I am amazed at the number of people who obsess over computer games. I've tried them a few times, but after a few minutes I always felt guilty for wasting time and not doing something more productive. Like reading.
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Mac Gaming to Gain DirectX 12 Support via CrossOver 23
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No not really, it takes money to do and the return is so very little for the majority it's simply not worth it. Sorry but Apple are far too small and change things far too much (ditching 32bit app support), to make it a viable gaming platform.
Hence apps like Crossover.
It sure does make sense for many developers. It only took about 8 months to port a DX12 open world game like ELEX II to Mac with all the bells and whistles and they worked together with Apple engineers, meaning if you approach Apple like this or like 4A, Larian, Hello games, Capcom and more Apple is happy to help you. Look at Piranha Bytes press relase and all their work on the game.
"Piranha Bytes always strives to deliver more complex and enhanced games, and bringing ELEX II to Mac was no exception. ELEX II takes advantage of the Metal shading language to tap into Apple silicon performance. With Metal's Indirect Command Buffer (ICB) approach on Mac, the game also fully embraces GPU driven pipelines. In a little over eight months, a team specializing in GPU and Metal ported the DX12 version of ELEX II to Mac. ELEX II worked closely with Metal engineers to take full advantage of the many powerful features and tools to deliver a truly wonderful game."
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They do it all the time for free. They helped 4A with Metro exodus, Larian with Baldur's Gate 3, Piranha Bytes with ELEX II, Capcom with Resident Evil Village, Hello Games with No Man's Sky... the list goes on.
They also have a compatibility database people should check before buying and if you're willing to put in some effort you can become a BetterTester and eventually get a free license of Crossover for Mac, Linux and Chrome all at once. I did it in about two weeks.
Hey, to each his own. But I don’t see what is inherently more “productive” about reading unless you are reading something related to something you have to get done, in which case it sounds more like ”work” than down time. My wife is in your camp and prefers to read. Games work better for me as a release for “down time”.
Day-to-day responsibilities are hard. I think too many people underestimate the importance of down time, and sometimes even feel guilty about it because they don’t think it’s “productive”. Down time is absolutely worthwhile and no one should feel guilty about any activity that successfully takes their mind off real life for a while, be that reading, playing a sport, playing a game, watching a show/movie, or even just taking a nap if that feels right at the time.
which apps/games do you run? I have 2015 macbook intel but even running games from 1999 makes it loud and hot like an airplane about to take off so I am guessing anything past 2007 is no dice (unless you have some beefy desktop mac)
Its ludicrous to wait a full year to get that $30 discount
The idea is that paying $64 for a 1 year subscription to play games pre-2005 is a bit ludicrous when a better solution is to get another gaming device like Nintendo Switch for $300 or even a hand down PC. Even worse I am not sure where its going with Apple move in M1 chips, will cross over continue to exist? IDK
Its a liesure activitiy like watching a movie or a sport game but you are right, do it more than necessary and they are a huge time sink holes and a waste of life. A lot of games will take 60-80 hours to complete or play competitive and that would amout of 2.4 days of your life time on earth. SO yeah...spend whatever time you have in life where you want
It is an inherent part of how monitors work that above a certain luminosity you aren't going to be able to have saturated colors. If you are seeing PCs do this, I can guess that either, 1) the PC has an inherently brighter monitor with the luminance restrained. Or, 2) You are destroying croma information by oversaturating it. You may like the resulting look, and that's fine for games, but those settings will set you up for trouble for any task where accurate color is important. The Mac interface is doing the right thing by making you understand that you are asking for something non-standard.
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It is because Macs are expensive, and ought to be able to do everything we want. If you have to buy a PC anyway for games, why buy a Mac at all? It is easier to understand one OS then two, even if one of them is a Mac.
How does this work? And does it work for games a generation or two ago? Can we run Steam Windows games via Crossover or do we need to install games separately? I’d really like to try this.
But you get the same problem on Wintel just a few years later.
Even now, Intel is trying to phase out 32 bit - just like Apple did.
It would be nice if they could set up something that would help port titles from DX12/Vulkan to Metal like a smarter compiler.
Yes, I was just thinking of this exactly! Those were the good ol’ days, Mac versions of games even before the Intel Macs.
Now with Microsoft buying Activision-Blizzard, seems like this is gonna be a fat chance in Hell (pun intended).
