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Future for Mac games in M1 era
- Thread starter cocoua
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Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Enjoy your suspension.
Not that I care, but what happened here? Suspended for posting nonsense? He'll be back with a new account anyway.
That being said, I wonder what made GTA IV (he mentioned that) so popular. GTA V sure, but IV?!?
Also, wonder how popular cloud gaming services will become. With things moving to the cloud so quickly, it could make this discussion pointless.
That was what I gathered from how nvidia has described the hardware. As far as I am aware their solution is really good at crunching incoherent rays whereas AMD’s isn’t. Which would align with what you have seen/found.
I know, I just imagined “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” as something from a cheesy action movie and had to post it.
So what would be interesting is seeing what has changed from a 2080ti RT core to the 3080 RT core as both cards have the same amount of cores, yet the 3080 performs better in a fully path traced game (Quake2 RTX). Nvidia claimed twice as many intersections processed compared to the old core yet Q2RTX isn’t twice as fast on the new hardware.
https://www.hardwaretimes.com/nvidi...gen-rt-cores-3rd-gen-tensor-cores-and-rtx-io/ See nvidia marketing slides, also note PC Watch made the diagram of both architectures not sure where they got the info from though.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-review?page=6 Scroll to Q2RTX section.
I wonder if he's related to this member or the same person judging by their profile pictures and comments. He also argued once that M1 sucks because it can't run many popular Windows games that aren't even ported and still spreads his dislike for Macs.
So @Homy do you track the steam info for Metro Exodus for Mac? I wonder if they are going to try adding the RT option that came with the game originally or if they are going to just enable the Enhanced Edition (where RT is required) instead. I guess I am really curious to see if Apple pulled a nvidia and are allowing RTRT on M1 even though it has no acceleration hardware.
You could use RT on M1 since it was released. Metal supports RT on all Macs and iOS devices since last year. I am ashamed to admit that I never got to playing around with it, but I will definitely try some simpler things this summer. It is entirely possible that by combining raytracing with tile shading Apple can avoid much of the usual performance problems with ray tracing…
Metal has full RT support, so if you wanted to write a RT-based game running on M1 or Intel Macs with whatever GPU you can do it. I am not sure though that you’d get satisfactory performance
Yes.
If I read AMDs documentation correctly, RT support in RDNA2 involves a small number of BVH intersection instructions. Seems to me like it wouldn’t be too hard to add support for these instructions in the Metal driver. Whether AMD (or Apple) bothered to do so for Navi 2, no idea. The proper way to find out would be to run an RT demo on an external Navi 2 GPU and see if one gets a decent performance boost.
I am reasonably certain AMD doesn‘t write drivers for Apple sold AMD GPU’s. It would be interesting to see if the 6000 series driver update Apple supplies does support the ray accelerator.
For the M1 it would be cool to see what level of performance, using software shaders, is possible to get a baseline for when (if) they add hardware support in the M2.
Yeah, who writes the GPU drivers is something people have been arguing about for a while
Personally, I’m quite certain that’s is a cooperative effort but that the main bulk of work is done by AMD. They are the ones with the code and the in-depth knowledge after all. Im watching the WWDC videos and it seems that the Metal debugger is able to do what looks like real-time RT on a scene with fairly detailed geometry. I’m sure that this is an M1 MBP.
It could very well be a cooperative effort, but it is curious that boot camp users cannot get GPU drivers from AMD, they have to come from Apple.Yeah, who writes the GPU drivers is something people have been arguing about for a while
Im watching the WWDC videos and it seems that the Metal debugger is able to do what looks like real-time RT on a scene with fairly detailed geometry. I’m sure that this is an M1 MBP.
That is good news, now someone just has to rewrite Q2RT for Metal and we can get a good comparison going…
Not sure where to look. My only source has been Steamdb. Here are all the files and no mention of ray tracing or "enhanced". Here is the history log and not much has happened. 4A stated that the enhanced edition won't be available for Mac. Don't know if it's gong to change.
