'Shadow of the Tomb Raider' Coming to macOS in 2019

[Internet Enzyme]

Good on them. Wonder how well it runs on my iMac with radeon pro 580 graphics. It does feel nice that I’m part of a very very small contingent of mac users who might have a shot at running this. I wonder what hardware they developed this for ideally, because currently i do not see any suitable mac hardware that could properly run this game at say ultra settings 60 fps

 

[Janichsan]

Wonder if this will have support for Ray-tracing like in the PC version.

You mean on PCs with specific Nvidia GPUs using proprietary Nvidia technology.

Pretty sure we can forget that until Apple adds support for raytracing in Metal and until there are MacOS drivers for GPUs supporting raytracing. Maybe next year?

How about this year?

Whether that can be used to emulate Nvidia's proprietary RTX is another question.

 

[Canubis]

Sooo happy to hear this. In love with the Tomb Raider series for 20+ years!
And rather quick decision by Feral this time, previously took longer for them to get the rights for the port if I remember correctly.
Will definitely buy from Feral directly/Mac App Store at full price to support their work.

 

[MacBH928]

I am surprised they still port games to the mac... who buys these?
They are usually late to release and multiple times more expensive than on the PC side. Even so, no Mac is ever able to run them. I played Shadow Warrior-a 20 year old game-and it almost made my macbook melt. I can't imagine what a modern day game will do to the internals of the tightly stacked under powered macs of today.

 

[freezelighter]

I am surprised they still port games to the mac... who buys these?
They are usually late to release and multiple times more expensive than on the PC side. Even so, no Mac is ever able to run them. I played Shadow Warrior-a 20 year old game-and it almost made my macbook melt. I can't imagine what a modern day game will do to the internals of the tightly stacked under powered macs of today.

It runs wonderful on my iMac 27″ with i7, 16GB RAM and Radeon Pro 580 8 GB.
Just like Far Cry 5, HITMAN 2, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, PREY, Fallout 4, Civilization VI, Dishonored 2, Divinity original Sin 2, Wichter 3, DIRT 4 etc.
All newest games run perfectly.
Very High or Ultra, 2560×1440, 70-90 FPS (Bootcamp).

Got it on Steam, so as soon as Mac verion is there, I will be able to play without Bootcamp.
Great news!

 

[TheFluffyDuck]

I am a gamer and I wish more games would be on the Mac. However that being said macs have middling hardware, worse GPUs (if they have one), METAL which cant hold a candle to DirectX or Vulcan, and the reality of ports always being poorly optimised to run on something it wasn't designed for. This will translate, as it always does, to the worst way to play the game in a sea of options. Apple have made progress, but it's too little too late IMO

I would be exited if:
1) Apple to put discreet mid to high-end GPUs in all of their machines, and start reflecting a Macs price point (like they did 11 years ago).
2) Adopt Vulcan for pitty sake!
3) Talk to GPU chipset makers to have the hardware optimised for Metal. Just as Microsoft does to AMD and Nvidia, for Directx.
4) Developers designed around mac first, and other platforms second to avoid unoptimised ports. That wont happen (see points 1-3),

Gamers don't touch Mac because the hardware is garbage for the price point, and the OS isn't optimised for graphics intensive tasks (although the later is improving slowly, but the former is getting worse every year).

Point in case the mac-mini is a GPU-less brick that costs ~80% of the way to a VR gaming beast, but not 80% of the way in performance. Just spend the extra couple of hundred and get something that smokes it and all other "consumer" Mac flagships, for the next 3 years at least.

 

[freezelighter]

Good on them. Wonder how well it runs on my iMac with radeon pro 580 graphics. It does feel nice that I’m part of a very very small contingent of mac users who might have a shot at running this. I wonder what hardware they developed this for ideally, because currently i do not see any suitable mac hardware that could properly run this game at say ultra settings 60 fps

Its great with Bootcamp.
4K, Very high, ~70 FPS.
Lets see what native Metal can do.

 

[Internet Enzyme]

I am a gamer and I wish more games would be on the Mac. However that being said macs have middling hardware, worse GPUs (if they have one), METAL which cant hold a candle to DirectX or Vulcan, and the reality of ports always being poorly optimised to run on something it wasn't designed for. This will translate, as it always does, to the worst way to play the game in a sea of options. Apple have made progress, but it's too little too late IMO

I would be exited if:
1) Apple to put discreet mid to high-end GPUs in all of their machines, and start reflecting a Macs price point (like they did 11 years ago).
2) Adopt Vulcan for pitty sake!
3) Talk to GPU chipset makers to have the hardware optimised for Metal. Just as Microsoft does to AMD and Nvidia, for Directx.
4) Developers designed around mac first, and other platforms second to avoid unoptimised ports. That wont happen (see points 1-3),

Gamers don't touch Mac because the hardware is garbage for the price point, and the OS isn't optimised for graphics intensive tasks (although the later is improving slowly, but the former is getting worse every year).

Point in case the mac-mini is a GPU-less brick that costs ~80% of the way to a VR gaming beast, but not 80% of the way in performance. Just spend the extra couple of hundred and get something that smokes it and all other "consumer" Mac flagships, for the next 3 years at least.

When you say that Metal cant hold a candle to DirectX or Vulcan, I do not think you are incorrect, but I can't find any real videos on YouTube that properly review and test the capabilities of Metal compared to OpenGL or any competitors. I can't really find any objective testing that gives me an idea of how far behind Metal is. By what's claimed at WWDC it seems like Metal has massive potential but I have no clue where it falls on the spectrum

 

[Eric5h5]

They are usually late to release and multiple times more expensive than on the PC side.

