I think they are waiting for features (Metal) that will be available in the next macOS.
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What does Switch 2 mean for gaming on Apple platforms?
- Thread starter kiranmk2
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Need though? And as far as I can tell RT and Path Tracing are the same thing. MS doesn’t have a separate API for path tracing so why would Apple?
I don’t have any real commentary on Frame Generation though. If the base frame rate isn’t high enough it isn’t really useful, in my experience.
You may not need those features but when they're announced CDPR and Apple must make sure everything works well and is polished. Those features are for those who want, need or can use them. Metal and no Mac game have had those features before. We're not talking about separate API but adding new features, drivers, codes and other stuff I have no knowledge about. I guess we'll find out tomorrow why the game was delayed and when it will be released.
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That's a good point. People will want to play cinematic games on large screens. I, myself, have that same preference. But I wasn't talking about my preferences, but where the gaming markets are heading right now. And it looks like they're heading in the direction of handhelds.
I have to say, the state of gaming on the Mac is such a missed opportunity. I only have so much budget for devices, and I have two pretty powerful Macs - I'm loath to purchase a console as well…
Switch 2 is at least on par with PS4 - go and look at some of the Digital Foundry coverage.
Current M chips have a lot of power, but probably not as much as some people think, judging from recent ports such as Control. A year ago, a developer making a game for PC, Xbox or PS5 wouldn't have even thought of porting to ARM to support the Switch 1 due to it's low horsepower (on par with an XBox 360). Now, the Switch 2 offers a large upgrade in performance (still not on par with with current XBox/PS5) and the fact it is likely to be a successful system means that studios will be wanting to support it. This means that there will be a lot more titles optimised and ported to a PS4-level ARM device which is closer to MacOS than previously - especially the Mx base chips that are becoming more commonplace in Macs and iPad Air/Pros. It would not surprise me in the least if CDPR agreed to port CyberPunk to Mac because it was already planning to port it to Switch 2. I'm hoping this means that we get a Mac port more optimised to give a good performance on the lower end chips - Switch 2 offers 1080p30 in Quality and 1080p40 in Performance - if CDPR can get a similar level of performance on M1 (even leaning on MetalFX) I would consider that a good sign.
Why though? None of those features were in the PC/console launch either. They could be added down the line. It doesn't look particularly great to be delayed with no news or when the same game ships on an entirely new platform that wasn't even announced when they announced it for Mac either.
Do we even know they'll be at WWDC?
Diminishing returns in terms of visual fidelity vs. power required = handheld will get you close to AAA desktop gaming as time moves on.
Cyberpunk runs at a playable frame rate on the switch 2. Yes, the game is now 5 years old but it is still one of the more demanding games on the market; the fact that it is now running on a device inside of say 10-15 watts is pretty amazing.
I'd say its above a PS4 in the performance hierarchy - the PS4 ran Cyberpunk so badly it was pulled from sale, the switch runs it around 40 fps which is way better than Breath of the Wild ran on the original switch.
In terms of Mac GPU horsepower - there's a lot of it considering the power consumption, but it isn't targeted specifically at gaming performance.
- The switch is basically a cut down Ampere Nvidia GPU. Its a well known architecture at this point to game developers
- Apple's GPU is entirely bespoke
- Just because the public didn't know about the switch 2, it's been in development for about 7 plus years according to nvidia/nintendo. To paraphrase the nintendo material in the switch news app "it's been in development since the release of the original switch". IIRC that was around 2017? It would not surprise me if nintendo had been talking to CDPR about Cyberpunk 2077 since at least 2021-2022 as a possible launch title for their new console.
Apple's GPUs and Metal API have been known for years too. It's not like with M4 they threw everything out and started from scratch.
Being a familiar Nvidia GPU doesn't mean much either. It's not like the Switch 2 runs Windows and Direct X, usually consoles get their own unique API with a new one for a new generation.
The Mac announcement still happened first. I'm sure there was months or years of planning there too.
Valve is also letting handheld PC makers use steamOS with no yearly dev fees. What is apple offering? Steam offers hosting and payment processing.
Yup, and Nvidia were instrumental in helping Nintendo develop that API. Probably CDPR too, as Cyberpunk is a showcase for Nvidia RT.
M series only got raytracing recently, Nvidia has been doing RT hardware since 2018.
