Denuvo is not a problem actually. It's only a problem if you want to release a Mac port on day one with the Windows version. Otherwise by the time the Mac version is out many developers have already removed Denuvo. It was removed from Metro Exodus only a year after its release and exclusivity on Epic.This year the Mac and Linux version arrived. Borderlands 3 for Mac was released one month after the Windows port on Epic and didn't have Denuvo. Shadow of the Tomb Raider for Windows still has Denuvo but the Mac/Linux ports don't.
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Future for Mac games in M1 era
- Thread starter cocoua
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Denuvo is not a problem actually. It's only a problem if you want to release a Mac port on day one with the Windows version. Otherwise by the time the Mac version is out many developers have already removed Denuvo. It was removed from Metro Exodus only a year after its release and exclusivity on Epic.This year the Mac and Linux version arrived. Borderlands 3 for Mac was released one month after the Windows port on Epic and didn't have Denuvo. Shadow of the Tomb Raider for Windows still has Denuvo but the Mac/Linux ports don't.
Jebus, neither major feature is supported? Hope that changes soon as it is like the whole reason to use UE5, lol.
@leman the video author seems to think Lumen isn't supported due to lack of hardware ray tracing, but the default mode of Lumen doesn't use it (it is software based) which Metal supports just fine, so what gives?
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I'm not too hopeful if nanite relies on on mesh shaders. Mesh shaders are not compatible with the design of Apple GPUs.
In a way don't mesh shaders replicate what TBDR does natively? Plus I still don't understand why Lumen doesn't work.
I wonder how much of the relationships between the companies (Epic/Apple) at the engineering side are hurting due to the trial , I can imagine the amount of work that goes on between them when developing a complex game engine like this , i guess because the size of epic , its probably is hurting sadly , unlike lets say MS , where the office team is delivering M1 native apps on day 1 , while MS surface team is doing smear campaign ads on national TV.
I would hope for both companies and their customers that the money/business feud will stay just that and wont get in the way of UE5 development !
by the way is the editor runs natively on M1 ? it would be a first no for the engine no ? i recall both unity and UE are running via Rosseta theses days.
I would hope for both companies and their customers that the money/business feud will stay just that and wont get in the way of UE5 development !
by the way is the editor runs natively on M1 ? it would be a first no for the engine no ? i recall both unity and UE are running via Rosseta theses days.
Doesn’t that just prove my point though? As long as a company uses Denuvo they can’t release a Mac port. The Mac ports are only possible without the inclusion of Denuvo.
Nintendo has killer 1st party titles, and the switch sells gangbusters. Sony has financial leverage to pay for exclusives.
And both have far, far more leverage in gaming.
Apple can’t pay for exclusives? On what planet does Sony have more financial clout than Apple to pay for exclusive games?
Why do people miss the point?
It doesn't matter if M1 supports gaming or not, unless the game companies want to write a game for the platform all this is moot.
The real issue is, NONE OF THEM CARE TO.
NONE OF THEM.
If you bought an M1 Mac for gaming, you bought the wrong computer.
It doesn't matter if M1 supports gaming or not, unless the game companies want to write a game for the platform all this is moot.
The real issue is, NONE OF THEM CARE TO.
NONE OF THEM.
If you bought an M1 Mac for gaming, you bought the wrong computer.
Yes but you wrote "this blocks the Gaming publishers from porting the game to Mac or Linux, even if they wanted to". While initially true my point was that Denuvo itself doesn't block any company from porting their games to Mac. If they really wanted they can choose to not include Denuvo like Gearbox did with BL3 or remove it after only a year and bring their games to Mac/Linux like 4A did with Metro Exodus. They always have a choice.
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But can you play Pong on it? If not a native version, than at least trough an emulator...
Oh, I forgot, you can always trough a web browser.
They could theoretically, but they’re far more into iOS gaming. I think they’d play up that angle more.
Also, let’s be real. Gamers would just skip any Mac-exclusive games. Publishers would likely pass on any deal Apple offered.
Fair enough.
This was the issue with x86 Macs too.
The likely reason that these features are not supported on Metal is simply because Epic didn't care to implement them. In a way, it's kind of understandable. They seem to target high-end PC hardware and to optimize them for Apple Silicon is probably a significant effort and Epic didn't feel like committing to it for a sake of a niche platform (especially given the fact that Apple an Epic are not friends these days).
I think the important thing is that UE5 does run on a Mac, even if some more exiting features are missing, which should simplify cross-platform games. Who knows, maybe some time down the road when Apple's transition is doing good progress these features can be brought to Mac as well.
No, they don't have anything to do with each other. Mesh Shaders are a bit problematic for Apple since TBDR doesn't rally work with the basic premise of Mesh Shaders, but there might be some ways around. Frankly, for the more common usages of mesh shaders (LOD, primitive processing) can be efficiently done in Metal today using compute shaders and GPU-driven pipelines.
