Metal Developer Tools on Windows Offer New Gaming Opportunities

[ksec]

PS5/XBox One 2020 are RDNA 2.0 based GPUs. Nothing Apple will do will match that level. They are both custom AMD SoC with Zen 2/RDNA 2.0 designs.

Does that imply the assumption Apple will do nothing?

There is nothing special about RDNA 2.0. Ray Tracing isn't API / anything GPU specific either. Apple could add Ray Tracing if it seems fits. ( Not saying they will as I dont see how RT will work on Mobile at the moment )

Why not adopt industry standard Vulkan instead of making developers learn another API?

Which "industry" is using Vulkan as Standard? It isn't even standard on Android.

I understand the "Dream" of having a cross platform Graphics API. I was once there too wanting OpenGL to be industry standard. But it simply doesn't work. It never did, and possibly never will.

 

[bryanzak]

Why not adopt industry standard Vulkan instead of making developers learn another API?

Almost certainly because Apple never wants to held hostage with other orgs controlling an API crucial to their platforms. By controlling Metal they can push forward with new/different GPU tech. It’s crystal clear that apples GPUs is already better than intels and you can bet they are gunning for amd and Nvidia. Metal lets them do all that at lowest levels and doesn’t leak anything to their competitors.

 

[Bokito]

Every 3 - 5 years Apple does something that might enthusiast AAA game developers in porting their games to the Mac, but 99% of those ventures are dropped after just a year. This venture is just a tiny fraction of what is needed to successfully port Windows games to the Apple ecosystem.

It’s a nice help for developers who have all their asset sources only available on their Windows machines, but that’s just it. I don’t think it will attract new developers to the Apple ecosystem.

 

[MacLawyer]

I’m glad they’re doing this but Mac Gaming* really needs Melisandre from Game of Thrones to bring it back from the dead. 😂

*Meaning games other than the casual stuff.

 

[iAssimilated]

Apple has recently dumped a lot of money in TV and Movie production, what's another couple of million (billion?) on a couple of first class AAA titles to entice gamers. One can dream 😁

 

[JimmyBanks6]

If Apple wants to get seen as a serious game platform, they'll need to pay for (or develop) compelling exclusives.

I don't see Apple going after the "mature" exclusives of the PlayStation and Xbox... so that'd mean we'll see them competing with Nintendo. This could be interesting... I feel like it's been a long time since we saw serious competition for Nintendo's franchises... Sonic and Megaman became crap while Spyro, Crash, Gex, Epic Mickey, etc all just kind of vanished.

Nintendos sales are completely revolved around their exclusives. Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, Super Smash, Mario Kart etc.

There is no competing against Nintendo and exclusives. That's a lost "battle" before it even starts.

 

[amartinez1660]

Not entirely true. Still have to test the compiled executable on a Mac, but at least this would let developers who develop on Windows for Windows, have an easier time targeting the Mac, and being able to benefit from the enhanced performance offered by Metal. If you wanted to target macOS from Windows previously, you'd invariably have to use OpenGL.

Curious question, can you try at least to run whatever was written on Windows Metal on that Windows environment? Maybe a software reference driver to make sure that at least it works maybe? Or with a connected device?

Im assuming some form of ‘very likely’ because working blindly wouldn’t make sense at all.
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PS5/XBox One 2020 are RDNA 2.0 based GPUs. Nothing Apple will do will match that level. They are both custom AMD SoC with Zen 2/RDNA 2.0 designs.

Agreed. However apple is pushing in the exact same direction with a decade+ long experience and perfecting that SoC in heavily constrained thermal and power-output design. 2 years old iPadPro chips prove it. On the Max Tech episode running around... they show that actually metal devices are even capable of hardware RayTracing, potentially way before RTX cards. All untapped to date sadly.

Not saying that they will slay what PS5/Xbox are doing, might not even get close... possible, but heck, I would think that they are aligning themselves to at least provide solid competition at worst and clean the floor at best (at least in numbers. Gaming and platform support as usual can always still be subpar).

 

[Emanuel Rodriguez]

Curious question, can you try at least to run whatever was written on Windows Metal on that Windows environment? Maybe a software reference driver to make sure that at least it works maybe? Or with a connected device?

Im assuming some form of ‘very likely’ because working blindly wouldn’t make sense at all.

