Feral to port games for Apple silicon going forward

[KiPhish]

I was curious to see if Feral Interactive would be porting their existing library to Apple silicon, so I emailed them a couple days ago. Here's the reply:

"Thanks for your email, and apologies for the delay in reply as we asked our team for accurate information.

We do not have access to new Apple hardware before the street date, so have not yet tested any games on the new Macs. Rosetta 2 (included in macOS Big Sur) allows apps developed for older Intel-based Macs to run on the new Apple hardware. We expect our games to play without issue using Rosetta 2, and so there is currently no plan to update them to run natively on non-Intel Macs. If a game has an issue we will of course investigate.

We plan for all new releases to offer native support for both new Apple hardware and older Intel-based Macs. Our goal is to accommodate all Mac gamers whatever the chipset of their Apple computer."

Unfortunately, it seems like they have no current plans to port their existing games to ASi. However, they did mention new releases would be supporting them. I'm unsure about other devlopers/porting houses, but I expect largely the same response. At least we have BG3 confirmed.

 

[NotTooLate]

Make sense , doing such optimizations seems like a big overhead with little to gain , i.e folks are not buying older games usually (most game purchases probably happen in the first few months post release) , new games being optimized is great to hear , maybe , maybe they will optimize their best sellers.

 

[dmccloud]

Any game developer would need access to production hardware before even beginning cross-platform development because of the limitations of the DTK itself. If Rosetta is as good as some have claimed, then a lot of existing software should run on the M1 without needing to be recompiled/rewritten. But with all software (especially games), your mileage might vary depending on how the app was originally coded.

 

[Falhófnir]

When Apple announced Catalina and the 32-bit cut off, game developers sorted through their offerings and updated those they deemed profitable to keep going and discontinued everything else. Probably the same here if/ when Apple start the clock on ending Rosetta (which ironically they might do sooner if too many devs are being over-reliant on it).

 

[thingstoponder]

Does Rosetta work with OpenGL games? I would assume yea but they showed Metal at WWDC

 

[LonestarOne]

Does Rosetta work with OpenGL games? I would assume yea but they showed Metal at WWDC

Apple has deprecated OpenGL, so developers continue to rely on it at their own peril.

 

[tevion5]

Given the iPad Pro impressive GPU performance with well optimised iOS software I’m really eager to see significantly better graphics performance on Mac going forward with Apple Silicon.

Possible the days of shoddy unoptimsied Mac ports of AAA games might be gone now. Everything Apple have built up to with Swift, Metal and Xcode is a nice developer environment.

Similarly it shouldn’t be much more effort for games like Civilization VI to cross the other way from Mac to iPad once the port is done for the former.

We’ve only seen the low tier M1 so far but that’s getting OpenCL results on par with a GTX 1060. Nothing to rave about in 2020 but still not awful for a MacBook Air.

If Apple can scale this up well to higher end MBPs and iMacs well optimised AAA games could be a serious proposition for the first time maybe ever on MacOS since the 90s.

 

[nicho]

Similarly it shouldn’t be much more effort for games like Civilization VI to cross the other way from Mac to iPad once the port is done for the former.

Civ VI is already on iPad and has been for a long time..?

 

[cmaier]

Does Rosetta work with OpenGL games? I would assume yea but they showed Metal at WWDC

Yes, for now it works.

 

[tevion5]

Civ VI is already on iPad and has been for a long time..?

Oh nice I thought I wasn’t.