Aspyr Will Stop Selling 32-Bit Mac Games After Today

[marksatt]

Because it's their business model. If they wouldn't adapt, they would perish. But if you look at first-party conversions, you will notice that Mac support has quite dwindled. While in the OpenGL days it was relatively easy and feasible for developers like Flying Wild Hog (Shadow Warrior) or 4A Games (Metro series) to support OS X, they all dropped the Mac like a hot potato when Apple went proprietary. Frontier Development (Elite Dangerous) also explicitly mentioned Metal as reason for ending Mac support.

That period was right at the end of the 360/PS3 console generation where developers were still limiting themselves to long supported graphics feature-sets to maximise their potential audience, while Apple's hardware and software had long moved beyond the capabilities of the consoles. Basically all the games were running on engines that were a year or two behind the cutting edge so they were easier to port.

Frontier hit the wall with the Elite Dangerous: Horizon's expansion because Apple didn't support OpenGL compute shaders and decided that trying to use OpenCL (which Apple recommended & Feral used in Shadow of Mordor & Alien Isolation) was too much work for the expected return. The longer-term problem was that Metal didn't come quickly enough for them and when it did arrive, wasn't sufficiently robust or feature-complete to make updating the game cost-effective. They were probably right given what I've been told by former colleagues.

 

[JordanNZ]

While I also think this is a vast overstatement, I've had chance to revise my opinion on MoltenVK. It will need a lot of work to be able to support a modern engine like UE4 (it lacks a lot of functionality I've implemented in UE4's MetalRHI backend) but as and when that work is done it should be pretty good. The shader translation component especially has come along very nicely over the last year or so. Provided the implementation is fleshed out and gets used in anger and optimised it should eventually be pretty close or perhaps even as good as a native Vulkan driver would be, with the notable exceptions of Geometry & Tessellation support which will remain problematic. This of course assumes that Apple keep updating Metal in-line with Vulkan.

Aren’t the shader translation and MoltenVK two separate projects?

The problem is right NOW MoltenVK sucks. The performance and stability of titles using it range from average (Dota2) to absolutely horrible (Elder scrolls online).

And that’s compared to OpenGL...

 

[marksatt]

Aren’t the shader translation and MoltenVK two separate projects?

The problem is right NOW MoltenVK sucks. The performance and stability of titles using it range from average (Dota2) to absolutely horrible (Elder scrolls online).

And that’s compared to OpenGL...

SPIRV-Cross & MoltenVK are technically separate projects but they naturally feed into one another - you can't implement MoltenVK without SPIRV-Cross and there'd be little point in creating SPIRV-Cross without MoltenVK...

And, yes I can imagine that anyone trying to use MoltenVK in anger right now is going to find lots of rough edges. It hardly surprises me that it works better for older and/or less demanding title like DOTA2 than something more modern in ESO. Long term I'd expect it to improve but much like how it took time for MetalRHI in UE4 to go from supporting ES3 on iOS, to SM4 on macOS, to SM5 on macOS & iOS it won't happen overnight.

I'd expect Apple's OpenGL stack to be even worse, if it could indeed support these titles, which I would not take as a given.

 

[JordanNZ]

SPIRV-Cross & MoltenVK are technically separate projects but they naturally feed into one another - you can't implement MoltenVK without SPIRV-Cross and there'd be little point in creating SPIRV-Cross without MoltenVK...

And, yes I can imagine that anyone trying to use MoltenVK in anger right now is going to find lots of rough edges. It hardly surprises me that it works better for older and/or less demanding title like DOTA2 than something more modern in ESO. Long term I'd expect it to improve but much like how it took time for MetalRHI in UE4 to go from supporting ES3 on iOS, to SM4 on macOS, to SM5 on macOS & iOS it won't happen overnight.

I'd expect Apple's OpenGL stack to be even worse, if it could indeed support these titles, which I would not take as a given.

OpenGL is still supported on Dota2, and is faster than MoltenVK in some circumstances, and slower in others (depending on graphics card and resolution).