You can pretty much guarantee there's some flavour of Vulkan running underneath on the switch 2 and it uses DLSS which has been around since something like 2018; Metal didn't get upscaling until recently and still doesn't have frame-gen.
I mean really:
- gaming focused company building bespoke gaming hardware with close ties to nvidia who has a close relationship with CDPR
- apple, who has shown a complete and utter contempt for / incompetence with gaming since the pippin. Apple's "commitment" to gaming is basically Apple Arcade and trying to set up a gaming app to take a cut.
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I admire some of the optimism in this thread, but Apple is not and has not been serious about gaming for decades.
Apple’s entire gaming focus over the past (say) ten years has been anodyne casual gaming via Arcade, and the iOS money pump. The iOS gaming platform is basically irrelevant to the Mac, because all the money there comes from free-to-play games like Candy Crush with lucrative micro-transactions where Apple gets 30% for doing literally nothing more than processing the payment. When Apple released a full-price AAA game on iPhone (Resident Evil 7), two things happened: the performance was a stuttery mess, and the sales were in the toilet, with only around 6000 sales total in the first year.
Apple has looked at MS and Sony and gone “sheesh, they seem to have spent an awful lot of money building out a platform, and they’ve been really patient about it, and they’ve got XBox Live and PSN and all that stuff, and holy holy, have you seen how much they’ve spent on developers?”, and they’ve gone “yeah nah, we’ll just port some four-year-old Capcom games about zombies and babies in jars, it’ll be fine! We’ll put a cool-looking senior gaming exec in a fancy leather jacket on stage at WWDC! GAMERING!”. An example I’ve used before is something literally millions of people play: FIFA $this_year. Can you play FIFA 2025 on Mac? You can not. Can you play it on PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch™? Absolutely*!
There’s no shortcut. Apple needs to buy and commit to one or several studios, and build the player network/matchmaking infrastructure (e.g. XBL, PSN). Apple Silicon GPU performance is, while remarkable per watt, pretty weak by comparison with PC GPUs one or even two generations old. But that’s not stopped Nintendo. Since the N64, no Nintendo system has been particularly graphically impressive - but their secret sauce is “weak GPU, forty years of stellar IP”. Apple can’t do this unless they buy it. They’ve got the money - but who’s going to sell? Apple folds on gaming regularly.
*FIFA 2025 releases on the 27th of September, btw
Apple’s entire gaming focus over the past (say) ten years has been anodyne casual gaming via Arcade, and the iOS money pump. The iOS gaming platform is basically irrelevant to the Mac, because all the money there comes from free-to-play games like Candy Crush with lucrative micro-transactions where Apple gets 30% for doing literally nothing more than processing the payment. When Apple released a full-price AAA game on iPhone (Resident Evil 7), two things happened: the performance was a stuttery mess, and the sales were in the toilet, with only around 6000 sales total in the first year.
Apple has looked at MS and Sony and gone “sheesh, they seem to have spent an awful lot of money building out a platform, and they’ve been really patient about it, and they’ve got XBox Live and PSN and all that stuff, and holy holy, have you seen how much they’ve spent on developers?”, and they’ve gone “yeah nah, we’ll just port some four-year-old Capcom games about zombies and babies in jars, it’ll be fine! We’ll put a cool-looking senior gaming exec in a fancy leather jacket on stage at WWDC! GAMERING!”. An example I’ve used before is something literally millions of people play: FIFA $this_year. Can you play FIFA 2025 on Mac? You can not. Can you play it on PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch™? Absolutely*!
There’s no shortcut. Apple needs to buy and commit to one or several studios, and build the player network/matchmaking infrastructure (e.g. XBL, PSN). Apple Silicon GPU performance is, while remarkable per watt, pretty weak by comparison with PC GPUs one or even two generations old. But that’s not stopped Nintendo. Since the N64, no Nintendo system has been particularly graphically impressive - but their secret sauce is “weak GPU, forty years of stellar IP”. Apple can’t do this unless they buy it. They’ve got the money - but who’s going to sell? Apple folds on gaming regularly.
*FIFA 2025 releases on the 27th of September, btw
The big killer to macOS gaming is going to be the rumoured discontinuation of Rosetta 2.
A huge number of existing macOS games available via steam require either intel or Rosetta.