I’ve seen this thrown around a couple of times here like it’s some kind of silver bullet and it just isn’t. The best known general purpose game engines are probably Unreal, Unity, and CryEngine (inc. Lumberyard derivative). Not sure about Cry (haven’t been interested) but Unreal and Unity support a long list of platforms, including Mac.
- Lots of games don’t use any of the above. They use custom game engines developed “in-house”. Implementing support for additional platforms is not a walk in the park and it is not cheap. You’ll need to make sure the newly supported platform faithfully implements every feature of the engine initially, and in perpetuity (regression testing, etc.) when updates are made.
- Even when a game is using an un-modified general purpose “multi-platform“ engine, devs/publishers won’t automatically choose to release a game on every platform supported by the engine. While the engine goes a long way to provide platform abstraction, there are quirks unique to each platform. That aside, the dev/publisher has to commit resources to testing and updating each platform version of the game for the life of the game separately. Running a full test suite on the Windows version (for example) and “passing” does not mean that is the same outcome on any other platform.
- The cost of customer support for the game is likewise multiplied by some factor for each platform. Even when the same user-facing failure is reported across multiple platforms, the root cause may be different.
I still remember going from 10.4.10 to 10.5.x and losing a fair number of games. Then, with Catalina, there wasn't much remaining at all.
Once in a while, we can see a small studio with the guts to do things for all platforms. Even if we've lost most everything, there are others coming. I was surprised when I saw Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition available for modern Macs.
I used to use my PowerBook G4, then my MacBook Pro for games like UT2004 and they were fine.
I ended up with an Omen by HP gaming laptop computer with a 7th generation quad-core i7 and GTX 1050 and it was acceptable but not really faster than the MacBook Pro with a 3rd generation quad-core i7. My latest ASUS laptop computer with Ryzen 7 5800H and 3050Ti makes things considerably better but it doesn't seem to be faster than the MacBook Air M1 that I have. It's just easier to find games and other software available.
Only about 8 months may not sound long, but if you realize what this development time for an entire team costs it’s still too often not worth it. If it were, we would be seeing a way more interesting macOS gaming market.
When this comes out I’m tempted to have a crack at installing XCom2 and see if it runs any better than the Mac version. That said, it runs pretty sweet already at 1050p on a 2015 MacBook Pro modded to hell and back lol
If it’s so clear perhaps you can break down the profit potential between PC and consoles vs Mac in detail for us, right?
Is it so clear that you probably won’t justify that claim?
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OpenGL absolutely did make things easy back in the day when many game/game engines were still written for OpenGL, or were written to support multiple graphics engines. Back then, the market was pretty split between titles written for DirectX and those written for OpenGL. OpenGL titles, broadly speaking, were cross-platform and usually got Mac ports.
This was almost a golden era for Mac games, between around 2000 and 2015 or so. Although PCs tended to run the latest games better (typically having more powerful graphics cards etc), at least Mac versions were (often) available.
Vulkan seems to be gaining in popularity, but is not yet as ubiquitous as OpenGL was back in the day.
Was gaming was a top priority when you chose to buy a Mac?
Was gaming even a top-5 consideration when you chose to buy a Mac?
Do you think gaming has ever been a top consideration for the vast majority of Mac buyers since 1984?
Even Apple does not play up gaming among Reasons to buy a Mac.
I'm not really in the market for gaming on the Mac. But I would be interested in something like playing Tomb Raider on Apple TV. Because my 4K Apple TV is always plugged in and I could just relax on my sofa. I gather that you can get a PS5 controller that will work with Apple TV.
For anyone who has done this (Lara Croft Go on Apple TV), how does it compare with the days of old, running Tomb Raider on a PS1? Is it any good? Better? Or is the Apple TV just too underpowered?
I imagine one day there will be photorealistic games on a little Apple TV, but I guess I will be long dead before that hardware sees the light of day.
For anyone who has done this (Lara Croft Go on Apple TV), how does it compare with the days of old, running Tomb Raider on a PS1? Is it any good? Better? Or is the Apple TV just too underpowered?
I imagine one day there will be photorealistic games on a little Apple TV, but I guess I will be long dead before that hardware sees the light of day.
I’ve been playing Diablo 3, and it’s been fun, but Diablo 4 just came out and Blizzard dropped support. 