Valve Drops Mac Support for SteamVR Less Than Three Years After WWDC 2017 Announcement

[VictorTango777]

Apple has shown over many decades that computers for gaming is not a priority for them. For their own reasons, they don't care very much about that segment of the market. I don't go complain that Kia is ignoring the truck market, or that Porsche is stupid for not offering inexpensive options. Businesses have their own priorities and strategies. If someone is getting worked up about gaming on a Mac, they haven't been attention to years and years of history. I could understand more if Apple made a bunch of promises about making gaming a priority, but they haven't.

Quite frequently there are posters in this forum acting all proud of themselves, proclaiming that they use only Apple products and never touch Windows software or hardware. How can the rest of us join this exclusive Apple-only club so we too can feel good about ourselves without giving up the ability to play the latest high end games?

 

[falainber]

Yet it’s worked perfectly well for several decades.

Not really. They have been and remain a niche computer manufacturer with about 6% market share.

 

[dogslobber]

VR, AR, MR, etc. They're all flops as people don't want to wear binoculars to see this stuff through.

 

[MarciaFunebre]

When people use the word "VR". They are always thinking "gaming". VR is a gateway to a lot more - a potential that hasn't even been begun to be realized.

For Valve to abandon the platform (Mac) on which a lot of creatives work is simply and plainly and even obscenely stupid... I mean STUPID!

 

[Stella]

It is well documented in the technology press that there have been a string up Windows 10 updates recently that have caused computers to fail to boot, blue screen, and even delete user data.

Sure there have been issues ( which shouldn’t happen in the first place, in the ideal world ) - but affecting only a small portion of the user base. For the Vast majority, windows update complete successfully.
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VR, AR, MR, etc. They're all flops as people don't want to wear binoculars to see this stuff through.

AR hasn’t been successful yet because there isn’t a great delivery mechanism. AR through a phone is inconvenient and not a great experience.

as technology improves, AR will find its place.

 

[mattspace]

This is a sad, but entirely predictable development. I use VR for work, not gaming - designing and prototyping sculptures that end up 7-10 metres tall, I have another workflow that allows me to sculpt in Voxel digital clay, then take that through to 3D printing.

Apple's (arguably diminishing) strengths (consistent UI) don't have a lot of relevance in a platform where every app is its own universe, and indistinguishable from OS to OS.

Apple's weakness' - providing performant 3D hardware, creating performant 3D APIs, providing machines where 3D hardware can be upgraded regularly are the sum total of "what VR needs".

For people using VR to do actual work, Apple's VR efforts have been a slow-moving, very obvious trainwreck from day 1.

The blogaratti, who were hyping Apple embracing VR, sadly made themselves look like idiots.

 

[VictorTango777]

I’d argue that P.C. gaming is doing quite well. My teenage son prefers titles like Fortnite and Minecraft on PCs, as do pretty much all those he plays with. Consoles are huge, but do not write off PC gaming. What do you think dominates streaming, competitive gaming and e-sports? I’d say it’s the PC. And many games are unavailable on consoles or, as I mentioned in regards to my teenage son, simply in the opinion of many much better experienced on PCs.
I am 50, so not a trendsetter obviously, but there are quite a few games I first played on consoles that I migrated to PC to play. You can add mods etc. And of the PC only titles I enjoy (MMOs come to mind), even those that have minimal requirements have always made my Macs become an oven and sound like a 747 taking off. And the dedicated GPUs Apple offers are usually not the latest. They ask prices for a leading edge gpu and give one that is one or two cycles behind.
So I do most of my serious work on my Mac, and built a gaming rig - as many here suggest. But it does not make me wish any less that I could just use a Mac for it all. I’d buy a tower Mac to complement my MBP in a heartbeat rather than build my own PC rig.

People seem to have no problem using cars, coffee makers, microwave ovens, washing machines, and power tools from different manufacturers with different user interfaces. Some people even have multiple brands of game consoles. What makes the same people so particular towards a certain kind of phone or computer operating system that they want nothing to do with anything else?

