jblagden
macrumors 65816
Well, if you write games in OpenGL, they can be compiled for Mac and Linux. Or if you wait for Vulkan, you can compile your games for all three platforms (assuming Vulkan gets Mac support).
Blizzard's Upcoming Game 'Overwatch' Won't Be Coming to OS X
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MagnusVonMagnum
macrumors 603
Waiting for Vulkan....and waiting...and waiting....and waiting. Meanwhile, DirectX 12 is out. Metal is out. Vulkan...not so much, yet it's supposed to somehow be the API that "rules them all" when it's two years late and a dollar short. In other words, exactly how does Vulkan think it's going to get ANYONE to stand behind it? Linux isn't a major gaming player. Windows and OS X already went with their own solutions. The only hope I see is that DirectX 12 and Metal aren't exactly teaming with game support yet either (market is too small to bother). But unless Vulkan is MAJORLY backwards compatible with older graphics cards, it won't get a lot of support soon either. At least Metal supports the HD4000 chipset in my 2012 Mac Mini (DirectX 12 does not even if i boot into Windows and that's quite the turn-around from when Windows supported hardware decoding for HD video on the 8600M GT and OS X did not).
OTOH, I'm still waiting to see a single game fitted or retrofitted for Metal on OS X to see if actually does something halfway impressive to begin with. Yosemite slowed down OS X so much graphically, it seems like all Metal did was put it back to Mavericks-level speed. While that makes El Capitan useful to me on my old 2012 Mac Mini, it doesn't exactly impress when Mavericks was just fine and I "know" that El Capitan is inherently SLOWER across the board if not for Metal. I wish Apple would work on optimizing OS X back to its former self where needed. It's really turned into a dog in several areas (conventional hard drives are slower, graphic draws not using Metal are night and day slower in some tests, etc.)
OTOH, I'm still waiting to see a single game fitted or retrofitted for Metal on OS X to see if actually does something halfway impressive to begin with. Yosemite slowed down OS X so much graphically, it seems like all Metal did was put it back to Mavericks-level speed. While that makes El Capitan useful to me on my old 2012 Mac Mini, it doesn't exactly impress when Mavericks was just fine and I "know" that El Capitan is inherently SLOWER across the board if not for Metal. I wish Apple would work on optimizing OS X back to its former self where needed. It's really turned into a dog in several areas (conventional hard drives are slower, graphic draws not using Metal are night and day slower in some tests, etc.)
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SteveW928
macrumors 68000
Yea, at this point it looks like Apple is going to just let OS X fade away and push people towards iOS (the bigger pie-slice, you know, for the bean-counters). I think Apple lost most of the hard-core devs who worked on all that cool audio and graphics core stuff that once made OS X so great for the pros. And, then I won't even get into all the amateur-hour remakes of the apps and stuff.
That said, the grass on the other side of the fence isn't that green either (but at least improving), so at this point, I guess the Mac still makes the most sense. As far as graphics tech, I've been a fan of OpenGL for a long time, so I guess that's the standard, despite M$ attempt to break that. I'm kind of hoping the new Microsoft quits trying to ruin the industry and joins in with the standards a bit more, like they've started doing in the browser realm.
antonis
macrumors 68020
I partially agree with the above. However... Blizzard was indeed a supporter of Mac platform while Activision is not. But what has Apple done to make Activision (or any other publisher for that matter) to look at Macs seriously ? I don't think Activision has any obsession against Apple or something. It is Apple that has to win them over.
MagnusVonMagnum
macrumors 603
I'm not sure how green the grass is here either, though. Apple has a way of choosing to support standards only when it's convenient for them or they're too lazy to roll their own for some reason. Witness Lightning cables. Why is Apple refusing to support the world-wide standard of micro-USB and actually has to furnish adapters for Europe to avoid being fined? Now instead of working with the Vulkan folk to make it a new standard to replace OpenGL, they do their own thing instead and Microsoft keeps doing theirs as well (they have a good reason; to try and stop the one area they OWN (games) from leaching out onto competing systems since their mobile efforts have failed (not that I agree; I bought a Lumia 640 and think it's awesome for only $48. I can't believe people would rather spend $300 for Android or $650+ for an IPhone for a damn smart phone, but then I'd rather put my money in desktop and room-to-room media players networked, etc. instead).
