There were literally reddit posts saying 'DX12 is impossible on Metal' the day before GPTK was announced. Just amazing.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Major gaming news at WWDC: Metal and New games
- Thread starter Homy
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Does it?
There's a key difference between a game coded for your OS and a game coded for another OS: customer support.
When there is no support, you're on your own. The game may crash at any second, you may get graphical issues, audio issues... and you can't hope that any will be fixed because no one is paid to ensure that the game works correctly on your platform. In fact, you can only hope that the next update doesn't break the game, not that it fixes it.
Maybe Linux uses are happy with that, but Mac user are a different bunch. They want reliability. Personally, I want Mac games, not Windows games.
Last edited:
Sometimes, yes. It's grown a damn lot though. Started off at 68k when I started keeping an eye on it in June 2020. Currently at just short of 150k.
It's probably one of the largest Mac gaming communities.
Ha! As if that actually happens. Even on "supported" platforms it's a crap shoot if they ever fix the problem.
And there is hope your issue will be fixed...by the Proton, Wine, etc. teams.
How much has customer support helped with 32 bit games? When Apple finally guts OpenGL support? Some other random change Apple does that breaks a two year old game? If you want software reliability Apple is not that at all.
32 bit is long dead... But it's not like Apple is going to 'kill 2 two year old games'. All of the games in my library that are 64 bit are still running just fine on the current OS. Even games that are over 10 years old.... I have no idea where this 'games break every two years' narrative comes from.
They have their own Silicon now, their own graphics/sound/input API... That foundation will be there going forward.
It would probably be more accurate to say there are more Steam games that you can play on Linux that you cannot play on macOS even with D3DMetal. (Starfield and Ratchet & Clank:Rift Apart come to mind)
Metal 2 and 3 and not brand new APIs, just some new features added to the existing ones. So unless there is a bug somewhere (it happens from time to time) nothing has been broken.
Feral has updated a bunch of their 32-bit games. That's better than nothing.
And almost all Metal games still work.
With Proton, even the latest games may break suddenly.
If they have the time and if they can actually fix issues.
The majority of AAA gamedevs have been supporting customers a lot on the Steam Deck, adjusting Proton settings so games run perfectly out of the box, and because Proton makes it so easy they don't have much work to do and can get players on Deck back out there quickly.
And outside of official customer support there's the effort of the Linux community with contributors like GloriousEggroll employing community adjustments to Proton.
There's no such thing as "Windows games" lmao, they're just games one of the same, and that's all people want.
I took my Steam Deck to the Apple Store one time as my Macbook Pro needed service done on it. Everyone in the store saw my Deck and crowded around it, wanting turns to play stuff off of it. While I wanted to play Powerwash Simulator everyone ended up taking turns playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on it instead. Regular people do not care if a game is running natively on their operating system or not, they just want games, simple as.
Full DX12 compatibility is still impossible, not every game runs with GPTK. In theory you can go all the way down to full emulation including AVX512 instructions for CPU, if you accept the performance hit it comes with to the point when it's simply not practical to run applications and games like this.
Probably from people who actually develop games and have to deal with the consequences of new OS versions.
I recently updated my main machine to Sonoma only to face massive network issues with my Caldigit TS4 dock, which required a reboot even when the dock wasn't connected anymore. Turns out the reworked network stack in combination with Little Snitch filters caused this. Had to disable filters manually to update Little Snitch to the latest version and it worked. So you have to rely on developers updating games/applications, which wouldn't be necessary if someone wouldn't break them in the first place.
Apple brings major changes to the OS every year and that breaks a lot of things for developers to fix in their applications. I can't remember how often I had to fix ML Agents for Unity after macOS updates until I eventually gave up. Every new major macOS release broke something that worked before.
That happens on other systems as well, just not as frequently. Windows is by far the least problematic when it comes to this. In Linux you can run into issues with OS + Unreal Engine + 3rd party library versions, but far less frequent than yearly macOS releases.
If macOS had any kind of compatibility mode like Windows does, none of this would be happening. But Apple expects everyone to constantly update software, never just set it and forget it, which in turn caused many developers to leave when Mojave and Catalina came out, including Valve
So nothing there relates to games breaking every two years. Good to see confirmation.