No. You buy them on Steam, like everybody else. You pay whatever the price is for the PC version. I mean, you can buy direct from Feral (I do, it gets them a little extra since they don't have to give Valve a cut), but you still just get a Steam key.

(In other news, I see Total War: Warhammer II is out for macOS now too. Requires Mojave though, I'm sticking with 10.13 for a while. Also haven't got around to playing the first one yet....)

--Eric

 

[TheFluffyDuck]

When you say that Metal cant hold a candle to DirectX or Vulcan, I do not think you are incorrect, but I can't find any real videos on YouTube that properly review and test the capabilities of Metal compared to OpenGL or any competitors. I can't really find any objective testing that gives me an idea of how far behind Metal is. By what's claimed at WWDC it seems like Metal has massive potential but I have no clue where it falls on the spectrum

Well, in terms of running on AMD and Nvidia hardware I would be interested. I have no doubt it runs exceedingly well on Apples custom mobile chipsets. Perhaps an argument for ARM macs. But mainly it's the reach of the API for desktop class games that holds it back. No independent hardware developer or software developer is going to go out their way to make their products optimised to Metal.

 

[MacBH928]

It runs wonderful on my iMac 27″ with i7, 16GB RAM and Radeon Pro 580 8 GB.
Just like Far Cry 5, HITMAN 2, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, PREY, Fallout 4, Civilization VI, Dishonored 2, Divinity original Sin 2, Wichter 3, DIRT 4 etc.
All newest games run perfectly.
Very High or Ultra, 2560×1440, 70-90 FPS (Bootcamp).

Got it on Steam, so as soon as Mac verion is there, I will be able to play without Bootcamp.
Great news!

Please note you are running the latest high end iMac... which most mac users do not own. Also you are running it on Windows I meant for people who run it on MacOS.

 

[Internet Enzyme]

It runs wonderful on my iMac 27″ with i7, 16GB RAM and Radeon Pro 580 8 GB.
Just like Far Cry 5, HITMAN 2, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, PREY, Fallout 4, Civilization VI, Dishonored 2, Divinity original Sin 2, Wichter 3, DIRT 4 etc.
All newest games run perfectly.
Very High or Ultra, 2560×1440, 70-90 FPS (Bootcamp).

Got it on Steam, so as soon as Mac verion is there, I will be able to play without Bootcamp.
Great news!

See what I dont understand is that I have ran my imac in bootcamp and I do not get that kind of performance. And mine is literally the same as yours just with 40GB of ram. I could try out some of those games in particular tho to see if I get similar numbers

Well, in terms of running on AMD and Nvidia hardware I would be interested. I have no doubt it runs exceedingly well on Apples custom mobile chipsets. Perhaps an argument for ARM macs. But mainly it's the reach of the API for desktop class games that holds it back. No independent hardware developer or software developer is going to go out their way to make their products optimised to Metal.

But I wonder how in particular is Metal actually inferior for desktop class game development? Is it really that much worse, or are developers simply so stuck in their DirectX ways that developing for Metal and even OpenGl (a cross platform API!) is just not on the table given that Apple has never saw it fit to provide proper graphics hardware in base configs of any of their most popular models—are the shortcomings of Mac gaming due to Metal and OpenGL, or are devs just not seeing incentives to port given Apple has historically provided very little suitable hardware? I suppose it’s both, but lately Apple has both been providing eGPU support and shipping Pro computers with great graphic hardware, so I think the excuses for devs now lean more towards a “too little too late” mentality where no matter what Apple does with Metal or graphics hardware, most devs will just not port games

 

[Ethosik]

When you say that Metal cant hold a candle to DirectX or Vulcan, I do not think you are incorrect, but I can't find any real videos on YouTube that properly review and test the capabilities of Metal compared to OpenGL or any competitors. I can't really find any objective testing that gives me an idea of how far behind Metal is. By what's claimed at WWDC it seems like Metal has massive potential but I have no clue where it falls on the spectrum

It all comes down to optimization. Optimization. Optimization.

If the developers can get the 2016 Doom to run on a Nintendo Switch (and very well too), any developer that focuses so much on optimization can make any game run buttery smooth on a Mac.

Some people have responded to this argument saying "The Switch version has less particles and textures so it obviously runs better". That is exactly what optimization is.

I am not denying the fact that Windows and Direct X are the king of gaming performance. However, if developers put more effort into optimization on macOS, we would definitely have FPS parity between Windows and Mac. Maybe not quality, who knows.

This is exactly the same issue we had to deal with for years on PC gaming with regards to console ports. Even my GTX 1080 struggles on some console ports. It is all optimization.

Doom (2016) is such a beautiful game. I am able to run 2560x1440 144 FPS on my 144 hz monitor with ZERO drops with everything maxed with my GTX 1080. Same goes with GTA 5 which was delayed and delayed but definitely worth it as the performance is amazing. Yet games like Minecraft are so horrible even on my GTX 1080. Even the first of the rebooted Tomb Raider has FPS drops.

Besides, I prefer 1080 or 1440 at 144 fps vs 4K at 60fps. Seriously, the hz difference feels just like going from a HDD to a SSD. Even from day-to-day tasks. I am typing this on my 2017 5K iMac and I can clearly see how sluggish just moving my mouse is compared to my 144hz monitor on my Windows machine. I can clearly see the frames now where 144hz looks so smooth.