Overwatch not coming to Mac OS X

[jeanlain]

I know from working on UE4 that there are a number of API/shader differences that make life harder and whose workarounds are quite complicated. This can reduce performance vs. Windows so they might have found another gotcha that really hurts their engine.

It's important you say that, because performance by itself doesn't mean that an API/OS is better than another, despite the common belief here. It's just that a game engine was built around a particular API.

 

[marksatt]

It's important you say that, because performance by itself doesn't mean that an API/OS is better than another, despite the common belief here. It's just that a game engine was built around a particular API.

Yep. It is always going to be easier to maximise performance when you build the engine around a particular API/platform. Other APIs/platforms have to be a bit special to overcome that development inertia. Even if we had identical features to D3D we'd still likely be slower due to lack of driver/shader-compiler maturity and sheer optimisation effort at every level of the engine and OS/driver stack. The same would apply to other APIs that shall remain nameless.

In the case of Metal the absence of geometry shaders, the different tessellation pipeline and the way D3D/HLSL handle some Buffer types (see the comments for Change 3710454 in this UE4 commit) are all problems that Mac (or iOS) developers have to solve. How big a problem rather depends on the engine...

 

[antonis]

Kind reminder: Metal exists now, and that's what Mac games are generally using from now on instead of OpenGL. While that doesn't necessarily mean that performance is equal (and indeed Blizzard games with Metal renderers still tend to lag behind Windows performance), so far the fps hit is usually much less.


"Windows side" is not something that just automatically exists. Since I believe everybody is aware of the possibility of buying Windows and using it with Bootcamp by now, and indeed has been for many years, it seems pointless to mention this. We can just assume, for any game, that anyone who is willing to use Bootcamp has already done so. The discussion is about Overwatch on macOS.

--Eric

Obviously Metal exists now, otherwise this discussion would not exist, as it could never be based on the ancient implementation of apple OpenGL. I was just making a point that assuming that a game can run on Mac based on the minimum pc requirements is far from accurate conclusion. The minimum specs are -most of the times- a marketing BS even on PC, anyway. Even more if you project these requirements to a platform where you will get a performance hit out of the box.

In other words, my post was more of a reply to another poster that claimed that his/her mac from 2012 could cover the minimum requirements of overwatch. Yes, that specific imac can do that, but these requirements are for windows, not for macos. If the game was ever released for macos, these requirements would - most probably - be considerably higher.

Now, whether Metal will prove to be the messiah of macOS gaming or not, remains to be seen and it's everyone's guess at this point. My assumption is that it was made mainly with iOS in mind and this is where we are going to see it shine.

 

[Eric5h5]

You were posting as if you hadn't heard of Metal or the fact that existing Metal games have typically had substantially improved framerates. Metal on macOS has features that don't exist on iOS (and vice versa, though it mostly seems to be related to the specific graphics hardware used for iOS devices, what with the tile-based rendering etc.).

--Eric

 

[Atomic1977]

Nobody cares about macs. Pc is and where the best games are.

 

[Atomic1977]

This just goes to show ya that a PC is better than a Mac for games.