Regardless of what platform you develop on, you have to have the platform you develop for somewhere in order to fully test your code. This doesn't change that. Metal can still only run on macOS, but now devs won't have to do half their development on Windows, and the other half on macOS, if they want to use Metal. Now, they can do all the work on one platform, and send the executable over to a Mac environment for testing.

 

[amartinez1660]

It feels like the appletv treats gaming as a bit of a hobby right now. If the next one has performance that beats the current gen systems and has a few genuinely excellent exclusive titles; games that have fully developed stories and last 40+ hours then I think it would become a ‘serious’ gaming platform. Ie, one that people might buy simply or primarily for the games.

No one (hardly anyone?) buys the current appletv as a gaming device.

Indeed...
However in my point of view, if history has shown us something, is that what seems like ‘a hobby treatment’ today might wipe the floor clean for devs that assume that hobby in the future. Case in point, the whole App Store of yesteryears and their Candy Crush / Angry Birds and lesser gimmick apps (fart noise creator or beer glass anything comes to mind), is for companies today a huge source of revenue, with companies like SuperCell having orders of magnitude more profits than EA, Square, Ubisoft, you name it.

Case in point, in the video linked several messages after yours from Max Tech it does point out that CoD Mobile has more users than all the previous titles from the last 10 years combined. That has to say something.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t even play most of those games, however, the whole Diablo Immortal ordeal of past BlizzCons for example, does have a completely different look with the news of last 3 months.

Exciting times at the least in a long long time I think.

 

[decisions]

Come on MacRumors, love the site but you should really credit Max Tech considering the chance that the author of this article coincidentally looked at the exact same WWDC Dev videos just after Max Tech posted his video is extremely low.

 

[ChromeCloud]

This sounds like great news. Apple wouldn't waste time implementing such tools if they didn't belong to a bigger strategy to disrupt the gaming market.

Interesting times ahead.

 

[JosephAW]

Maybe there's an Apple TV Pro coming soon with gaming in mind.

 

[AxiomaticRubric]

I’m glad they’re doing this but Mac Gaming* really needs Melisandre from Game of Thrones to bring it back from the dead. 😂

*Meaning games other than the casual stuff.

It's impossible to bring back to life something which was never alive. Macs have *always* been fourth class citizens in the gaming world.

There have been some unique games on the Mac, true, but there has never been a Golden Age of Mac Gaming.

 

[amartinez1660]

Does that imply the assumption Apple will do nothing?

There is nothing special about RDNA 2.0. Ray Tracing isn't API / anything GPU specific either. Apple could add Ray Tracing if it seems fits. ( Not saying they will as I dont see how RT will work on Mobile at the moment )



Which "industry" is using Vulkan as Standard? It isn't even standard on Android.

I understand the "Dream" of having a cross platform Graphics API. I was once there too wanting OpenGL to be industry standard. But it simply doesn't work. It never did, and possibly never will.

Read your message a tad late.
Exactly 100% this, we should strive to that dream nevertheless, however when it doesn’t work it’s perfectly ok to downscale that dream a bit to at least the possible reach, and that’s what apple is doing, with all the potential gaming endeavors, cpu/GPU developments, unifying A LOT of all their devices (plus the ecosystem which is what made me go 100% Mac already), this dream will be possible at least on that environment.

Raytracing: it has actually been there from some years! I remember a very long time ago that Unity was working on some form of hardware raytracing for mobile devices using custom OpenGL extensions, those news went underrated and under the radar and untapped. Watching MaxTech’s video, it does mention RayTracing with Metal.

Heck, Apple has even working example of something really cool: Deferred Rendering in a SINGLE PASS, because of the fact that their graphics API (and also before with OpenGL ES extensions) allows for reading and writing to the same target texture where anything (player’s point of view for example) is being drawn. This is usually an illegal operation on today’s standard GPUs and needs an intermediate copy to another render target that reads from what was rendered before first.

 

[mi7chy]

Metal provides a 10 times increase in draw calls compared to OpenGL ES 3,1 while Vulkan provides a 3.5 times increase in draw calls compared to OpenGL ES 3,1.

Essentially Metal is faster.

If Metal is faster then why do people bootcamp Windows on the same Mac to play games? Every comparison out there shows Vulkan/DirectX12 > DirectX11 > Metal. Wouldn't they rather have the convenience of gaming on MacOS with the frame rate of Vulkan/DirectX12 without having to boot into Windows? Maybe Apple will finally come to their senses like with VP9 adoption.

