Major gaming news at WWDC: Metal and New games

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

TBF the ARM devkit comes with 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD, once you add that to the Mini it is decidedly more expensive. Plus you can upgrade the storage yourself which the Mini really should have especially with all the wasted space in the base model.

A lot of good that 32gb of RAM does when the OS can't even use it properly. When a 8gb Mac is outperforming your devkit, it's time to reevaluate your ARM plans

First come first serve though? Although I guess they already skipped the BSDs and Haiku...

When the only other notable ARM OS is Windows for ARM, that runs like garbage, is limited to expensive underpowered Qualcomm laptops, and who's marketshare for almost four years STILL hasn't made any significant changes, I doubt that. It's a repeat of the iPod and iPad again, where good competition never came and it dominated marketshare.

But hey that's good news for us, as no competition in the ARM space means Mac is the obvious choice for many, and we're getting switchers in droves. The Mac's marketshare is the highest it's ever been now. In the US alone it's now above 30%! Not even during the Mac vs PC days and with Windows' lowest points has it ever got to that point.

 

[salamanderjuice]

A lot of good that 32gb of RAM does when the OS can't even use it properly. When a 8gb Mac is outperforming your devkit, it's time to reevaluate your ARM plans



When the only other notable ARM OS is Windows for ARM, that runs like garbage, is limited to expensive underpowered Qualcomm laptops, and who's marketshare for almost four years STILL hasn't made any significant changes, I doubt that. It's a repeat of the iPod and iPad again, where good competition never came and it dominated marketshare.

But hey that's good news for us, as no competition in the ARM space means Mac is the obvious choice for many, and we're getting switchers in droves. The Mac's marketshare is the highest it's ever been now. In the US alone it's now above 30%! Not even during the Mac vs PC days and with Windows' lowest points has it ever got to that point.

I think you're taking my joke a little too seriously...

The ARM Windows PCs aren't that slow honest. They can feel slow because the of x86/amd64 translation layer and they don't have any hardware bits to speed that up like the M series chips but give them some admittedly rarer than it should be Windows ARM software and the performance can be decent Intel mobile i5 level. Not the fastest no but there is worse out there. And it's still a lot faster to keep stuff in RAM than to swap to the SSD so of course the roughly i5 level dev kit can make proper use of 32GB RAM compiling, running VMs and other dev things.

 

[Homy]

The Sims 4 Horse Ranch expansion pack comes to Mac on Jul 20.

The Sims™ 4 Horse Ranch Expansion Pack on Steam

Work hard and play hard with animal friends and your own stretch of land in The Sims™ 4 Horse Ranch Expansion Pack.

store.steampowered.com

Recommended
OS: Mac OS® X 10.11 or later
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i5 (4 cores), or better
VIDEO CARD: Intel HD and Iris Graphics from the HD 4000 series or newer
MEMORY: 8 GB RAM
HARD DRIVE: 50 GB of free space, with at least 1 GB additional space for custom content and saved games

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

The Sims 4 Horse Ranch expansion pack comes to Mac on Jul 20.

The Sims™ 4 Horse Ranch Expansion Pack on Steam

Work hard and play hard with animal friends and your own stretch of land in The Sims™ 4 Horse Ranch Expansion Pack.

store.steampowered.com

Recommended
OS: Mac OS® X 10.11 or later
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i5 (4 cores), or better
VIDEO CARD: Intel HD and Iris Graphics from the HD 4000 series or newer
MEMORY: 8 GB RAM
HARD DRIVE: 50 GB of free space, with at least 1 GB additional space for custom content and saved games

Truly, one of the gaming news, of all time. Horses

I just wish Sims 4's Mac port was on Steam. The Origin Mac client is just bloatware at this point.

 

[Homy]

The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet Of Chaos for Mac is free on Epic.

 

[diamond.g]

BG3 is coming the end of July for Early Access folk!

 

[Homy]

Big jump for AS in June.

 

[Homy]

Many fixes in the new update.

 

[diamond.g]

Many fixes in the new update.

Interesting he didn’t mention that 1.0.2 breaks Diablo 4 EDIT: on Ventura. If you are using Sonoma it works fine.

 

[diamond.g]

Watching this now.

 

[Ethosik]

Watching this now.

I swear if Direct X 13 doesn't fix shader compilation and micro stutters I am just done with PC gaming (pretty much done with it now as it is though). It's a shame the toolkit made it worse with some of those titles.

Good news is with the M2 Ultra fixing the GPU scaling issue with having 2x Mac SOC, we should get 60fps+ on a lot of these that were shown (unless some other technical reason exists).

I do hope they re-do their test with an M2 Max or M2 Ultra as Apple fixed A LOT of issues with the GPU and things that the first gen experienced.

 

[Homy]

Watching this now.

Was about to post. Psychonauts 2 runs faster in GPTK than the Intel Mac version.

 

[diamond.g]

I swear if Direct X 13 doesn't fix shader compilation and micro stutters I am just done with PC gaming (pretty much done with it now as it is though). It's a shame the toolkit made it worse with some of those titles.

Good news is with the M2 Ultra fixing the GPU scaling issue with having 2x Mac SOC, we should get 60fps+ on a lot of these that were shown (unless some other technical reason exists).

I do hope they re-do their test with an M2 Max or M2 Ultra as Apple fixed A LOT of issues with the GPU and things that the first gen experienced.

Even if it did fix the compilation issues how long do you think it would take the industry to switch over to it instead of DX11 or DX12?

 

[diamond.g]

Was about to post. Psychonauts 2 runs faster in GPTK than the Intel Mac version.

