Apple Event Next Week Likely to Emphasize High-End Gaming on Mac

[threesixty360]

This “game mode” thing. Can they do that for iPhone OS so that I can use music software on AirPods / Bluetooth without the mad amounts of latency?

It seems like they are saying it’s possible to prioritise and reduce this latency?

 

[2540497]

Apple will never be seen as a gaming machine. Why? Pitiful storage options that’s costly to upgrade.

Baldurs Gate 3 and Modern Warfare 3 both recommend saving 100GB each to use. That’ll take up the entirety of an entry level MacBook Pro with 256GB storage.

Untenable. Never happening.

 

[laptech]

Apple has always been about prestige which is education and business. Gaming is not considered prestige in Apple's eyes in my opinion. Therefore Apple will point to the many different offerings of game playing devices if mac owners want to play computer games instead of building mac's for gaming.

 

[MacsRgr8]

I would just be happy with some of my 32-bit Mac games working on modern macOS.

Yeah... for that reason I still have a macOS High Sierra bootable volume on an iMac 2017....

 

[rp2011]

This is great news. I love my M series Macs but for any work requiring better graphics capabilities, I have had to switch to a Windows machine. May still need my Windows machines for rendering, but for mobile work, hopefully it will be good enough for decent Blender work flows.

 

[Phil A.]

Would love to see decent gaming on Mac.
I play Baldur’s Gate 3 and while people claim it runs smooth it’s not even close to my PS5.
Rooting for Apple to finally bring gaming to Mac.
It’s easier and cheaper, because some games are better with Mouse & KB and I am not interested in having a gaming PC as well…

The only time I've really heard the fans on my M2 Max MBP is when I fired up Baldur's gate. It did give me reasonable performance at 1440p, but I prefer to play it through GeForce now where I can get brilliant performance at 4K and a silent machine!

 

[xxFoxtail]

Apple has always been about prestige which is education and business. Gaming is not considered prestige in Apple's eyes in my opinion. Therefore Apple will point to the many different offerings of game playing devices if mac owners want to play computer games instead of building mac's for gaming.

While I mostly agree, Apple has been slowly getting into gaming the last few years. Starting with Apple Arcade, and getting AAA publishers to release games for Mac and iOS.

Whether they like it or not, gaming has potential to generate lots of money for them. It’ll get gamers to switch over to Mac. At the end of the day, that’s pretty much what it’s all about - money.

 

[Zest28]

Makes sense. AAA games are mobile games now with micro / macro transactions. And the Apple customer is the one that spends alot of $$$$$ on micro / macro transactions.

PC gamers are allergic to micro / macro transactions.

 

[joecomo]

given that I want to get a desktop - this could lead to my eldest son blocking my office gaming …

 

[laptech]

Makes sense. AAA games are mobile games now with micro / macro transactions. And the Apple customer is the one that spends alot of $$$$$ on micro / macro transactions.

PC gamers are allergic to micro / macro transactions.

You hit the nail squarely on the head there as to why mobile gaming is more important to game developers than computer gaming - micro transactions, which is why Apple appears to be in favor of gaming on it's mobile platforms than desktop platforms because they and the game developers can make more money that way.

 

[Isengardtom]

Would love to see decent gaming on Mac.
I play Baldur’s Gate 3 and while people claim it runs smooth it’s not even close to my PS5.
Rooting for Apple to finally bring gaming to Mac.
It’s easier and cheaper, because some games are better with Mouse & KB and I am not interested in having a gaming PC as well…

This is why I got a gaming pc this summer. I used to love playing through bootcamp on my iMac and even though it was never amazing it was definitely fine.

 

[Isengardtom]

Apple has always been about prestige which is education and business. Gaming is not considered prestige in Apple's eyes in my opinion. Therefore Apple will point to the many different offerings of game playing devices if mac owners want to play computer games instead of building mac's for gaming.

Apple hasn’t been decent in non creative business in over a decade.

 

[Kissmo1980]

The only time I've really heard the fans on my M2 Max MBP is when I fired up Baldur's gate. It did give me reasonable performance at 1440p, but I prefer to play it through GeForce now where I can get brilliant performance at 4K and a silent machine!

I have a Samsung Odyssey Neo g8 - 4k 240 fps

No way I am playing BG on 1440 😂
I fire up the PS5

 

[DeanPSN]

Think the “Scary Fast” event will unveil and add the M2 Extreme.

4x M2 Max DIEs fused together. 😱
That would be killer performance leaving jokes aside.

 

[jonnysods]

I'm excited about the event and hope to see some exciting new hardware/product updates, but not gaming... I just don't see it as a revenue game changer for Apple. May as well just allow cloud gaming services to run on it and be done with it, not enough devs want to port games to Macs.

 

[JippaLippa]

Only a monumental effort would realistically bring gaming to the mac, beyond a few cherry picked titles.
Still, any progress is good.

 

[BrightDarkSky]

What are you smoking? Steam is still supported on Macs, and recently got the redesign also. It's still not apple silicon native, but at least now has hardware acceleration and is more stable.