There are plenty of high-impact companies that provide high-quality Mac versions of their games (and a good chunk of indie developers who do the same). Sure, the situation could be better, but I think it's a bit odd to claim that there are no Mac games when my Steam library is filled with games such as Total War series, Civilization, Paradox simulation games etc.
@diamond.g By the way, AMD has confirmed that their Super Resolution toolkit will be open sourced under the MIT license. It shouldn't be too difficult to port it to Metal, maybe even improving efficiency so that it can run better on Apple's GPUs (tile shaders etc.)
Yeah I saw that yesterday. I hope Apple does support it as it is a free way to scale ATV games to 4k from 1080p and keep performance up. We will see how it does on IQ on the 22nd.
Speaking of marketshare bs, I know it’s popular to target high-end PC hardware, but I wonder just how many people have access to actual high-end hardware anymore. I’d be willing to bet within a few years “High-end PC hardware will be equal in marketshare to m-series Macs. (And I mean xx70-Nvidia and x900-AMD gpus and whatever cpus.)
Most PCs in my (albeit anecdotal) experience tend towards mid-to-low end.
That's very true, but shiny features tend to sell stuff. Paradoxically, people will more eagerly buy a game that supports X even if their hardware will never support X simply because everyone is talking about how cool X is.
I think there are a lot of effects that can probably be more efficiently implemented on Apple Silicon (because using things like tile shaders might save you a lot of memory bandwidth as well as setup overhead), but would require relatively beefy PC hardware to run with acceptable performance. For instance, I don't really know how EU5 Lumen works on the technical level. If it indeed heavily relies on ray tracing, then skipping support on M1 makes sense, as M1 is probably simply not fast enough to do these things in real time. But if it's a merely a more advanced deferred shading method that utilizes multiple lights and screen space effects, M1 could probably do it quite efficiently.
For now, I guess I am glad that we at least got UE5 support on Metal. There were some genuine concerns that Epic might drop it entirely.
I'm sorry, but unless the game was built from the ground up for the Mac at the same time any PC version is being built, it's a port at best and usually well behind the PC release.
The last game that fit that bill was WoW and even Blizzard has moved their Mac programmer to the PC side of things.
Things aren't looking up. There still aren't any developers developing directly for the Mac platform from the outset (excluding mobile titles). Until that mindset changes, all you will ever have is weak ports well after the fact.
Steam may be full of games... but they're really old games. It's like saying a movie that was done in 1990 is a new movie because you can watch it on a Mac. It may be new to the Mac, but it's ancient history on a PC.
This is at true. There are not many studios that release simultaneously for Windows and Mac and many popular games are afterthought ports that come with a significant delay and often lower quality. The absolutely insane thing is that better planning from the start would radically simplify the multi platform porting effort. Studios are literally throwing money away hiring porting companies that often have to hack code that was not meant to be hacked and redo things over and over again. I don’t know whether it’s because studios lack competent software architects or because everyone is stressed and frustrated, or maybe because nobody cares, but I certainly hope that the situation will improve v
Is it really that easy to develope a game/game engine that uses Metal and DX12 at the same time? From what you have said before they are pretty different in how they do things, which seems like it would increase the development time (which for indie games may be doable, but shareholders don’t like big games being delayed). It is a shame no one releases their numbers for Mac sales vs PC sales.
It is part of the reason why we will probably see more iOS conversions (trying to not call them ports) to macOS than straight PC titles being moved over.
If you plan ahead a little bit and use proper abstractions in your engine, yes, it's that easy. And you can have a lot of control on how much time you want to spend where. Besides, you can also use Vulkan and you get the Metal conversion for "free" via MoltenVK.
Anyway, the difficulty is not supporting multiple API backends, but platform-specific behavior and lack of simultaneous testing. When designing your core application structure you need to make sure that it will work well on each platform you intend to support eventually, or you might be in a for a big surprise later on. To give you a real-world example: Civilization VI is a game that was originally developed for Windows, with Mac porting of the final product being delegated to Aspyr. The details of the story are unclear, but it appress like some very intelligent person at Firaxis has designed the entire random number generation pipeline around Windows-specific behavior (I don't even know how they managed to do it). The effect was that the random number chains were different between Windows and Mac versions, which in itself sounds like it is not a problem, except when we come to multiplayer. You see, games like to only exchange the minimal necessary information to minimize potentially slow network transfers, so what often does is simulate much of the state and only send information about the other player's moves. That's exactly what Civ VI did — they run simulations on each player's machine, periodically checking whether the game state is still comparable across all machines and triggering an annoying full-state resync if the state has sufficiently diverged. This basically made cross-platform multiplayer impossible. And it took Aspyr over a year to fix this if I remember correctly. A lot of time and very frustrating work that could have been avoided completely if the system was properly designed in the first place.
And such examples are plenty.