New Rumors of Overwatch on Mac Surface, but Blizzard Engineer Says Still 'No Plans' for Launch

[jeanlain]

Says who? Says you? What grounds or evidence do you have to support that Metal is more than adequate for playing Overwatch? Are you a Blizzard software engineer for Overwatch?

When Blizzard issued their first statement in 2015, Metal was immature and openGL almost unusable on macOS. Their reason was completely legit. No serious Metal game was released before mid 2017 (Sierra 10.12.4). Since then, we've had many Metal games using many different engines. UE4 is arguably more advanced than the overwatch engine (considering that it's integrated in a very powerful IDE). The same could probably be said for Unity.
I just seems Blizzard is recycling their argument just because they can't be bother to find a better one.

What does overwatch need that Metal 2 could not offer? Does it implement a particular rendering technique that Metal could not provide? Geometry shaders maybe? These can be implemented with compute shaders, from everything I read.
The thing is, blizzard didn't say that the Windows version of the engine could not be ported to Metal with absolutely zero compromise or change, they said that technology decisions prevented them from making overwatch the way they wanted it to be. Really? They cannot even slightly alter the way something is rendered? That would be intolerable? Somehow the game can use DX and console APIs, but not Metal. I'm highly sceptical of this.
Maybe it's related to networking and multiplayer, I don't know, but that would also would be very surprising.

You know, the same thing happened to Elite Horizon. The developers raised the lack of compute shaders. Since Metal was released together with compute shaders, the devs have stayed silent. No reply to questions, nada. As if they no longer had an excuse and didn't know what to say. Now all hope for the Mac port is lost, and that certainly isn't due to Metal being inadequate.

 

[Kynmore]

In the meantime...

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/mac-pc/

Nvidia GEFORCE Now has been awesome so far, and there are more game that can be played than what they have listed; you can close out of a Steam Install popup on it, and download and run [almost] anything else you have in Steam.

 

[chucker23n1]

GNM or GNMX, like almost everyone else. Vulkan isn't even an option on the PS4 (or the Xbox One, for that matter).

Huh, I had no idea the PS4 had a proprietary 3D API.

Neither, nor: Brad Oliver's Twitter account is set to protected, i.e. you can only see the tweets when you are one of his followers.

That's what I meant by the latter option. If it was protected all along, jeanlain should remove the screenshot because it's kind of a privacy violation. If jeanlain only protected it following this news story, that's another matter.

 

[jeanlain]

Huh, I had no idea the PS4 had a proprietary 3D API.

All consoles have proprietary APIs.

 

[Eric5h5]

Well, in all fairness, DX12 is still regularly found to be outperformed by the older DX11. So that might be a better comparison.

I looked it up and found contradictory information; sometimes DX12 was faster and sometimes DX11 was. I did find that the benchmark did indeed change, though. Although the new one is apparently more demanding? Well, if anyone with Windows has TW: Warhammer and a R9 280X and would care to run the "dwarfs vs. greenskins" benchmark on 1920x1080 at Ultra, we could clear it up.

Who cares about Integrated graphics in gaming?

I imagine some Windows users do, considering integrated graphics are by far the majority of the market (Intel has much more GPU marketshare than AMD + nVidia combined). I wouldn't game on integrated graphics, but the newest ones aren't completely worthless like they used to be.

3 of your 4 examples, are faster on Direct X.

Nope, read it again.

Thanks for proving my point?

Your point was that Metal gets "crushed", and that was 100% definitively disproved. But hey, you go ahead and continue to ignore reality.

--Eric

 

[kingtj]

Yeah .... at some point, you have to ask why it's even worth trying to push for games on Mac anymore?

Ever since I first switched to Mac from Windows PCs in 2000-2001, I tried to get ahold of every single decent title that was released to run native in OS X. Felt like I had a duty to support the devs at the companies like Aspyr and Mac Play and Feral, even if they were selling 1-2 year old releases at full retail pricing. I really wanted to vote with my wallet, in the hopes it would help keep the Mac side of gaming alive.

In recent years though, it's just gotten hopeless. The companies are well aware that a modern Mac can boot into Windows via BootCamp and run whatever they write for Windows -- so why bother porting things? The die-hards who still do Mac versions are getting squeezed out because of Apple's reluctance to put decent graphics cards in anything but their most costly systems -- and even then, you're stuck a generation or more behind what's available for Windows counterparts.

