OS Neutral Why don't PC games come to Mac, and why when they do it takes forever?

I'd agree and this is not changing any time soon if ever. So, it's either bootcamp, build a PC rig or buy one or more consoles or some combination of these options if you want more options. It's just the way it is.

I will say though that I have found so much to play natively on OS X that there really is more than I have time for. On the other hand, I do have to concede that does not keep me from wanting access to certain titles just the same such as Dragon Age Inquisition and the upcoming Fallout 4 not to mention all the Bethesda RPGs and some other of their games too. So it does kinda suck it's true but on a bright note there really is quite a lot of good stuff too. It's never been as good as it is today for high quality options I don't think. So that's a plus.

 

To put it short: no. The new Apple TV is little more than a less portable last generation iPad, so nowhere near the capabilities of a current gen console (or PC). And that's not even taking into account the weird limitations Apple imposed, that DirtyHarry50 mentioned.

 

Short answer not worth it.

Long answer:

• Bad video driver on OS X, the video driver are less performant
• no directX
• old OpenGL and OpenCL implementation (updated lately, but still OpenGL 4.2 is not recent and OpenCL 1.2 is years behind)
• each OS update break everything, OS X is not backward compatible, they break the API so often. Since OS X maverick thing seem to be more stable but far from trully backward compatible
• require time and cash to port on OS X

It's hard to have the game perform at a decent level and it cost more to maintain for a small amount of sale. Apple never encouraged gaming, it just happen by mistake on iOS.

 

It sucks but there is nothing anyone can do. Windows will always be the gaming O/S of choice and Macs for getting real work done.

 

And real work is so much fun compared to gaming... LOL... just j/k... only playing. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of tech... and would love to see AAA games released for all platforms at the same time. It would be nice just to talk about games in general... besides talking about OS and hardware.

 

Your link shows that Mac sales are surging but still only about 8% of the overall market.

 

As a Mac user, I should stop buying games that run on Windows. That just contributes to low market share for Mac gaming.

 

We launched Beyond Earth: Rising Tide today along side Windows...just sayin

 

Its 8% of the overall market, but Macs are also much more biased towards low-performance machines than PCs are. Marketshare is not enough, you also need to look at what quality of games people are wanting - and what the hardware can deliver. The Wii & WiiU is skipped by AAA studios regularly because they believe it does not deliver enough on the performance aspect. And historically, Wii & WiiU ports have had problems.

Apple sells predominantly in the Laptop market, and that laptop market consists mostly of MBAs and 13'' RMBPs. Those are laptop series with no dGPU, and dual-core ULV processors. The faster 15'' RMBP has its own issues specifically related to gaming - a design flaw prevents the machine from having the dGPU and CPU running at 100% at the same time; in practice the machine is not as good for gaming as the specs imply.

You need to pay 2000 USD minimum to get something that might satisfy Fallout 4 minimum specs on the Mac side of things. By contrast, 1000 USD (Half the price) gets you a PC desktop that manages the harsher recommended specs. And these desktops are not uncommon. Not only that, if you have a i5 based PC as old as 5 years - the only component that might be a bit out of spec is the GPU; which is just a cheap 200 USD upgrade to bring something that predates the iPad to playing the final games of 2015.

The PC gaming industry is most reliant on machines that sit in-between the Mac Mini and Mac Pro in price and performance. And thats just where Apple's hardware offerings have a very pronounced gap.

 

That's rubbish. The vast majority of Windows PCs are low cost machines that have even worse specs than most currently available Macs.

 

Sorry, no. Fewer 'Windows PC' processors are ULV processors for one (which are weak, and more costly), and dGPUs are found much much earlier in Windows based Laptops and Desktops. Never mind that Windows based desktops are much more common. The MB, MBA, and 13'' RMBP dedicate most of their price to portability - not power. That doesn't make them bad machines, but it does make them bad gaming machines.

The Fan-Less Retina Macbook has a processor thats more expensive than a i7 processor found in a high end gaming rig (and 27'' Retina iMac); yet its one of the slowest processors Intel sells. Said i7 is not noticeably faster than the significantly cheaper and more common 'mid-range' i5.

Note the difference in GPU presence on Steam:
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=mac
Here the top 6 consists of Intel Integrated GPUs; and the share of GPUs outside them is very small. Also note that only around 3.5% of Steam users connect through OSX.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=pc
Here we find that there are more users with a GTX970 (one of the fastest GPUs on the market) installed than are running OSX. Most of the GPUs on top of this list are mid-range desktop GPUs, which are around 10x stronger than those present on the Mac list. Note that even if we assume Mac users are connecting through Bootcamp Windows, most GPUs such macs would use fail to even make the list.

Additionally, also note that the average CPU speed and average core count is much lower amongst Macs.

 

1. Steam has historically not recorded the dedicated GPUs in dual-GPU Macbook Pro's, leading to very inflated reporting of Intel GPUs. Nvidia 650M and 750M MBPs are much more common than the Steam stats would suggest.
2. Worldwide PC sales are skewed toward low-end laptops, just like Apple's Mac sales, so Janichsan is right. However the subset of gaming PCs remain skewed toward traditional desktops of the kind Apple haven't shipped since the end of G4/G5... so Exhale is also right!

Basically the gaming subset of the PC market is very different to the Mac market - more desktops means more full-fat CPUs and GPUs and as this is the bigger market it remains the target for AAA games developers. That is part of the reason why Mac gaming remains a niche despite Apple's increasing Mac market share.