I suppose the problem is pretty much profit. As long as there is more money to be made NOT following standards, people will do their own thing. It's not about what's good for the consumer, after all (at least not to Corporations).
SteveW928
macrumors 68000
Oh gosh, I'm *SO* glad they didn't go micro USB, it's a horribly sucky connector! I've got one on my mouse, and on a few other devices and I hate plugging it in... it just feels like it's ready to break the pins or whatever at any second. But, I do hope they go to USB-C, as that looks like it should be good both mechanically and technically (finally). (I haven't actually tried one yet, but it looks like it should be good.) But, otherwise I somewhat agree about Lightning, especially the rumor about Lightning headphones! Eek!
I don't know a lot about Metal, but at least Apple is kind of going more open sources (i.e.: Swift) in direction, and built on top of Unix, etc. But yea, they are guilty of it sometimes too. Microsoft, on the other hand, has spent most of their career holding back the industry or actually breaking things in a white-knuckled attempt to retain their power (vs actually making superior stuff). We're *finally* starting to break free of the damage M$ did to the Web.
re: profits and corporations - Yea. Apple used to be a bit different in that regard. While they've always been about profits, they used to mostly get those profits by being the best, often making slightly unpopular decisions when it was the right way to push the industry. Yea, sometimes they just did stupid stuff - often for a reason - but stupid none the less (like a single proprietary cable between computer and monitor... form over function), but many times they were good moves. Now, they seem to be pretty much going for profits #1, user-experience..... #2? #5? Who knows?
MagnusVonMagnum
macrumors 603
It's on my Lumia 640 and the only thing I don't like is that it's not reversible (corrected on USB-C). Otherwise, I find the differences quibbling at best.
Getting rid of the headphone port is a really awful idea with no real benefits, but it does do what Apple does best these days and that is create more overpriced dongles.... The word "dongle" may soon become synonymous with Apple at this rate.
And it's also making malware more common to all platforms (they used to go for the easy target in the Microsoft frameworks) and frankly, HTML5 has only made "pop up" style adware that more common and undefeatable (ad blockers seem to do nothing lately on many sites that have their own built into the web page iteslf). You know, the kind that make the background go dark and then a window shows up and sometimes won't go away unless you give them your email address...and your first born. Web pages load 10x slower than they used to with 100x more garbage on them. A 1st Gen iPod Touch used to be able to load web sites. It's such a joke now that even a 4th Gen iPod Touch can't load squat without crashing (not enough memory to buffer that many ads and buttons and it doesn't even support Flash so it's all standards). I remember my web site used to load in a second over DIAL-UP and I had buttons and graphics and all that was needed to present INFORMATION to the viewer. I used to get regular emails praising how fast the site was (not junked up with garbage, hand-coded to only load what matters and I even had frame/non-frame versions with a defeat button and lynx-friendly code (tested to make sure it was usable in a text browser). It didn't take that long to make and it wasn't that difficult. 99% of what is out there is GARBAGE and designed to make fast money for undeserving sites that spread 10 pictures with 2 lines of text out over 10 pages filled with ads all day, every day. WTF has the Web become?
Meanwhile, the regulators and government busy-bodies and other scum are constantly dreaming up news ways to tax, fine, control, regulate and otherwise make a mess of something that could have been great. They want to know everything about you, everything you do, everything you think about (in case they can either make money off you, shake you down or throw you in jail for something) and people are like, "Why should you be concerned if you've got nothing to hide?" What's legal today could be illegal tomorrow or they could just drown you in legal fees (a favorite business practice these days particularly when it comes to so-called "software patents" to crush startups or bleed corporations).
Steve Jobs picked a business man to run Apple instead of another visionary (maybe those are in short supply, but that's the type he needed to keep on Apple on track). Tim Cook is NOTHING like Steve and Jony Ive is best kept under control and limited to finding a way to make something work rather than given full control to ruin a product with innate flatness and buggy interfaces. Scott Forestall got blamed for Maps not being instantly reliable and so they forced out the one guy who knew how to do GUIs at Apple and yet Jony gets no blame for OS X becoming unusable and buggy as hell???? What a load of crap.
MacVidCards
Suspended
There is an even simpler explanation. Apple hasn't bothered in the least to have any real GPU support.
Case in point, their "Flagship" machine, 6,1 Mac Pro is using GPUs first introduced for PCs in (I am NOT making this up) 2011. Multiple generations ago.
