this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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If they want to be serious about this, they need games. Not only a handful that they proudly announce at the September event every year, but most/all major AAA titles from day one.
Then, if they want to reach as many people as possible, they need to offer an affordable product that has enough power to properly play games. Sure, it's nice that the MacBook Air can do some light gaming and it's quite impressive for a device without a fan. But the GPU of the base M2 doesn't really cut it for triple A titles, and 8 GB of RAM in the base configuration won't motivate developers to port their games over, especially as it's both system and graphics memory. Developers already complain about the Xbox Series S, and it comes with 10 GB.
So I highly doubt we'll see more than the usual MacBook Pros with M3 Pro/Max, that sure can do some gaming, but are also $2,000+ devices.
They could piggyback off of the work Valve has been doing with Proton and WINE, but that would mean the Apple needs to implement Vulkan support, because translating Vulkan to Metal isn't a perfect solution. I don't see Apple embracing Vulkan any time soon; they have a really bad case of "not invented here" syndrome.
They already have Rosetta 2 for x86 emulation, so that part is taken care of already.
I don't know about Proton, but Crossover for Mac still exists, and according to the programme database on their website seems to have a decent hit rate for games.
Crossover is made by Codeweavers, who are the main contractor for Proton and the biggest contributor to Wine.
WINE isn't the limiting factor here. Most games rely on either DirectX, OpenGL, or Vulkan, none of which Apple supports.
On Linux, we have translation layers for DirectX in the form of DXVK and VKD3D, and native driver support for both OpenGL and Vulkan.
Apple has to rely on translating Vulkan to Metal with tools like MoltenVK, but Metal isn't 100% feature-compatible with Vulkan.
Devs also need to consider if they want to port stuff to a different architecture.
It all boils down to whether or not porting to the platform is going to make you a buck.
Apple is now basically telling devs, don’t port to the Mac, port and build for iPhone 15 hardware and up. It’s not going to run Cyberpunk max out, but it’s beefier than a Switch, connects to displays and PS / Xbox controllers out of the box, and iOS has an installed base that dwarfs consoles.
And if you port to the iPhone, moving that game to other Apple silicon devices is easy.
Seems like the play is to leverage the iPhone to get console quality games on Apple’s hardware.
The AppStore is a cash cow, and the gaming category is, by far, the biggest part of the App Store. Last time I heard from some colleagues there, that category of the store has like 5x the staff as the other categories.
They have the traffic and reach, they just need hardware that can run better games on a mobile hardware. And it looks like that’s the play they’re trying to make with the iPhone 15 and tools to demo port performance.
I’m about to show you why Apple is the most valued company in the world. Here we have Internet Guy explaining everything Apple needs to do to be serious about gaming. It’s fairly PC / console based perspective and leans very hard on AAA titles. Okay. Got it. That’s a point of view.
Meanwhile, Apple is already earning more money on gaming than Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, or Activision - combined (source). Apple doesn’t care at. all. about what Internet Guy has to say, doesn’t care if anyone says it’s “just” mobile games, or “just” because of the iPhone. They laugh all the way to the bank and back again. They aren’t Internet Guy’s favorite and never will be, but they win the revenue game and gaming is just one tiny part of what they do. This is why they’ve become so insanely rich. They’re very very successful at the business they’re in and don’t GAF about anyone else’s perceptions.
So…let’s maybe say they are already serious and might become even more serious with upcoming products.
The article (and me) is obviously talking about triple A/"console quality" games. I'm well aware that they make a lot of money selling in-app purchases in repetitive puzzle games.
To be fair the 8GB of RAM works a lot differently compared to x86 architecture. You can squeeze a lot more out of SOC 8GB. Unless they announce something amazing tonight, I’ll be sticking with my M1 16GB Mini.
Right, but the latency of the swap is much quicker. So in essence you can squeeze more out of 8GB when optimized properly. Obviously memory is memory, but how that memory can be used is one of the keys to the M architecture.
You’re not getting more out of 8gb, you’re getting more out of the swap speed. its hitting the SSD at that point and you’re going to be sharing the bandwidth on those lanes with whatever else needs the SSD during that time
That’s what I said lol
Ah I think my brain just interpreted what you said differently.
That won't matter much though. For productivity that setup will work quite well, but for gaming where you need data from memory ASAP and consistently fast, even those SSD swaps will cause jittering, especially if it's also shared with the GPU.
I see lot of discussion justifying 8gb vs higher. I think we can go round and round around this topic all day. But thing is ram is cheap just fucking put more ram in apple. Freaking base steam deck is selling for 350dollars? Has 16gb ram and apple device will cost at least 1000 dollars just put in more ram. They can always make more money by selling higher storage options.
No it doesn't. Apple just leverages their very fast SSDs as a substitute when RAM runs low.
There are some advantages to Apple's RAM setup, but that mainly comes down to latency and bandwidth to some extent. Then they can do things on the OS level like memory compression and clever swapping, but as far as I can tell they don't do anything super special.
8 GB is definitely fine for light multitasking with office, mail and browser apps, but big triple A titles are a different beast. There is no magic that Apple can use to make a scene require less (V)RAM. All textures, models etc. in the scene need to be in memory. A texture doesn't magically take less memory on Apple Silicon than on a PlayStation 5.
Current games on (Windows) PCs are sometimes struggling with an 8 GB GPU, and with the 8 GB Apple Silicon Macs, these 8 GB are the whole system RAM. There is an OS with services and other apps running, so at best the game gets 7 GB of memory (probably less, even when most of the rest is swapped out) for both game logic and as video memory. Developers won't downgrade/"optimize" their games for this target, especially since the marketshare is minuscule.
So I stand by what I said: if Apple is serious about gaming, they need to upgrade the base spec of all models from 8 to 16 GB. Right now upgrading from 8 to 16 GB costs about as much as an Xbox Series S. Imagine you want to play games on your Mac once they finally come out in somewhat relevant quantities only to realize that you got the 8 GB base model that struggles with most games, and you can't upgrade it. They need to make every Mac as compatible as possible with these games, as their marketshare is too low as it is.