 

[Dan From Canada]

This is not surprising at all. Apple has not been friendly to developers who want to write cross-platform, enduring code, doing things like deprecating OpenGL and 32-bit support and just in general constantly making it difficult for people to keep old code working. Hell, the rumors of transitioning to ARM suggests this is going to get even worse.

Meanwhile Windows can still run binaries from 20 years ago without much issue. Windows is the gold standard for keeping code working for a long time, second only to IBM zSeries (mainframes).

As much as I love MacOS, I hate that Apple has zero respect for old software. I built a gaming machine not too long ago and no longer give a hoot about gaming on MacOS.

I completely agree. As a long, long time Mac user I think my next machine will be a windows machine. You can get so much more for the same price as a mac and sadly the latest OS updates have been buggy as heck.

 

[SteveW928]

Is anyone using VR? Or, is Mac just the first platform to be dropped?

 

[Spock]

Well, maybe it's a situation of PEBKAC?

No, pretty sure it’s Microsoft not testing updates before sending them out.

Windows 10 problems with latest update get worse – it’s now allegedly breaking PCs

Microsoft still maintains that it isn’t aware of any issues with this optional update

www.google.com

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There’s some else going on - maybe you’ve got flaky hardware, such as your RAM or file corruption.

I have no issues with Windows 10, pretty rock solid.

My computer is fine, I’m referring to the software update issues that Microsoft has been having for the past few months.

 

[Emanuel Rodriguez]

MAC hardware has only recently been able to game at an adequate levels. Software is basically non-existent. Also, with the rumored move of the Mac to ARM and iPadOS, why would anyone develop for the MacOS in its current form?

From a development standpoint, there should be little difference between code for macOS on x86, and code for macOS on ARM. In most cases, the recompilation will consist of a simple push of a button. For the rest, the transition should be fairly simple, with a few exceptions (hypervisors for example).

The only reason Macs are not ever going to be dominant in the gaming world, is because they cannot be upgraded like PCs can. As games progress, gamers need to be able to upgrade their GPU, or they'll end up having to buy an entire new computer to play the latest games, which would end up being extremely expensive (on top of the already more-expensive Mac hardware). Really, buying a Mac to game on, in the long run, is just throwing money away.

The Mac Pro is an exception, but it's still limited by the Mac drivers. Many GPUs cannot be made to work with macOS no matter how much you hack it.

With that said, I do not understand people who game on consoles. A mystery to me.

 

[Black Magic]

This is not surprising at all. Apple has not been friendly to developers who want to write cross-platform, enduring code, doing things like deprecating OpenGL and 32-bit support and just in general constantly making it difficult for people to keep old code working. Hell, the rumors of transitioning to ARM suggests this is going to get even worse.

Meanwhile Windows can still run binaries from 20 years ago without much issue. Windows is the gold standard for keeping code working for a long time, second only to IBM zSeries (mainframes).

As much as I love MacOS, I hate that Apple has zero respect for old software. I built a gaming machine not too long ago and no longer give a hoot about gaming on MacOS.

I think Apple is trying to get there by trying to make Metal a standard. Apple isn't a fan of latching on to someone else's platform especially when they have to deal with all the bugs and such. Truth be told if I was a game developer, the only places I'd be developing for would be PlayStation and X-Box. You have to go where the gamers are. The PC gaming market is a niche and not enough money to make.

You speak of Windows like its a great thing that it supports code from twenty years ago? That is why it has been unstable and littered with vulnerabilities. Microsoft would love to start fresh with a new OS from the ground up but their hands are tied. I prefer the Apple route with modern code and minimal problems. If I want to game, I get on a gaming system that cost as much or less than a great video card and can enjoy games for 7 plus years without worrying about drivers and new PC parts.
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From a development standpoint, there should be little difference between code for macOS on x86, and code for macOS on ARM. In most cases, the recompilation will consist of a simple push of a button. For the rest, the transition should be fairly simple, with a few exceptions (hypervisors for example).

