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Major gaming news at WWDC: Metal and New games
- Thread starter Homy
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I'm sure I'll get flamed by the gamer bros for this comment, but if the GPT can get me to 60fps, I'm good.
Not just 60fps. But I dream for a computer experience that is a pure solid 60fps experience. No more of this frame pacing, micro stutters, shader compilations etc issues please. It effectively made FF7 Remake on DX12 unplayable.
Stability, performance, optimization for hardware, not for platform. Porting to Apple Macs opens the door to porting the game to other hardware that uses Apple Sillicon.
Like for example: AppleTV that could morph in future into gaming consoles.
Why couldn't a Apple TV "gaming console" just use the translation layer too? Arguably that's what Valve built with the Steam Deck. It's stable, performance is 80-100% the performance of running the game on Windows and some titles like Elden Ring have famously benefited from optimizations done on Valves side.
Not every native port is going to be 100% optimal either. So if a native port gets 80% the performance of an optimal one and the translation layer gets 80% too which is better? Heck I have native Linux ports that run worse than the Proton version!
Because that translation layer you have to first install on your computer.
And that doesn't fit into how App store on AppleTV and iOS/iPad OS works. Of course now we can have a conversation about containerisation of those Apps that would use this translation layer.
I agree with Apple here, just for the sake of principles. You WANT to have native ports on your platform, the same you have native Windows Apps.
Simple as that.
100% performance you get ASSUMING you have the same hardware running side by side. But on Apple platform - you don't have the same hardware as you would on Windows.
You may find that ports on Mac run actually better under Mac than on Windows, because of the nature of Windows APIs. THATS why you want native versions of Apps.
He's unfortunately right. Apple needs to
- Invest in developers to acquire day 1 ports of popular IP
- Promote games in their own separate game store/launcher included with the OS (The app store is garbage for games)
- (maybe) acquire their own game studio
Apple are, at the very least, encouraging and helping developers to bring their games to Mac, which is a promising sign, albeit one that's underreported.
Be nice if some of the media groups, like, say, MacRumors, would try to reach oout and ask some of the developers, or Apple themselves, but...
Be nice if some of the media groups, like, say, MacRumors, would try to reach oout and ask some of the developers, or Apple themselves, but...
Is it really the API's or is it the hardware variation that doesn't exist with Apple hardware?
They don't need that.
They already HAVE their own, that Apple has created on their own.
Both.
You have no variation of hardware, and no variation in software, which is unheard of in Windows/PC space.
I wonder why Psychonauts 2 ran so poorly natively vs using GPTK.
Apple has a game studio?
This is why I was hoping the rumors of Apple acquiring EA were real. Apple used to have a longstanding partnership with EA, so they would've been a great fit.
Maybe they can buy the EA SPORTS side since EA has internally split...
You do not have to wish. They were real.
That is pretty much common knowledge at this point.
I don't even think Apple has actually published any games either (or at least not that I can find).
They actually have. They have a Texas Hold Em game they made that uses live action FMVs for the other players.
Texas Hold’em
Apple’s Texas Hold’em is back! To celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the App Store, we’ve brought back one of its first games, a popular classic. Originally created for iPod, then brought to iPhone, fans will love the polished redesign, featuring new characters, more challenging gameplay, and...
apps.apple.com
Yeah it's not very good lmao
It didn't run "so poorly". DF said it ran "slightly faster" in GPTK than the Intel port. The Mac port uses Rosetta and isn't a native AS port so it runs 3-5 fps slower compared with GPTK. Still a bit odd though that it runs slower.
I mean isn't the GPTK version 3 layers deep with translations, which is why folks have said GPTK -> native doubles performance (I think they were using The Medium for reference)?
Yep, my understanding is that everything running through Game Porting Toolkit uses Rosetta 2 (the only theoretical exception would be if you were trying to port a Windows ARM instead of an x86 game.)
As to why a game like Psychonaut’s Intel Mac version performs worse than its Windows version running through Game Porting Toolkit, the short answer is that it’s sub optimized.
The longer answer is that the APIs and algorithms the devs selected at the time are less efficient than those shipped with Game Porting Toolkit. That’s not uncommon since every engineering team has to work within the iron triangle of time, resources and scope so it’s not necessarily a reflection of malice/incompetence. Apple, for example, just released a new version of Game Porting Toolkit that results in faster performance for many games, likely because they continue to map DirectX calls/structures more efficiently to Metal calls/structures.