So if you want to have your game ready for OSX, do you hire developers who knew these GPUs "back in the day"? You certainly can't write latest & greatest graphics tech for these ancient things. There are some iMacs with newer gen stuff but all of the latest & greatest GPUs have been notably absent. Apple has stopped competing in the horsepower wars.
Since Apple is still, to this day, shipping 2011 GPUs in their 2016 "Flagship", how seriously would you take them for gaming support? Years back Tim said he could do everything he needed on his mobile device. He sees no need for real GPUs so, we see no real GPUs.
Case in point, their "Flagship" machine, 6,1 Mac Pro is using GPUs first introduced for PCs in (I am NOT making this up) 2011. Multiple generations ago.
So if you want to have your game ready for OSX, do you hire developers who knew these GPUs "back in the day"? You certainly can't write latest & greatest graphics tech for these ancient things. There are some iMacs with newer gen stuff but all of the latest & greatest GPUs have been notably absent. Apple has stopped competing in the horsepower wars.
Since Apple is still, to this day, shipping 2011 GPUs in their 2016 "Flagship", how seriously would you take them for gaming support? Years back Tim said he could do everything he needed on his mobile device. He sees no need for real GPUs so, we see no real GPUs.
star-affinity
macrumors 68020
Some nice new features coming to Metal in macOS Sierra. Might make Blizzard change their mind about Overwatch?
What's New in Metal, Part 1
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/604/
What's New in Metal, Part 2
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/605/
What's New in Metal, Part 1
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/604/
What's New in Metal, Part 2
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/605/
MH01
Suspended
Nope. And with the new GPUs coming out this year, Apples offering fall so far behind , I cannot see companies jumping in to support such outdated hardware for little return. Apple has shown more indication that they will move to ARM processors
SteveW928
macrumors 68000
Yes, the non-reversible is kind of a big thing for such a small connector, but it also just doesn't feel good. I'm hoping USB-C is better for that. And, if so, I'd 100% support Apple going to that for everything, but they'll probably keep Lightening in mobile for now.
That's just because they haven't updated it. It was released in 2013, and wasn't really intended to be a gaming machine, so it's not a gaming GPU.
But, point taken... Apple pretty much sucks at keeping up with GPUs for just about any purpose. Gaming has never really been their focus though.
Yea, that's kind of my fear as well. Creatives and power-users just aren't their target market anymore. Their new target is more concerned with what emojis can do in Messages. In a short-term, Wall Street way of thinking, who can blame them? The mobile devices make up most of their profits, with Mac being a iddi-biddy pie slice.
And, I suppose, all the iOS productivity losses aside, a majority of modern computer users would be served just fine with ARM processors. They are getting powerful enough now that they could put them in laptops and maybe even desktops if macOS ran on them.
MH01
Suspended
Bingo. That is my thoughts on the current state also .
As things are not going to improve, yesterday my sonnet echo express 3 and gtx 1070 arrived, need to pick up a power cable today and going to see how this units works in boot camp under my rMBP, Mac mini and Mac Pro, might be the compromise to get decent gaming performance on a Mac via thunderbolt
GeneralChang
macrumors 68000
As applied to Overwatch, I'm not sure that argument carries weight. I was running Overwatch just last night on a Core 2 Quad with a GT 640. All the graphics settings were as low as they'd go, but it ran smoothly. Blizzard is obviously already supporting outdated hardware, so it's probably more to do with not supporting OS X because there just aren't that many Mac gamers to buy the game.
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Ooh, please let us know how that goes. I'm very interested.
Ill say it again. The graphic DRIVERS under Mac OS for ALL video cards are so out of date its no surprise no game developer wants to have their products on them. If you want a gaming computer DO NOT GET A MAC. The ONLY company that will update its video drivers on its own for the Mac is NVIDEA and thats on a limited number of models of Macs. They have what they call "web driver updates" which are updated often.
Apple does NOT supply current video card drivers with Mac OS updates. The most recent NVIDEA (for example) drivers currently in Mac OS 10.11.5 are from way back in April. On my Mac the newest NVIDEA drivers are from 2 weeks ago!
This is why Macs are behind in graphics from gaming from PC's. It all has to do with video card driver updates and woe to all of you who have cards in your Macs from RADEON because they DONT update their drivers for Macs and supply them on the web like NVIDEA does ever. Once they send Apple a driver its a done deal.