Not sure how you come to that conclusion, unless you literally mean "every game breaks every two years", which would be a silly statement. I wouldn't read it as such, though. Major macOS updates break things. Not every application, game or attached hardware, but it happens and then developers need to supply updates.
That's particularly annoying for older software, which doesn't bring in cash. Hence the run for these annoying subscription models for software. Great for developers (constant source of income), bad for the user (constantly paying for software).
Massive advantage of games for consoles. OS updates there usually won't break anything.
I don't recall major compatibility issues with games, at least for 64-bit games.
CSGO ran considerably worse on 64 bit than 32. The Source engine was not meant to run in 64-bit
But we would have other issues related to the maintenance of old code. Like antiquated apps that the developers never bothered to update.
That's Valve's problem. In this day and age, I expect developers to know how to code a 64-bit app.
I didn't know Valve released a 32-bit Mac version of the game.
That's not how compatibility modes work. Compatibility modes are emulators that mimic the environment of the old computer, and isn't on all the time. Windows 11 is 64 bit only, but still has a compatibility mode for 32 bit apps despite 64 bit being the standard now, so your legacy apps and games you bought and paid for still work. There's a reason Windows is the gaming juggernaut it is
Bare minimum, all macOS would need is something like Windows 11's 32 bit compatibility mode. Apple won't even do that because in their eye anything old is bad and everything and anything should get constant updates even if they really do not need it. Hell WE ALREADY HAVE A COMPATIBILITY MODE WITH ROSETTA 2! So just do that, but for older versions of macOS! Is that so hard?
Source 1 is spaghetti. The engine is old, really old. Half Life 2 came out in 2004, and when Portal 2 came out the engine received a revision that added lots of new graphical effects but added onto the spaghetti more. It's not as simple as just checking a box and suddenly all Source 1 games work on 64 bit binaries. With how old these games are it would require a full engine rewrite, which is impossible due to the web of spaghetti. They made Source 2 for a reason to avoid what happened with Source 1. Just look at the leaked source code for Team Fortress 2 and all the developer comments of the Valve coders struggling to work with that old engine.
But of course this is only a problem on macOS since Apple is of the mindset you gotta go their way or the highway, and guess what: Everyone chose the highway because the way Apple wanted game development done sucks. There's a reason Counter Strike 2 isn't coming to Mac, and what happened with Mojave and Catalina is one of those reasons.
The only gripe I have seen is that Apples peripheral support is still garbage. Steering Wheel support and maybe Flight Stick support is sketch on newer version of macOS.
I expect a lot of things as well, but that's not always realistic. So if something runs perfectly on macOS 13.x, then Apple releases Mac OS 14.x and suddenly things don't work anymore or not as expected then the cause for it is clear. The macOS update broke something that worked before. Of course it is up to the developer then to fix it (because Apple usually won't paddle back on changes they made), but it's unrealistic to expect a day and date patch, especially for older software. It might be fixed or not, in the end the end user has to face the consequences for the OS update.
There are always pros and cons for such updates. Going back to my Sonoma example, that new Filters & Proxy configuration is probably a great thing, but it broke something that worked before. In this case the developers had a patch ready. Apple must have changed something in the hot plug or TB handling as well. When I connect my TS4 to my MBP when it's open and my external monitors are turned off (but connected to the TS4), macOS turns into a slide show for a few seconds and then reboots with a kernel panic. As soon as I turn on the external monitors or plug the TS4 in while the monitors are on, it's stable. That wasn't a problem pre 14.0, at least from what I can tell. It's not a big deal in this case, I know how to handle it, but sooner or later someone will probably have to patch this (Apple or Caldigit).
In the end, I think that's what people are worried about. It's not about "everything breaks" literally.
What? You think by saying your post didn’t show games breaking every two years, despite your claim, that I actually meant they do break?
Also are you agreeing that your point was a “silly statement”?
To be clear, @JordanNZ said they had no idea where this “games break every two years” comes from. You said that idea comes from game developers. What’s the implication there? That games do break every two years.
A silly statement indeed.