Which is an interesting result. Not sure what is wrong with the “native” macOS port.

 

[Homy]

He said MetalFX Temporal is more like DLSS 2 than FSR 2.

 

[Ethosik]

Even if it did fix the compilation issues how long do you think it would take the industry to switch over to it instead of DX11 or DX12?

Quite a bit since PS5 and Xbox Series X ported games are typically DX12. This issue literally makes games unplayable from an experience perspective. My biggest disappointment has been Final Fantasy 7 Remake. I could have force it to use DX 11 and remove 90% of the issues, but I just started it up on console instead.

 

[diamond.g]

Quite a bit since PS5 and Xbox Series X ported games are typically DX12. This issue literally makes games unplayable from an experience perspective. My biggest disappointment has been Final Fantasy 7 Remake. I could have force it to use DX 11 and remove 90% of the issues, but I just started it up on console instead.

I often wonder how the games with custom game engines get away with not having compilation stutters. UE 4/5 still seem to have issues with it.

 

[Irishman]

Interesting he didn’t mention that 1.0.2 breaks Diablo 4 EDIT: on Ventura. If you are using Sonoma it works fine.

Yes, but will it still work fine once Sonoma leaves beta and is released to the public?

 

[diamond.g]

Yes, but will it still work fine once Sonoma leaves beta and is released to the public?

No clue, hope so. Really would rather the games be made native, but beggars can’t be choosers I suppose.

 

[bhawk]

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

So a game developer in response to the Game Porting Toolkit had one question: Why? Why should he go through the effort of making a native Mac port when it would be better if the wine layer in GPT was improved upon to be on the level of Proton?

As eyerolling as these comments are, it does highlight a still real distaste of Apple still present with most game devs, and raises the question why should they do native ports?

 

[salamanderjuice]

What's eyerolling about it? Besides performance what's the benefit of native ports? The game maybe says "Exit to macOS" instead of "Exit to Windows"? There isn't really a plethora of unique Mac gaming features you'd be missing out on. There's no equivalent to dualsense haptics that you'd miss out on. I guess MAYBE MetalFX but perhaps that's mappable from FSR/DLSS/XeSS by the translation layer if enough effort is put in.

If they could get the game porting toolkit to within Proton levels of performance why not? If they were smart the license would read something like "by using this toolkit you agree to exclusively release this title in the Mac App Store".

What would you rather have? A bunch of bad native ports because the developers can't be bothered to spend more money on a tiny market or a good solid translation layer?

 

[Numa_Numa_eh]

So a game developer in response to the Game Porting Toolkit had one question: Why? Why should he go through the effort of making a native Mac port when it would be better if the wine layer in GPT was improved upon to be on the level of Proton?

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As eyerolling as these comments are, it does highlight a still real distaste of Apple still present with most game devs, and raises the question why should they do native ports?

The danger of the GPT, and why Apple will never allow it to be shipped with a game. To be honest I would rather this person stay a long way from any Mac games. Hoping for proton levels of performance with GPT is futile. The differences between TBDR and what AMD/Nvidia are doing are significant enough to prevent great performance.

 

[Ethosik]

The problem with that take about Apple not taking games seriously as it doesn't do any good from a shareholder perspective. Sony and Microsoft have gaming divisions. Nintendo also competes in this area. Then there is Windows with the dozen stores available there. It makes no sense for Apple to buy out a gaming company as why would anyone get a Mac for gaming when you can get a $400/500 console and be able to keep up with gaming for 5+ years?

So Apple will address this by making their lowest end product able to game now. So it will be "if you build it they will come" will pretty much need to be Apple's motives here. Shareholders and public companies don't have the freedom that private companies do. Things like Vision Pro are more attractive to focus on and spend billions on instead of buying a gaming company which might become a failure anyway. Vision Pro could be a failure too, but with how saturated the gaming market is, it makes more sense to go after something like AR/VR instead.

 

[Rnd-chars]

As eyerolling as these comments are, it does highlight a still real distaste of Apple still present with most game devs, and raises the question why should they do native ports?

I suspect Apple’s obvious answer is: “For the same reason you made your initial version — because it would be profitable.”

Apple’s lowering the cost for a developer to port the game, theoretically to the point where dev costs and risks are reduced enough that’s there a worthwhile ROI for the developer. And, of course, as Apple’s market share grows, the number of Boot Camp capable Macs decline, and tools like Game Porting Toolkit improve/reduce dev cost, the more the ROI improves.

Of course companies can have a backlog of higher ROI items (eg releasing some low effort/high uptake DLC) and depending on their backlog/user base/etc, it may never make sense for them to do a Mac port. Or they can be ideologically opposed (like this person), in which case (theoretically) no amount of money would be enough for them to port their game.

Also, why would Apple invest in any tool (Game Porting Toolkit or otherwise) to compete with Proton? Even if they got it to an acceptable level (which would be a massive ongoing effort with a moving target) *and* required sales through the Mac App Store, they’d still perform significantly worse than a cheaper Windows machine or dedicated console. I doubt they’d make back the money in software or incremental hardware sales, while also reinforcing the wrongheaded notion that “Mac’s aren’t capable of real gaming.”

I suspect Apple’s efforts will focus on:
- make it as easy as possible to bring your existing game to the Mac. It’s up to you to decide what’s “good enough” (as it should be) so customers blame devs for bad ports rather than Apple or its hardware
- make it as easy as possible to publish your game cross-platform (Mac, Apple TV, Vision Pro, iPad iPhone, etc), thereby significantly increasing potential sales. If you can get Resident Evil Village running on an M1 Mac, you can get it running on an M1 iPad with just a little more effort