 

We can still detect machines that could carry them on the statistics (again, know the hardware); and it remains a low figure. Never mind that the 650m and 750m aren't exactly fast (don't confuse the M variants for their desktop variants - the desktop variant is many times faster).

And I don't disagree. But again, its important to realise that price != performance in laptops. Apple favours ULV processors; cheap machines cannot afford them since there is a premium, so they go with 'M' range processors instead. The same class the 15'' RMBP uses. Particularly true for people that are looking for a cheap-ish laptop capable of occasional games.

Doesn't matter that its an i3, an 'M' class will still beat an i7 'ULV' through the courtesy of having greater thermal headroom.

 

I've worked at Frontier, Feral and now Epic for nearly a decade, on a range of AAA games for Mac & console - I know the difference between the mobile and desktop GPUs all too well. The dedicated mobility parts may only be at most half as fast as the 300W monsters designed for the PC gaming crowd but that still makes them about twice as fast as Intel integrated GPUs.

No - you can't tell from the stats how many of the Intel equipped Macbook Pros (both Retina and non) also have an Nvidia 650M or 750M. These two Nvidia GPUs are especially under-represented in the Steam stats and are *far* faster than any Intel GPU. The discrete GPU Macbook models are much more popular than these stats would have you believe - they are the overwhelmingly most popular Mac for gaming in my experience.

The point I was alluding to was that most AAA WinPC games don't support laptops because the intended target audience runs desktops and towers with full-fat 300W GPUs. Apple effectively stopped shipping an equivalent machine for gaming enthusiasts/prosumers when they moved from the PowerMac G5 to the Intel Mac Pro.

The difference between Mac & PC laptop processors at the low-end is a bit sterile - those types of machine rarely have discrete GPUs (Mac or PC) making them unsuitable for gaming anyway. At the high end the 15" rMBP actually uses a 47W i7-4870HQ CPU and the most obvious equivalent, the Razer Blade Pro, uses a similar but slower 47W i7-4720HQ CPU. By contrast the Razer Blade Pro has the faster Nvidia 970M GPU rather than the AMD M370X.

 

?
Mac Pros up to 2012 models can accommodate a fast and power-hungry GPU just as well as a PCIe G5.

 

Its half the fast if you're getting the x90 parts. The x50 parts (and x60) parts are nowhere near as fast, and the Haswell Iris Pro is only slightly slower than the 750m as I recall.

No, but the stats do give good idea of which machines are MBAs, 13'' RMBPs, and 15'' RMBPs. And from that, we can obtain a optimistic maximum. For example, 9.17% of the machines carry a HD5200 - Iris Pro - which is only carried by the 15'' RMBP. Thats the only laptop which can also carry a dGPU.

The HD4000 is harder to make heads or tails of - since it uses a GPU found both in an older MBA, along with an older 13'' MBP and 15'' MBP. Though of those, only the 15'' MBP is dGPU capable (a 650m).

Machines carrying a HD5000, HD5100, HD6000, HD6100 cannot carry a dGPU.

 

Forgetting about the iMacs, aren't we?

 

That depends on what you compare too - obviously a 650M will be a lot slower than a 680 GTX, but it'll be around half as fast as a desktop 650 GT. You are right though, it'd be nice if we could have the faster parts...

Also the Intel Iris Pro ends up being noticeably slower than the 650M in actual games despite the claimed performance, I was over-egging by saying half, that's more applicable to the HD series, but certainly enough that even the low-end discrete AMD/Nvidia GPUs are substantially better for gaming.

That's a fair analysis - and you could assume that a smaller proportion are the 2012 MacBook Pro, but you can't know for sure. Certainly the iMacs & 15" MacBook Pro is more popular that it appears in Steam's survey from internal game stats I've seen, which makes me believe that AAA Mac gaming is only a part of the larger Steam-using Mac community. On PC I'd suggest the majority of Steam users are AAA gamers, hence why the emphasis on desktops and faster GPUs. It isn't a like-for-like comparison as you end up looking at 2 very different markets.

All that means games like Beyond Earth: Rising Tide which scale well on the Mac (well done Aspyr!) are often better bets to port than the latest AAA shooter.

 

True but they were firmly marketed as workstations by Apple - with ECC memory and workstation CPUs and a bit pricier than the PowerMacs they replaced. All I was saying was that the last tower with anything like the 'consumer'-level internals PC gamers run was the PowerMac G5 - not that you could use a Mac Pro.

 

The first Mac Pros were cheaper than the last-generation G5s. I know because I purchased one (posting from it right now).

 

I wonder how big % of Macs sold are laptops. 80%? Even 90%? I'm at uni and I have a Macbook Air and so does half of the class. But I don't know anyone who has bought an iMac recently. I used to have an iMac but the games released by Aspyr and Feral (props to you guys though) never really worked on it anyway due to the low-end GPU.

 

No, their GPUs are already correctly identified - since they doesn't use the GPU switching that can cause Steam to get a bad reading.

 

Well, the you are in fact forgetting about the iMacs, specifically those with only the Intel HD 4000 and the Iris Pro.

 

They don't alter the GPU distribution statistics by hiding a stronger GPU behind a weak one.

The entire point of the analysis was to demonstrate how we can figure out the limit of where a dGPU was present in a machine - but not reported. None of the iMacs report an integrated GPU when a dGPU exists. In other words, they only contribute to making Steam's statistics more correct.

 

I can only speak from the UK prices - the entry level PowerMac G5 had an RRP of £1399 in 2005 but the entry-level Mac Pro was RRP £1699 in 2006. This may not have been true elsewhere of course. They were/are fabulously robust machines - as you'd expect of workstations