ESO on the other hand was forced off of OpenGL because they re-wrote their particle system to use compute shaders. They went with Vulkan because they were porting the game to Stadia. Performance went down to 25%-40% of OpenGL on macOS after this change, plenty of people were counting the seconds per frame. They're currently in the process of working with Apple to make use of Metal directly after the user backlash.

When it comes to simple engines, I'm sure MoltenVK is a great cross platform solution.

 

[fairuz]

I'm not convinced this mythical time existed.

I was a kid with lots of time to waste on games, and I found plenty to play on Mac OS X.

 

[MacsRgr8]

I know it's hard to believe in these days, but when Apple adopted OpenGL back in MacOS 9, they actually were up-to-date, and they managed to include new versions in a timely fashion in the early days of Mac OS X, with often just a few months between the new OpenGL specifications and their implementation. They began to fall behind around the release of Leopard, when the gap between updates of the specifications and the implementation in OS X began to grow.

And there in fact was a (very brief) window in time when Apple adopted multithreaded OpenGL and a bunch of games actually performed faster under OS X than under Windows.


Because it's their business model. If they wouldn't adapt, they would perish. But if you look at first-party conversions, you will notice that Mac support has quite dwindled. While in the OpenGL days it was relatively easy and feasible for developers like Flying Wild Hog (Shadow Warrior) or 4A Games (Metro series) to support OS X, they all dropped the Mac like a hot potato when Apple went proprietary. Frontier Development (Elite Dangerous) also explicitly mentioned Metal as reason for ending Mac support.

IIRC OpenGL 1.0 for Mac was introduced somewhere in 1998/9 as an add-on for Mac OS 8.1 (7.5.3 and higher..?) during the same time when Steve claimed "at Apple, we love gaming".

At the time even the most powerful Mac (Power Mac G3 Blue and white) had poor graphics power (ATi Rage.. whatever) and the just-introduced iMac had even worse... (even though many game titles were introduced for Mac OS, the iMac back in those days could hardly run them at all).

During an Apple event, when a Mac OS X preview was demoed, John Carmack of Id Software tried to show-off Quake III running on this early beta of Mac OS X, of course, using OpenGL. The fact that this had stage-time gave the impression Apple was "serious" about gaming and that development and support of OpenGL in Mac OS X was a given.
One slight problem was.... Quake III wouldn't load during the live on-stage demo....

A few years on, Mac OS X became the standard but OpenGL support was already fading. OpenGL itself was getting updated frequently and on Windows (and Linux) the newer versions were made available fast.
On Mac OS X...? not so.
Added to that, all Macs shipped with below-par graphics cards. Even the most expensive Power Macs had mediocre graphics cards installed, and only thanks to after market expensive upgrades could you install a pretty good card.

Apple got to supporting OpenGL till version 4.1 (released back in July 2010!!) when the Windows version got all the way to version 4.6 (July 2017).
Why Apple never supported a newer version of OpenGL is beyond me.... that by itself, to me, states that Apple never, never was or is "serious" about gaming. Actions speak louder than words.

Then, Metal on macOS... the fact that Metal from iOS came to macOS is logical. Many iOS developers could start developing for macOS easier, and with the introduction of Project Catalyst this will get more iOS games onto macOS.

But by the elimination of Vulkan (why is it not possible to add this to Metal on macOS?) Apple is rather pushing game developers. Either port your iOS game to macOS, re-write OpenGL to Metal or leave macOS.

The developers of X-Plane (the only "game" ahum.. "sim") which I play a-lot are luckily implementing Metal support gradually on X-Plane 11 (and full Metal support on X-Plane 12) but Vulkan gets most priority, while many X-Plane "simmers" are running on macOS. It tells me that forcing Metal on macOS, and not adding support for Vulkan is a PITA for these developers.