I'm assuming the price for a major publisher would be in the billions (Bethesda sold to MS for 7.5 Billion), what return on that investment would apple really see? My personal opinion is they'd probably lose money on that investment, especially if they made all new releases exclusives to their platform, much like what MS is doing with Bethesda.
Again, the gaming category for the Mac (in my opinion) is just a small niche, the majority of Mac buyers are not game players. Anyone who wants to play games, will either get a console or a PC.
If they attach it to Apple Arcade and make it a GamePass competitor? Maybe throw some cloud gaming in to get folks on Windows/Android. I don't think it should be any more of a loss than AppleTV+...
I think apple arcade is not and will not be a gamepass competitor, two different animals, each focusing on a different market.
Gaming on the Mac has not been a priority for apple, and its not been a very successful or alluring market for publishers, and moving to an ARM chip isn't going to change that imo. Metal was released 7 years ago, and yet has not seen the level of traction for games. Small, niche market, using a propriety APIs, its just not the recipe for success.
I think you should see gaming as a destination activity. People buy machines to play games these days whether that’s Playstations, Nintendo Switches or PCs. What you’re basically saying is the Mac doesn’t have the titles to be a major destination for gaming, and that’s right. But by making it a major destination for gaming they could significantly grow their hardware market share. There are quite a few people out there who would buy an iMac or a Mac Mini if it meant also getting access to a library of exclusive high-quality games content.
Buying a publisher or a series of well-regarded single developers could be a great first step.
Again, the Mac has a marketshare of (around) 10%, and of that percentage, only a subset is wanting to play games. The numbers are not there for publishers to go all in on the Mac. Doesn't matter what term you use, gaming machine, destination device. The bottom line is that - will companies be willing to spend money to develop games for the platform? Right now the numbers speak for themselves and that answer is no.
We're also forgetting one major thing - streaming, with this service just in its infancy, there is actually less reason for publishers to support a new small niche platform, why spend more money developing a game on a niche platform when streaming will work even better, i.e., less support will be needed.
For Microsoft, buying Bethesda, it made a lot of sense, huge catalog of top tier games, a dedicated following of Bethesda's game franchises, and the ability to make MS' gamepass such a compelling offering, it will cause some people to forego the PS5 (which is what I did). So they'll be making and generating money, both explicitly and implicitly from that sale. For Apple, the enticement is not there, people (in my opinion) will not be buying a Mac just so they can play games and while ubisoft has a nice game catalog, I don't think its sufficient to alter people's opinions that Mac is not a gaming machine.
Finally, Apple has yet to roll out a decent GPU for gaming, yes the M1's GPU is nice, it can play tomb raider, but it has to be at the lowest setting. If Apple is intent on making Macs a serious gaming machine, then they're going to need to rollout GPUs that are on par with the RTX 30 series GPUs and as of today that's not the case
Let me just this thought as well. iOS gaming is hugely popular and has generated a lot of revenue for Apple, no question.
With the highly competitive and dare I say very crowded market for gaming (console + PC), what is the prospect of apple making a lot of money - especially when the cost of entering that market will be staggeringly high? Why spend billions when it may only generate millions
I don’t agree. You don’t have to go where the market is, you can make your own market. This would be a very Apple thing to do, and i think it would be a mistake to focus on providing a high-end GPU, I don’t think it is necessary for a compelling games platform.
As long as you would make these new game franchises run on a base spec M1 Mac Mini, you are providing a lot of incentive to buy that hardware, as long as the game franchises are good. But I think you have to look out of the box, and take a long view of the market.
As long as you would make these new game franchises run on a base spec M1 Mac Mini, you are providing a lot of incentive to buy that hardware, as long as the game franchises are good. But I think you have to look out of the box, and take a long view of the market.
Was just trying out Xcloud Gaming on my Mac. Obviously still beta and definitely not Xbox Series X performance but it's definitely playable and impressive nonetheless. As cloud gaming continues to evolve and improve, it really won't matter what system you game on (aside from exclusive titles).