Sure, there's emulators and modern games, but the problem is a lot of modern AAA games are just going to be too intensive to run properly (in the context of expectations for a desktop/laptop) for even a high end Mac (I'm talking M4 Max).
A huge number of existing macOS games available via steam require either intel or Rosetta.
Sure, there's emulators and modern games, but the problem is a lot of modern AAA games are just going to be too intensive to run properly (in the context of expectations for a desktop/laptop) for even a high end Mac (I'm talking M4 Max).
The other elephant in the room is storage.
I just cleaned up two games off my XBox Series X because I don’t play them anymore, and I like to keep it no more than about 75% full*. Forza Horizon 5 was 140GB, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was 112GB. I’ve still got about twenty-odd games installed on the 1TB system (bought in 2021, price £500, or a little more than you have to pay additionally to get 1TB in an MBA) including stuff like Diablo 4, Lies of P, Expedition 33 (no spoilers! Haven’t started it!), and a bunch of smaller games like the Ori platformers (so, so good). The XBox operating system itself is pretty small.
And if I do need more space? A 1TB expansion card is £119 off Amazon.
*Decades ago, I was a VMS admin. The rule of thumb for FILES-11 volumes was keep them no more than 66% full - something to do with optimally sizing the volume bitmap, or some such. That’s kinda stuck with me, even though it’s totally irrelevant.
I just cleaned up two games off my XBox Series X because I don’t play them anymore, and I like to keep it no more than about 75% full*. Forza Horizon 5 was 140GB, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was 112GB. I’ve still got about twenty-odd games installed on the 1TB system (bought in 2021, price £500, or a little more than you have to pay additionally to get 1TB in an MBA) including stuff like Diablo 4, Lies of P, Expedition 33 (no spoilers! Haven’t started it!), and a bunch of smaller games like the Ori platformers (so, so good). The XBox operating system itself is pretty small.
And if I do need more space? A 1TB expansion card is £119 off Amazon.
*Decades ago, I was a VMS admin. The rule of thumb for FILES-11 volumes was keep them no more than 66% full - something to do with optimally sizing the volume bitmap, or some such. That’s kinda stuck with me, even though it’s totally irrelevant.
Honestly I think the strategy for Apple is to focus on iPad and iPhone as handheld/portable gaming devices with third party controller support (like they have; they're CLOSE to doing the right thing) and, as @redcarian above says: get a decent in-house studio (like they've done with AppleTV content) and make some actual proper games, not just micro transaction generic mobile game crap.
The libraries between iPad and Mac are close enough that they will basically run on Mac for free, but honestly I think the confines of iOS and iPadOS as a baseline to get decent quality games in the ecosystem is a sensible first step.
Given enough motivation, developers have been able to port things like Doom to the OG switch, and the iOS devices are far more powerful than that for a very long time now.
It's the developers, Apple need to demonstrate that proper gaming in the Apple Ecosystem is actually viable beyond crappy little micro transaction driven "free" trash. They need to kick start it.
The platform is capable, the management of it is garbage tier as far as gaming is concerned.
The libraries between iPad and Mac are close enough that they will basically run on Mac for free, but honestly I think the confines of iOS and iPadOS as a baseline to get decent quality games in the ecosystem is a sensible first step.
Given enough motivation, developers have been able to port things like Doom to the OG switch, and the iOS devices are far more powerful than that for a very long time now.
It's the developers, Apple need to demonstrate that proper gaming in the Apple Ecosystem is actually viable beyond crappy little micro transaction driven "free" trash. They need to kick start it.
The platform is capable, the management of it is garbage tier as far as gaming is concerned.
Yes and no. If they enable things to run from thunderbolt/USB4 SSD that's good enough (at least on the Mac side).
I think if they can get decent games on the platform people will be more willing to spend on phone or iPad storage - if there's actually decent games on the platform to justify it and maybe replace their playstation or Xbox (to switch, but realistically Nintendo have the IP.
Then again, maybe if Apple build decent hardware, Nintendo could go Software-only and not have to continually spend on console development. People will buy Nintendo games, and as demonstrated by Nintendo's hardware, the hardware they run on is very much a secondary concern. There's a history of nintendo putting SOME stuff (or licensed stuff) in the App Store.