The only reason Macs are not ever going to be dominant in the gaming world, is because they cannot be upgraded like PCs can. As games progress, gamers need to be able to upgrade their GPU, or they'll end up having to buy an entire new computer to play the latest games, which would end up being extremely expensive (on top of the already more-expensive Mac hardware). Really, buying a Mac to game on, in the long run, is just throwing money away.

The Mac Pro is an exception, but it's still limited by the Mac drivers. Many GPUs cannot be made to work with macOS no matter how much you hack it.

With that said, I do not understand people who game on consoles. A mystery to me.

Explain the gaming on console problem please?

 

[Emanuel Rodriguez]

Explain the gaming on console problem please?

You can't upgrade them like a PC, which limits what devs can do with the hardware, and as a result, limits the kind of experience one can have on the platform. I can easily put together a PC which destroys a console. Yes, for a price, but the point is that gamers shouldn't be locking themselves to a hardware configuration which cannot be upgraded. PC devs benefit from being able to include intense graphics, and usually allow players to turn them off if the hardware can't handle them. A console can handle what it can handle, and you'll likely never know what the dev didn't include because of its limitations.

It does create a sort of illusion of performance, but as I said, it comes with a price.

 

[DeepIn2U]

Not a surprise since Apple's support for Mac gaming is non-existent.

It's not a surprise when you look at who's leading macOS (even gave it that nostalgic name) .. Craig. Without including the big video card makers or the large gaming platforms and fully keeping them in the loop, along with pushing the envelop for VR on Mac and keeping users enticed, and finally horrible eGPU support ... has alienated them. Why is external video card support sub-par to Windows?!!

It shows that iPhone and iPad (and potentially AppleTV if it still a box to be upgraded vs just software on smart TVs going forward) is Apple's focus for gaming, not on the Mac.

 

[DeepIn2U]

You don't buy a mac to play games, Apple's tepid support is the reason

Flynn ... please talk to Tim Cook and Craig F. ... convince them of the return of 'The User'

End of line, Dillinger.

 

[mattspace]

Is anyone using VR? Or, is Mac just the first platform to be dropped?

No, it's just Apple becoming increasingly irrelevant in non-legacy-media fields - even AR, Apple's holy grail, noone uses ARKit, they use the AR support of their development engine (Unity / Unreal etc) which then uses ARKit as a dumb pipe to the hardware. So whatever "advances" Apple makes, they're largely ignored until Android has an equivalent deployment technology.

The dirty secret of Apple Arcade, the games are made on Windows.

If you want to see where the cutting edge of content creaton is, it's tools like Tvori - where VR is the workspace in which you create content, that can then be delivered on legacy-2D screens.

Apple got that part backwards - they tried to presnt a workflow where you'd work in their legacy 2D paradigm (eg FCPX), then deliver to VR as an "experience environment", and while that's a use, the moment you give someone a VR workspace to make content - eg put someone in Tiltbrush, or Kodon, working on a screen is just a remoting-tool that gets in the way.

 

[DeepIn2U]

I predict MacOS will continue not supporting the industry-leading Nvidia GPUs, in the coming year on their newest OS. Lets see if my prediction fails.

What gives with Apple's hatred toward NVidia?! They worked very well together back in 2008 with the Alu_MB/MBP units and giving them great Southbridge performance at that time. What happened since then?

 

[Massy1989]

Yeah, this really doesn't surprise me.

With Valve releasing Half-Life: Alyx this year...they probably see Apple about to turn into their competition if they release an AR/VR product in the next few years. Why put focus on the Mac if your product could become irrelevant on the platform within a few years if Apple provides an AR/VR accessory with its own catalog?

They are better focused on further building VR apps on a platform where the majority of their users are. It's not like that means support for Mac is gone forever...they can choose to bring back support if it makes sense for the company.

 

[DeepIn2U]

Yup and for most of the Mac product line, the GPU is rather weak.

Full eGPU support is also weak. Windows via Bootcamp seems to get more fps via eGPUs than macOS ... why is it this way?