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Blizzard has added support for METAL in World of Warcraft Legion. Its so buggy however (because Apple hasn't been bothered to fix nor finalize its API's) that its completely useless and the game releases in 60 days. Its further proof Apple could not care less about Mac OS or gaming. Apple is nearly a 100% iOS shop these days and their lack of care for graphic driver updates only furthers to prove it.
Apple does NOT supply current video card drivers with Mac OS updates. The most recent NVIDEA (for example) drivers currently in Mac OS 10.11.5 are from way back in April. On my Mac the newest NVIDEA drivers are from 2 weeks ago!
This is why Macs are behind in graphics from gaming from PC's. It all has to do with video card driver updates and woe to all of you who have cards in your Macs from RADEON because they DONT update their drivers for Macs and supply them on the web like NVIDEA does ever. Once they send Apple a driver its a done deal.
[doublepost=1467405881][/doublepost]
Blizzard has added support for METAL in World of Warcraft Legion. Its so buggy however (because Apple hasn't been bothered to fix nor finalize its API's) that its completely useless and the game releases in 60 days. Its further proof Apple could not care less about Mac OS or gaming. Apple is nearly a 100% iOS shop these days and their lack of care for graphic driver updates only furthers to prove it.
You mean the world standard of micro-USB that's being replaced by USB-C?
Everything evolves, man.
Source?
Anecdotal? Reports from the WoW forums are claiming equal or better performance using Metal.
The first build to include Metal support had a severe memory leak and subsequent builds had all sorts of problems ranging from weird colours to constant crashing. "Equal or better performance" is a pretty big milestone.
60 days is a long time.
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MagnusVonMagnum
macrumors 603
You mean the world standard of micro-USB that's being replaced by USB-C?
Everything evolves, man.
And yet the "world standard" is still not Lightning and never will be. Enjoy your adapters for airports, etc.
It really depends on the hardware, pre-2013 Macs seem to have a recurring flashing texture issue, while some recent machines (with more powerful GPUs) have lag/stuttering/freeze issues - this to say, while it's improving, it's still very much a work in progress that isn't quite ready for prime time yet.
SteveW928
macrumors 68000
That's the direction I'm headed too. My next machine will probably be a MacBook Pro and TB3 eGPU. Then, I'll ship out extra processing and such to a local Mac and/or cloud-computing (ex: render jobs to Amazon cloud computing or competitors). It hardly pays to have a lot of local hardware laying around these days.
I'm curious how that went for you though. I suppose as long as macOS has the driver support, it would be seamless.
MH01
Suspended
Hey mate
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-mini-2012-2-6-gtx-1070-gaming.1980043/#post-23065693
The main issue is pascal drivers under OS X , fingers crossed they are coming.
The setup though turned my crippled Mac mini in terms of GPU into a performer. And that is under TB1, don't be fooled that you need TB3 to get performance . Get whatever is the right price, mine was based on good price on the sonnet. I'd be looking at the razer core ATM
diamond.g
macrumors G5
Are you hooking the eGPU up to the monitor directly? I have read that you get better performance that way. Having. The video come back through TB slows things down.
MH01
Suspended
The TB cable goes from the mac mini to the Sonnet, and the monitor is plugged into the the GTX 1070.
simonmet
Cancelled
That's all well and good but no way are developers adopting Metal for multi-platform games. I'm guessing the uptake is slow even for iOS-exclusive titles. I'm not even aware of any Metal games on the Mac. Macs are usually lucky to get an average PC port.
For games where there's a Windows version (which, let's face it, is all of them) you're always better off booting into Windows to play the PC version, unless perhaps it's just a very basic arcade or puzzle game where poor optimisation doesn't show and even then developers can make mistakes and the experience can be worse.
Take for example the cool little puzzle game "Mini Metro" which uses vector graphics. For whatever reason (the developer made some excuse) the game won't run any higher than my "looks like" resolution of 1680x1050 in macOS but I can play it at the full rMBP resolution of 2880x1800 in Windows, where consequently it looks much better. For the record, Windows is using display scaling too (150%).
I remember the days when there used to be Mac exclusive games. Games made and optimised for the Mac. Anyone remember Bugdom?
Sad that those days are long gone.
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Ishayu
macrumors regular
These days will never return until Apple stops selling terrible hardware for gaming and cripple them further with proprietary API's that lack essential features found in competing products.
The way Apple is going right now, I'm not expecting that to happen any time soon.