I'm hoping Apple Silicon will be a good contender for a gaming computer.
Not only that, I think Apple Silicon and an SDK that is friendlier to game developers would make the Mac a
superior gaming platform.
Apple just doesn’t seem particularly interested in a respectable library for the Mac of the most current and popular games available on the major consoles and PC.
Their strained relationship with Nvidia, their lack of OS support for code that was written to run on the graphics hardware of the three major consoles and on the PC/PC graphics cards, and their uncompromising stance on the use of the Metal API
only — even eschewing support for the “MoltenVK graphics and compute API” makes Apple come off as disdainful of the indie and AAA game developers. And the results are clear.
Apple used to have “Software Evangelists,” one of whom would approach/meet with game developers and essentially ask, “What do you need from us? How can we help? What difficulties do you face coding games to run on the Mac, and what changes to the platform would make your jobs easier? Would you like a team of Apple engineers to fly out to your studios and work directly with your programmers to get around any hurdles you may face writing for the Mac? Can we offer training? Need any money?”
So it wasn’t always the way it is now.
Bungie’s original Halo was designed to come out on the Mac first and a near-complete version was first demonstrated to the world by Steve Jobs on stage at MacWorld in 1999. It caused waves in the press because the gameplay and graphics represented a paradigm shift in the gaming industry at the time.
Bill Gates was also impressed by the demo and quickly bought Bungie to get his hands on Halo — and promptly cancelled all versions of Halo for all other platforms and made it exclusive to the Xbox.
(This wasn’t Apple’s fault, but the point remains that this indie game studio, Bungie, chose to develop “Halo: Combat Evolved” for the Mac
first — because it was such a powerful and attractive and exciting platform to write for at that time.)
ADDENDUM: Apple does have its own subscription gaming service, Apple Arcade, where almost every game must work across all Apple devices: iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac — even iPod touch. The only issue here pertaining to the Mac is that games made to work on all Apple devices don’t get to stray in terms of compatibility with iOS to avail themselves of the more power and features of the Mac/macOS. Using Apple Arcade, it’s more the case that you’re playing an iOS game on a Mac.
Still, outside of the Apple Arcade Ecosystem, game developers are free to write games titles specifically for the Mac and macOS and all the additional power and versatility the Mac platform affords — they just aren’t.
The recent trend in gaming — resolution scaling — is all the rage with AMD‘s FSR upscaling method along with Nvidia’s DLSS and Intel’s XeSS all duking it out, while Apple adds to the melee with its own proprietary MetalFX.
It was interesting to read that Apple nearly included
hardware-accelerated ray tracing in its latest generation of Silicon SIPs — by adding hundreds of tensor cores to Apple Silicon I would assume. Time will tell.
blurbusters.com