My 2013 Mac Pro cylinder had the best graphics capabilities Apple *ever* put into a machine, even though I paid a huge price tag to get it. And now, a few years later? There's absolutely NO upgrade path for the GPUs in it, and they perform WAY below what comes in any respectable "gaming desktop PC" for Windows that you'd buy off the shelf today.

I don't like console games or controllers much, so I never accepted the often-given advice to just "buy a PS4 or XBox to game on". But I *did* finally buy an ASUS ROG gaming laptop w/Windows 10 Pro on it. Now, I can just buy/install/play anything that comes out that sounds good, without worrying about compatibility. PUBG, The Witcher, GTA V, Overwatch, Fallout 4, etc. etc. I still use my Mac as my primary computer to get work done or even to web surf on. But it's not bad having all the games sitting over on a dedicated machine where they don't run out my disk space or clutter things up on the machine I do all my real work on.

Gaming on the Mac is essentially dead to me. It was a good run, and I still play some Starcraft II on my Mac, since it runs well on it. But it's a fool's errand if you want to only own Macs but play recently released game titles.

Well it doesn't prevent other companies from saying it. For instance, those behind PUBG have recently said Mac and Linux weren't worth the effort (even though the game uses UE4, which already has Linux and Mac versions).
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The same business case that justified the development of all their previous games maybe? Methinks the team developing overwatch is a different one and its manager doesn't care about Macs.

 

[-BigMac-]

Yeah .... at some point, you have to ask why it's even worth trying to push for games on Mac anymore?

Ever since I first switched to Mac from Windows PCs in 2000-2001, I tried to get ahold of every single decent title that was released to run native in OS X. Felt like I had a duty to support the devs at the companies like Aspyr and Mac Play and Feral, even if they were selling 1-2 year old releases at full retail pricing. I really wanted to vote with my wallet, in the hopes it would help keep the Mac side of gaming alive.

In recent years though, it's just gotten hopeless. The companies are well aware that a modern Mac can boot into Windows via BootCamp and run whatever they write for Windows -- so why bother porting things? The die-hards who still do Mac versions are getting squeezed out because of Apple's reluctance to put decent graphics cards in anything but their most costly systems -- and even then, you're stuck a generation or more behind what's available for Windows counterparts.

My 2013 Mac Pro cylinder had the best graphics capabilities Apple *ever* put into a machine, even though I paid a huge price tag to get it. And now, a few years later? There's absolutely NO upgrade path for the GPUs in it, and they perform WAY below what comes in any respectable "gaming desktop PC" for Windows that you'd buy off the shelf today.

I don't like console games or controllers much, so I never accepted the often-given advice to just "buy a PS4 or XBox to game on". But I *did* finally buy an ASUS ROG gaming laptop w/Windows 10 Pro on it. Now, I can just buy/install/play anything that comes out that sounds good, without worrying about compatibility. PUBG, The Witcher, GTA V, Overwatch, Fallout 4, etc. etc. I still use my Mac as my primary computer to get work done or even to web surf on. But it's not bad having all the games sitting over on a dedicated machine where they don't run out my disk space or clutter things up on the machine I do all my real work on.

Gaming on the Mac is essentially dead to me. It was a good run, and I still play some Starcraft II on my Mac, since it runs well on it. But it's a fool's errand if you want to only own Macs but play recently released game titles.

Perfectly said. Thanks for posting

 

[jeanlain]

I'm not going to blame a company for not porting a game to the Mac, but at least it should give valid reasons. In the case of Blizzard, there are elements suggesting they're just no longer interested in the Mac, not that the Mac is inadequate.
For instance, there is a bug in SC2 Mac, forcing players to use the outdated openGL2 version. This bug may take months to fix according to support. This is ridiculous.

 

[Regime2008]

I'm not going to blame a company for not porting a game to the Mac, but at least it should give valid reasons. In the case of Blizzard, there are elements suggesting they're just no longer interested in the Mac, not that the Mac is inadequate.
For instance, there is a bug in SC2 Mac, forcing players to use the outdated openGL2 version. This bug may take months to fix according to support. This is ridiculous.

Bugs aside, why would Blizzard want to spend money on advertising and getting their game ported to Mac, when its user-base is so small as is, not to mention, how many of those users would actually play the game? It seems like there are many aspects as to why Blizzard doesn't seem to care about this issue.