 

[mattspace]

What gives with Apple's hatred toward NVidia?! They worked very well together back in 2008 with the Alu_MB/MBP units and giving them great Southbridge performance at that time. What happened since then?

When Apple was initially designing the 2013 trashcan Mac Pro, they wanted to use consumer / gaming GPUs to save cost, so they could market the system as "a whole computer with two Pro GPUs for the same price as the GPUs alone in a competing PC Workstation".

Nvidia told them they wouldn't allow them to use the Quadro branding, unless they put actual Quadro GPUs in there, which was going to cost them just as much as it cost HP etc for retail cards (the figure I've seen mentioned was real Quadros would have added US$2000 to the baseline component costs).

AMD was happy to let Apple use the FirePro branding for cards that were modified Radeons, and subsequently AMD abandoned the FirePro brand.

Also, Nvidia's CUDA compute library gave better performance than OpenCL did, which meant people using it were GPU loyal, not Operating System loyal, and Nvidia wouldn't be so kind as to dump CUDA for OpenCL, so that Apple could eventually dump Nvidia without losing customer workflows.

 

[ssgbryan]

Remember, these toxic replies are just opinions, useless, irrelevant opinions. For the Apple haters this is just bias confirmation. We’ve listened for decades to the cacophony of the haters and nothing they predicted has ever come to pass.

Sticking your fingers in your ears won't make it go away.

 

[4jasontv]

Honestly... who buys a Mac for gaming? It's like buying a station wagon to race.

I do 3D model work on a Mac. But to test it in VR I have to move it to a PC.

 

[ssgbryan]

There is a lot of silly bashing on Mac for not shipping with a strong GPU by default. Most Dells don’t ship with a strong GPU either.

Most people don’t need a strong GPU, it would be a waste of money to pay extra for one. On a laptop it would also hurt your battery life.

If you do need a decent GPU but you didn’t buy a Mac with one, you can just add an eGPU like I did. I picked up a Razer Core X enclosure for $200 on eBay, a Vega 56 on eBay for $200, stuck the GPU in the case and plugged it into my MacBook Pro. Couldn’t be easier.

But I can put a strong GPU in a Dell - not doing that with a Mac.

 

[4jasontv]

Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi announced that SteamVR was coming to the Mac at WWDC 2017, but a recent Valve survey indicated that more than 95 percent of Steam users are running Windows or Linux.

This doesn't represent all computers, just those that have Steam installed. And since most games on Steam are for Windows it makes sense that it be biased in that direction.

With Valve releasing Half-Life: Alyx this year...they probably see Apple about to turn into their competition if they release an AR/VR product in the next few years. Why put focus on the Mac if your product could become irrelevant on the platform within a few years if Apple provides an AR/VR accessory with its own catalog?

VR is a bit stagnant. Sure, there is new hardware, and it is amazing technology. But there isn't a killer app for it yet. Alyx is a great game, but it just did all the things right. I didn't do anything new. And, really, VR suffers from a host of problems that are likely not to be solved soon.

 

[ssgbryan]

And keeping all that 20+ year old code in Windows is why it’s been getting more and more unstable with every release. They refuse to take the risks involved in breaking that code that allows 20 year old software to run like Apple has. I do think Microsoft is working on getting rid of some of that code sometime soon though.

I take it you haven't spent any quality time with Windows 10.

It is a different animal - I am currently at 173 days of uptime. (And I never thought I would write that.)
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Metal 2 blows the doors out of Vulkan and OpenGL. It’s focus is on making macOS the machine of choice for creative production. The arrival of the PS 5 and Xbox One replacement means a huge chunk of new games will be exclusive on those two platform stores. EPIC Games Store also eats away at Steam. Apple Arcade is making a solid stream of revenue for Apple.

Steam will be in for a fight to survive over the next 2-3 years.

As some that creates, let me assure it it isn't that way.

You have a Mac Pro that was obsolete the day it was released. And overpriced by a factor of 4.

You have an iMac that is thermally throttled.

You have a series of notebooks that are thermally throttled.

You have a mac mini that is thermally throttled.

Have fun playing Candy Crush.