicon, because they won't have to do the extra work of porting their code.
Especially since Mac users are like 15% in the US and like 10% in the world, and are not inclined to play games. We're not a good target audience yet for AAA games. We're usually ones to prefer consoles.
But something's also happening in parallel : games streamed in the cloud. And I think it will happen faster than dev interest in Apple Silicon, because they won't have to do the extra work of porting their code.
Especially since Mac users are like 15% in the US and like 10% in the world, and are not inclined to play games. We're not a good target audience yet for AAA games. We're usually ones to prefer consoles.
I wouldn’t say M1 Max is capable of playing AAA games, unless you’re targeting 1080p with medium-ish graphics settings. M1 GPUs are perfect for tasks they are designed to do (mainly photo and video editing), but are mediocre at best in general computing tasks, such as gaming. Just compare the scores to Nvidia graphics and you’ll see the difference.In 3 years, 50% of all computers capable of playing AAA games will be Macs
Edit: December 13th, 2021: Apple will sell about 27 million Macs in 2021. Assume that 80% are M1/M1Pro/M1Max Macs, then Apple will have sold 21 million Macs capable of playing AAA games. According to IDC, the number of gaming computers (desktops and laptops) sold in 2021 is projected to be 47...
What iOS games? Most of that stuff is just basic primitive attention grabbers and the few higher quality iOS games already work just fine on macOS. I mean, the big highlight for iOS gaming recently was Feral porting a 15 year old Total War title to the mobile, which is a bit of an insult on itself.
M1 Max is perfectly capable of playing almost every modern title at 4K or at least ultra Full HD, provided they would be optimised.