TL;DR:
Apple never "serious" about gaming, why?
• Below-par graphics hardware on Macs
• Always Lagging and out-dated support for OpenGL
• Metal iOS -> macOS. Shows focus on iOS.
• No Vulkan -> forcing Metal on macOS-developers -> many leave macOS platform

 

[JordanNZ]

The developers of X-Plane (the only "game" ahum.. "sim") which I play a-lot are luckily implementing Metal support gradually on X-Plane 11 (and full Metal support on X-Plane 12) but Vulkan gets most priority, while many X-Plane "simmers" are running on macOS. It tells me that forcing Metal on macOS, and not adding support for Vulkan is a PITA for these developers.

TL;DR:
Apple never "serious" about gaming, why?
• Below-par graphics hardware on Macs
• Always Lagging and out-dated support for OpenGL
• Metal iOS -> macOS. Shows focus on iOS.
• No Vulkan -> forcing Metal on macOS-developers -> many leave macOS platform

Metal for X-Plane is slightly further along than Vulkan... And is getting just as much love. It's hardly being neglected.
And although metal first appeared on iOS, having it on macOS doesn't mean it's iOS focused. It's just another API.

Vulkan isn't making a huge splash in the PC space either. Most games are using DirectX.

 

[MacsRgr8]

I am aware that X-Plane development is doing Vulkan and Metal simultaneously, but reading most of the posts by Ben Supnik, it seems Vulkan has a slightly higher priority than Metal, especially this bit:

• Flying with Vulkan on AMD, NVidia, and Intel drivers.

https://developer.x-plane.com/2019/04/vulkan-and-metal-it-runs/

And read this:

• On desktop, Windows is our majority platform – last I checked we were at least 65% Windows, and this number has been growing. Windows is also the most heavily used OS where a user can build a true “gaming” machine (that is, a machine that uses a lot of watts to generate a lot of compute power), so having good graphics on Windows really matters.
• We are not dropping OS X – it’s still a significant platform, and as long as people want to fly X-Plane on OS X, we’ll let them. Mac hardware doesn’t really qualify as gaming hardware – every current Mac is a power-constrained by the standards of core gamers, but the machines are also not slow either – Apple makes viable machines for flight simulation.

https://developer.x-plane.com/2015/06/heavy-metal-2/

X-Plane will be one of those games which takes the most advantage of Vulkan & Metal due to the multi-core options that OpenGL did not give, which a heavy game like X-Plane really needs.
Even on the Windows-side of things the fastest CPU with nVidia 2080 Ti grfx can not handle the highest settings. Especially in VR.

IIRC Ben uses a Mac himself, so luckily there is some love here!

 

[JordanNZ]

I am aware that X-Plane development is doing Vulkan and Metal simultaneously, but reading most of the posts by Ben Supnik, it seems Vulkan has a slightly higher priority than Metal, especially this bit:

• Flying with Vulkan on AMD, NVidia, and Intel drivers.

https://developer.x-plane.com/2019/04/vulkan-and-metal-it-runs/

And read this:

• On desktop, Windows is our majority platform – last I checked we were at least 65% Windows, and this number has been growing. Windows is also the most heavily used OS where a user can build a true “gaming” machine (that is, a machine that uses a lot of watts to generate a lot of compute power), so having good graphics on Windows really matters.
• We are not dropping OS X – it’s still a significant platform, and as long as people want to fly X-Plane on OS X, we’ll let them. Mac hardware doesn’t really qualify as gaming hardware – every current Mac is a power-constrained by the standards of core gamers, but the machines are also not slow either – Apple makes viable machines for flight simulation.

https://developer.x-plane.com/2015/06/heavy-metal-2/

Looking over his posts, flying on metal was already a thing. Ben's doing the Metal work, and someone else is doing the Vulkan side.
"Since my last Vulkan update, we now have the full sim running natively with Vulkan and Metal!"

And of course windows is their biggest platform, but the growth has stopped.
As of the latest blog post, windows is at 64% and Mac 35% (Linux just over 1%).

 

[Janichsan]

…you have to use the APIs in anger…

Interesting phrase.

 

[mudflap]

I picked the right time to leave Macs behind for good. All my favorite games to play are older titles. I love playing Empire at War and the Jedi Outcast games, and I will happily continue to do so and more on my Surface. I’d be pissed right now if I still used a MacBook.