 

[konqerror]

Regardless of what platform you develop on, you have to have the platform you develop for somewhere in order to fully test your code. This doesn't change that. Metal can still only run on macOS, but now devs won't have to do half their development on Windows, and the other half on macOS, if they want to use Metal. Now, they can do all the work on one platform, and send the executable over to a Mac environment for testing.

Especially when developers are using cloud and container platforms for their build pipelines (Azure DevOps, AWS CodePipeline, Google Cloud Build) and Macs simply aren't suited for these services.

 

[jinnj]

Nintendos sales are completely revolved around their exclusives. Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, Super Smash, Mario Kart etc.

There is no competing against Nintendo and exclusives. That's a lost "battle" before it even starts.

Plus Nintendo can change the cover on their devices (All New Pikachu Yellow Switch) and sell out cause the fanatics.

 

[Plutonius]

Macs have *always* been fourth class citizens in the gaming world.

With the switch to ARM, Macs will be able to run the iOS games in Apple Arcade. /S

 

[amartinez1660]

If Metal is faster then why do people bootcamp Windows on the same Mac to play games? Every comparison out there shows Vulkan/DirectX12 > DirectX11 > Metal. Wouldn't they rather have the convenience of gaming on MacOS with the frame rate of Vulkan/DirectX12 without having to boot into Windows? Maybe Apple will finally come to their senses like with VP9 adoption.

Same reason why people go to play Angry Birds on iPhone. There’s no port, option, pathway, application, etc to run it anywhere else barring emulations or higher level hacks.

Same with Windows games. And even sometimes the MacOS ones tend to be OpenGL versions of it... I do prefer to play on OS X though, from booting the Mac, to turning on the headphones and auto connecting them, turning on an Xbox controller and auto connecting, to opening Steam to launching the game I find it nicer overall on MacOS.

Windows 10 though, is legitly up to par nowadays. Minus performance, battery, etc and other minor quirks maybe... but previous versions did leave me a bad taste, for example trying to connect Bluetooth headphones, god forbid if audio goes to sleep because of sound not being piped for a few seconds of inactivity.

 

[smulji]

Apple game console incoming? All that controller / keyboard support. Apple silicon with GPUs surely competing / surpassing the current generation consoles. Seems kind of inevitable that the Apple TV becomes a serious gaming platform.

Funny you should ask.

Apple Rumored to Be Working on an ARM-Based Console Most Likely Featuring Its Own A-Series Silicon

After rumors of a powerful Apple TV inbound, Apple is reported to be working on an ARM-based console that will take on current-gen hardware

wccftech.com

 

[mi7chy]

There’s no port

That's the point of adopting Vulkan instead of Metal so it's easier to port.

 

[smulji]

There is no competing against Nintendo and exclusives. That's a lost "battle" before it even starts.

Unless Apple tries to acquire Nintendo

 

[console65]

Unless Apple tries to acquire Nintendo

That would be a huge boon for Apple. Nintendo’s vault is a goldmine. Just add it to Apple Arcade by creating another tier (“Apple Arcade+“?) and watch the revenue come in.

But there would be huge backlash from fans if Apple bought Nintendo.

 

[tubular]

That aside, it's great to see Apple taking gaming seriously.

They do it in fits and starts. Just enough to make us think that Apple will move beyond mobile games. And then they yank it all away again.

A (very few) major titles will go through the agony of embracing a new graphics engine. Most won't. They'll say, you know what? Apple has consistently shown an inability to handle serious gaming, and they have earned their position as an afterthought platform the hard way.

If Apple wanted to maximize the chances that major games come to the Mac, they should either implement Vulkan directly or make MoltenVK an officially Apple-supported tool.

 

[69Mustang]

PS5/XBox One 2020 are RDNA 2.0 based GPUs. Nothing Apple will do will match that level. They are both custom AMD SoC with Zen 2/RDNA 2.0 designs.

Saying that Apple can do nothing to match that level is a pretty far reaching statement. They may not hit the ground running with equal tech, but there's no reason to believe they couldn't develop an equivalent level of hardware in the near future.

One nitpick. There's no such animal as an XBox One 2020. There is such an animal as the XBox Series X and most likely the streaming only XBox Series S. Just an opinion, but I think a Series S streaming device is more than within Apple's capabilities. Shameless plug→ GamerTag:I AM NOOB527 Forza Artist.