If Apple had something like the switch (and an iPad or iPhone plus controller cradle is close!) maybe nintendo don't need to bother any more; their platforms are just a mechanism to sell games. Maybe the third party nintendo store being on the device is a barrier?
Ahh, fellow storage administrator.
Netapp suggest no more than >80% full. Otherwise filesystem performance falls off a cliff, you get excessive fragmentation, etc.
It's a rule I also live by for any of my systems. 80% is treated as "full" as far as I am concerned (i.e., I do not go over outside of very short term requirements).
I don’t think Nintendo will ever (willingly) go software-only, like Sega did. They are institutionally attuned to controlling the whole stack - hardware/OS/games, and unlike Sega, they aren’t up a financial creek without a paddle, so they don’t have to think about it.
- Apple Arcade was launched in Sep 2019, not ten years ago.
- The first AAA iPhone game was RE Village (8) in 2023, not RE 7 Biohazard in 2024.
- RE Village was released for PC in 2021. It was released for Mac in 2022, not four years later.
- RE 4 Remake was released for Mac 9 months after the PC release, not four years later.
- Many games have simultaneous release on Mac (or almost), like Civ VII, AC Shadow, Lies of P, Lies of P: Overture, Frostpunk 2, Farming Simulator 25, Football Manager 2024/25, Tennis Manager 2024/2025, GT Manager, Riven Remake, Myst remake, Layers of Fear, X-plane, Baldur’s Gate 3 (one month later), Humankind and Total War: Warhammer III (three months later).
- Millions of people don’t play EA Sports FC 25.
- Apple Silicon GPU performance is not ”pretty weak”. It’s a matter of optimization. In Blender M3 Ultra 80c is almost as fast as desktop 5070 Ti (300W) and faster than laptop 5080. M4 Max 40c is as fast as a desktop 4070 (200W). M4 Max 32c is faster than desktop 7900 XTX (355W) and laptop 5060 Ti/5070.
- There has never been any elephant in my room, not even a baby Yoda. I have a 10TB external HDD with Seagate IronWolf Pro enterprise-class drive for $280 for my Mac/Crossover games and other stuff. I could also buy a faster portable 1TB mini SSD for $100 if needed.
- According to Appmagic in this article RE Village had during its first 6-8 months since its release 34,000 sales, not 6,000 in a year.
Appmagic also writes this disclaimer:
"In most cases, the accuracy is pretty good: average monthly discrepancy is about 10%. But when it comes to low figures for revenue and downloads, it's very hard to stay accurate. The reason for that is that we build our estimations based on app rankings in mobile app stores. Each app may be ranked into more than one category, e.g. Overall/Games/Strategy. If an app falls out of the top charts of all categories in a subset of countries, we will have zero information about its metrics in these counties. As a result, we will underestimate metrics of this app from the worldwide perspective. When it comes to top positions in the charts, dispersion in possible values can be very high. For example, revenues of No.1 and No.2 apps may equal one day but vary by 5 times the other day. However, the apps will keep the same positions in the rankings. This causes considerable uncertainties. So we recommend taking estimates for revenue and downloads for low-performing apps (less than 30K downloads per month or $30K revenue per month) with a solid grain of salt. And for the apps that generate less than $10K revenue or 10K downloads per month, the estimates are hardly reliable. The better the performance of the app, the better the accuracy of estimates."
Such rumors are spread by users. Crossover and Apple GPTK both rely on Rosetta translation. Apparently Apple doesn’t have to pay royalties either this time for Rosetta since it’s an in-house technology. It’s not going to be discontinued anytime soon. Popular games also get Apple Silicon updates. You can also keep an old Mac for your old games if/when the day comes.
Covered off with the iOS part.
Didn’t say anything about first. BTW, RE8 sold like dog poo too.
Death Stranding came to Mac in 2023 four years after its release.
OK?
14.5 million people were playing FIFA 2024 in the first two weeks after release.
Gamers don’t care about Blender. Your competitive GPU only exists in a MacBook Pro starting at £4000, and the 4070 is a two-year-old part costing around £500.
Normal people don’t do this.
34K in 6 months is still absolutely tragic for a AAA game on a premium platform.
Rosetta will be discontinued when Apple decides it will be discontinued - exactly as per 68K, PPC, Carbon, 32-bit, etc.