I realized that I love the iPad and the iPhone is a very convenient device for me, but I can’t stand Macs, and I tried to like them several times too. I think it’s because I’m willing to put up with some walled garden aspects for tablets or phones, but for computers I draw the line. This right here is a perfect example as to why.

I still love Jedi Outcast! I love Macs, I abhor Windows, but I dual boot my iMac so I can play all of my games there. I never purchase graphics-heavy games for Mac because usually they're ported and they're always slower on MacOS than Windows. Even an old game like Left 4 Dead 2 is almost unplayable in 4K on MacOS, but on the exact same machine with Boot Camp it's great.

 

[marksatt]

Interesting phrase.

Just some vernacular. The real point is that you need to be using an API to ship something to really get to grips with it and find all the defects. Reading documentation and building toy projects is not sufficient.

 

[kingtj]

One game I still play all the time on my Mac is Starcraft II, and it pops up a warning that it's 32-bit and will lose support in the next OS X release. So I guess Blizzard needs to look at rewriting some of its game titles, too.

I understand why game devs for OS X would tend NOT to want to put in the effort to do many conversions on anything that's not a recent release. I bet the number of sales for native Mac games is VERY tiny these days. Most gamers I know just bought a console or a dedicated gaming PC, even if they use a Mac for everything else. That's unfortunate, but a reality Apple pushed all of them towards with the refusal to put fast enough 3D graphics chipsets in the majority of its computers.

Good to hear a game developer taking the lead on this. Pretty much the only remaining 32-bit apps on my Mac are Adobe installers and games.

 

[Project Alice]

I play most of those games either on one of my PowerPC macs, or my Windows PCs (or bootcamp). As annoying as this is, the games will still be playable. I guarantee every game on this list will run under WINE, and probably even virtualbox with Windows XP or something.
Hell I play Jedi Outcast and Academy all the time (based on the quake ID 3 engine btw) on very old hardware. My old Sawtooth G4 works pretty well for those.

 

[Ritsuka]

One game I still play all the time on my Mac is Starcraft II, and it pops up a warning that it's 32-bit and will lose support in the next OS X release. So I guess Blizzard needs to look at rewriting some of its game titles, too.

I understand why game devs for OS X would tend NOT to want to put in the effort to do many conversions on anything that's not a recent release. I bet the number of sales for native Mac games is VERY tiny these days. Most gamers I know just bought a console or a dedicated gaming PC, even if they use a Mac for everything else. That's unfortunate, but a reality Apple pushed all of them towards with the refusal to put fast enough 3D graphics chipsets in the majority of its computers.

StarCraft II is already 64bit, for a simple reason: it supports Metal, and Metal can be only used in a 64bit app.
But Blizzard launcher or whatever could still be 32bit.

 

[Tech198]

I find it hard to believe it would be that hard to compile it as a 64bit binary. I wonder what library they're using that's causing it to be a deal breaker, surely every once in a while they get a few sales

If it was that easy,,, all windows developers would be doing the same.... instead of coding new 64-bit versions.

Must be different,, as per memory limitations anyway, or 32- and 64-bit can't exist in the same ?? *shrugs*

(i.e one app, but code is skipped if its running on 32 bit machine.)

Since you get more performance for 64-bit anyway, why limit ?

 

[kingtj]

StarCraft II is already 64bit, for a simple reason: it supports Metal, and Metal can be only used in a 64bit app.
But Blizzard launcher or whatever could still be 32bit.

Hmm.... good to know. Yeah, I bet it's the Battle.NET launcher, then, that it's complaining about.

 

[blindpcguy]

defiantly sad Mac is loosing some true classics the Jedi knight games in particular at least their updating the rotors sims 2 super collection and such but still a sad day still kind of stupid for apple to drop support when the processors in our Macs still will support 32 bit code but oh well that's apple for ya and ubuntu on the linux world is slowly planning a similar move I wonder if windows will ever take this route