No problem admitting I was wrong about the steam part. The wave of articles earlier this year wasn't very clear that steam was being discontinued from only certain older Mac OS's. I read tech news all the time and even I took it as it was being pulled from the platform. That said it still doesn't seem to work very well.

Otherwise my comments regarding Mac and gaming still stand. I find this all to be extensions of the iPhone gaming platform growing up a bit and definitely not Mac trying to become some kind of gaming platform. Apple is just not built for this type of (game) work. I wouldn't mind running Genshin on my Mac but thats a pipe dream and it's fine.

 

[120FPS]

I do wonder if this is the perfect opportunity for Apple to release an M3-equipped Apple TV (console). It is nearing Christmas and customers may be keen to dissociate from the problems of the world.

 

[diamond.g]

Please explain your logic. ANY Mac out there, even base M1, is way better than the Nintendo Switch. So if the Switch can get decent games, still to this day, any Mac can. It doesn't need the requirement of access to 4090 graphics cards. This is why these gaming threads are tiresome.

Isn't marketshare why the Switch is getting "decent games" from 3rd parties? Not that I know anyone buying these 3rd party games... Nintendo Switch sells well because it is a "novel" form factor, is inexpensive, and has Nintendo games.

No Apple doesn't need a 4090 powered Mac, they need IP that folks want to play. And for that IP to be exclusive to macOS either permanently or timed. There is a reason Microsoft bought Activision (outside of King because they could have divested the rest of the company if all they wanted was mobile games).

 

[augustrushrox]

So by “high-end of gaming on Mac” what they really mean is “high-end of the low-end of gaming, and we’ve finally had someone port these old games on Mac after many years”.

 

[Fender2112]

If I had the necessary experience in the field, without a doubt, I would have opened a gaming studio focused on Mac.

Sadly, you would go broke.

 

[jlnr]

Isn't marketshare why the Switch is getting "decent games" from 3rd parties? Not that I know anyone buying these 3rd party games... Nintendo Switch sells well because it is a "novel" form factor, is inexpensive, and has Nintendo games.

Besides first-party titles, the Switch is surprisingly good for indie games. I grew up with a Nintendo that only allowed expensive, polished games on its platforms, and now they advertise Vampire Survivors in their newsletter. I'm not saying that these games are what sells Switch consoles, but at least Nintendo has fundamentally opened up to the gaming world in ways that are exactly the opposite of what Apple is doing (de-emphasizing the App Store in favor of Apple Arcade games that are hand-picked by non-gamers).

Apple has always been about prestige which is education and business. Gaming is not considered prestige in Apple's eyes in my opinion. Therefore Apple will point to the many different offerings of game playing devices if mac owners want to play computer games instead of building mac's for gaming.

One example of this must be when Game Center was effectively shut down. I know that Apple only built it in response to OpenFeint becoming popular, but there was a small time window when I really liked opening Game Center and seeing what my friends were up to, playing some online Carcassonne etc. Then Apple axed it, and all that the pundits had to say was "yay no more felt texture, this is so much more professional than before". Not even Apple bloggers understand gaming.

I hate the Steam UI so much, but I'll play games where my friends are, it's that simple.

 

[diamond.g]

Besides first-party titles, the Switch is surprisingly good for indie games. I grew up with a Nintendo that only allowed expensive, polished games on its platforms, and now they advertise Vampire Survivors in their newsletter. I'm not saying that these games are what sells Switch consoles, but at least Nintendo has fundamentally opened up to the gaming world in ways that are exactly the opposite of what Apple is doing (de-emphasizing the App Store in favor of Apple Arcade games that are hand-picked by non-gamers).

I feel like they started that with the 3DS, which would imply they were more open on their handheld platforms more so than their home ones. Or at least with the addition of the store.

 

[Chuckeee]

Just showing a bit of my ignorance here.

Just looking at the trend on Steam, I was wondering: Would it be easier to port Linux versions of games versus Windows versions of games?

 

[tubular]

The good news is that Apple has nailed its colors to the mast when it comes to configuration. They now have a story everyone knows they're going to stick to, after zig-zagging for decades: it's going to be Apple Silicon, ARM, and Metal talking to Apple's tile-based deferred rendering cores packaged in an SoC. That's the yellow brick road off to the horizon.

The bad news is that it's a hard road to coax the game developers onto, even if you ignore that zig-zaggy history. Without serious tools to adapt DirectX assets and API -- not translate-on-the-fly, but as part of the porting process -- porting is just too expensive and risky.

Apple's decision to deprecate OpenGL and then walk away from the successor, Vulkan -- shoving off the maintenance of a translation layer to the open-source community and Righteous St. Gaben -- doesn't help.

I really love the Apple Silicon direction, and the M2 Pro Mac mini I'm typing this on is the best Mac I've ever owned. But I don't expect to game on it. That's coming from someone who bought a Switch in May and binged 400 hours in BotW.

And I have to do my compulsory mention of the open-source Godot game engine, which got a significant attention boost when John Riccitiello shot himself down at Unity. Godot means to be as cross-platform as possible. It's focused on rendering in Vulkan (tho with GLES fallback for mobiles that need it) and uses MoltenVK on the Mac and iOS.