 

[fairuz]

Not only that.. but you would be playing them at half the quality settings, and half the fps

What, meaning 120 instead of 240? IDK about Overwatch, but more graphically intensive games work fine under macOS on the current Macs.
I don't get why this is an issue. They used OpenGL, right? What technology roadblock is there? OpenGL isn't quite up to date in macOS, but I seriously doubt that's a real issue considering how many other games have no problem with it.
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Again, no. It doesn't have to be this way. Metal can compete with other APIs. Those who know how to port a game (i.e., Feral) have done an amazing job with Metal, and regularly port the most demanding games to the Mac.

Nobody wants to use Metal. Apple should embrace OpenGL like everyone else. Sure, develop Metal on the side too, but OpenGL is the standard.

 

[Eric5h5]

Heh, no. OpenGL is basically over now, at least as far as games go. From what I've seen, developers generally seem to like Metal the most out of the three current APIs focussed on performance: Vulkan (OpenGL successor), Metal, DX12 (albeit I don't know the current state of DX12; there certainly was a lot of complaining at first). It gets commended for being well-designed and thought out. The downside was missing features at first, but at this point in 2017 with Metal 2 it's got pretty much anything you'd want.

Vulkan can apparently be faster, but it's super low-level and harder to use. However it's also a cross-platform standard, running on all platforms aside from macOS and iOS. There is a project called MoltenVK which runs Vulkan on top of Metal, though I haven't heard of anything that uses it so far. If it works well, it seems like Vulkan would be the logical standard for cross-platform games, or at least ones that are built entirely from scratch, particularly since DX12 is Windows 10-only and there's still a substantial userbase on 7 and 8. Given that so many games these days are written in a third-party engine and will use DX12/Vulkan/Metal as appropriate anyway, it doesn't actually matter as much.

I don't get why this is an issue. They used OpenGL, right?

No, they did not.

--Eric

 

[jeanlain]

Nobody wants to use Metal. Apple should embrace OpenGL like everyone else. Sure, develop Metal on the side too, but OpenGL is the standard.

Hmmm. It's not 2014 anymore.

 

[Janichsan]

Vulkan can apparently be faster, but it's super low-level and harder to use. However it's also a cross-platform standard, running on all platforms aside from macOS and iOS.

...and Playstation 4 and Xbox One. The only currently available console that supports Vulkan is the Nintendo Switch, although I'm not aware if any recent game actually uses it.

 

[Mildredop]

I thought this article was about a touch screen Mac. "Mac Surface" like the Microsoft Surface.

 

[fairuz]

Hmmm. It's not 2014 anymore.

Go on Steam, and everything that can run on Mac uses OpenGL.

 

[jeanlain]

Go on Steam, and everything that can run on Mac uses OpenGL.

Not true, especially for recent AAA games.

 

[fairuz]

Not true, especially for recent AAA games.

Eh, I've looked through some lists, and none are considerably large. Feral seems to have embraced it, but they always go all-in on Mac support. Notably, nothing from Valve is on any of them.

 

[jeanlain]

Valve haven't released a game in years. But they support Metal with SteamVR (rather than openGL).
Virtually any new games using unity 5 or unreal engine 4, which are the most widely used game engines, will run on Metal.

 

[Eric5h5]

...and Playstation 4 and Xbox One.

True, I was referring to computers rather than consoles.

Notably, nothing from Valve is on any of them.

If Valve ever releases another game, it will use Metal. UE4 is Metal-only. Unity can still build for OpenGL, but by default it uses Metal by preference. Metal is pretty new, so of course most games are OpenGL at this point. However most (all?) ports of major games recently use Metal, and that will continue. For games, OpenGL = dead.

--Eric

 

[marksatt]

You know, the same thing happened to Elite Horizon. The developers raised the lack of compute shaders. Since Metal was released together with compute shaders, the devs have stayed silent. No reply to questions, nada. As if they no longer had an excuse and didn't know what to say. Now all hope for the Mac port is lost, and that certainly isn't due to Metal being inadequate.

I have sympathy with Frontier - they went to the effort of doing a solid Mac port using OpenGL, hoping that Apple would update it as they went. Instead Apple switched to Metal and they would have to rewrite their Mac support to continue development for the expansions. Obviously the Mac version has not sold well enough to justify that. The balls up with the PR statement was just that - Frontier’s developers know that Metal has compute shaders.

 

[jeanlain]

That's what I'm saying. The official reason for dropping Mac support remains the lack of compute shaders, since no other explanation has been offered. Frontier devs never said anything about the effort needed to port the game to Metal or insufficient Mac sales. It's their way of communicating that I find objectionable, not their decision to stop supporting Macs.