@@kibabyte I did consider that, but I only have one Macbook Pro, and that's holding up my Switch. I guess maybe I could buy a second one, I mean it is already the right size to sit ontop of my current Macbook Pro, whereas the Switch looks kinda silly sitting ontop like that.
I was this close to buying the M1 MacBook Pro. Gaming was the reason I changed my mind and never looked back. I wonder how many people felt the same, and whether Apple would ever manage to win us over.
Funny coz I was the same lol back in 2015 I wanted to game on PC. My mac... Was not an option. I installed windows on bootcamp and started gaming with amd reasonably well. But then I started to get used to windows, and bought a legit gaming laptop. since than I never went back to apple
This is the best breakdown on this subject in a single video. I think you're right, that the management doesn't realize what the issue actually is. It's not about getting game devs to port things at this point. It's proving that the Mac is a stable ecosystem for games. A good first step would be to have some sort of translation layer for 32bit libraries, since a lot of games specifically have that. Libraries having backwards compatibility would go a long way in building trust. I didn't say re-building, because Apple has never had that trust the same way Microsoft did. Not to mention, it would go a long way in making things that are currently - "this will never work again on Mac" - and fixing it. I, and a lot of other developers I know, stay in the Windows environment because it's stable. And I don't mean like, "oh Windows doesn't crash." I mean, Windows doesn't fundmentally *change* its internals. Shit, we bitch when Microsoft changes a function in .NET *slightly.* What I appreciate about MacOS is that the desktop doesn't change. I love that it's the same thing it's been since OSX, really, with new things added on. I don't like that Windows' UI has changed. I *do* like that .NET 3.0 still works on Windows 11. I *do* like that old sound libraries from 1998 still work on Windows 11, if you tinker enough (granted that's an extreme use case.) My apps don't randomly break from OS to OS version. Microsoft takes great care not to break userspace. With MacOS, the guts have changed so much that I was excited to find out midis still worked natively. 32 bit libraries are gone. Apple's frameworks are far behind everyone else's in some ways. Swift is hidden behind some obscure wall that you have to go somewhere other than Apple to find good documentation on it. Their graphic APIs are not well documented, etc, etc. I *remember* the PowerPC era. Games came out for Windows and Mac at a pretty even tilt during this era. Anything you could play on Windows, you could play on the PowerPC in MacOS. Now you can't even play shit from the PowerPC era on a modern Mac, and you're probably better off trying to find a source port or running a GOG version through a translation layer. Apple switching architectures didn't initially destroy that trust, but god damn if it didn't add to it. And Apple has fundamentally always been at odds with game devs, because game development as a rule of thumb doesn't really "advance" in the same way other programming disciplines do. Apple loves to leave old stacks behind. Game devs will stick on a specific version of a tool that they're using and never move away from it if they don't have to, most times, because it works for their creative flow. It's the same thing with musicians, but Apple has less control over their toolsets. The best Mac gamers can hope for here is that Apple gets their head out of their ass on this particular subject, and works on a tool to translate these older programs to run on modern MacOS. That alone would incentivize a lot of game developers to take a second look at MacOS. And the best bet there is to create a translation layer that makes it easy for Devs to target. They also need to develop this as a *stable* framework, that even if it's the 1.0 of the framework, will still work on their OS in 10 years. Which Apple has *never* guaranteed. And is what is currently shooting them in the foot. I think another way Apple could potentially fix this would be with their universal packaging system, in that, each App is it's own "environment." Therefore the App never breaks as long as a Mac can read the package. As long as the hardware instruction sets are there, it could fix it. Similar to how Flatpaks/AppImages/Snaps run in Linux. There would never be a worry for me, as a dev, that my app is going to randomly break, and I'm going to have people screaming at me and opening tickets. Either way, this was a great video. Thank you. One day, I hope I'll be able to daily drive a Mac and *not* have to regularly switch to Windows for various things. But. Today is not that day.
purely out of interest: from a stability pov (I am talking about the one you described here), which one do you think is better from a game dev pov currently: macOS or Linux Desktop
Man and I complain when an older game doesn't work on windows lol, imagine having your whole mf os and all it's apps faced out and turned incompatible with what's new
This is so true. Apple's commitment to gaming has been extremely halfhearted and spotty. They keep announcing these new "Gaming on Mac" things but then they ignore them for years
I mean it makes much more sense for them to commit to it now that you don't have to spend in excess of £3000 just to get playable frame rates in AAA games, at least now games are accessible to the majority of the user base and not around or less than 10%.
@@thebuddercweeper You do know you don't have to run the games at max settings, right? 99% of the games you find on PC were either developed first with consoles in mind or will eventually get ported there anyways. Xbox Series X is what, $500? A high end gaming PC may have a CPU that costs close to that amount and a GPU that is pricy enough to buy 2 consoles and three full games. But there are also computers that are comparable to what the current gen consoles offer for like $800-1200. And the flexibility in terms of parts selection is insane, and you aren't stuck with a given config for the lifetime of the machine. Drop in another SSD, swap out the GPU or RAM, etc.
@@thebuddercweeper "I mean it makes much more sense for them to commit to it now that you don't have to spend in excess of £3000 just to get playable frame rates in AAA games" your words.
I have had a Mac as my main gaming computer from about 2007 to 2017. I have used a Mac since 1997. I think my 2010 Mac Pro, with GTX1080, 32 GB RAM, upgraded X5690 CPU and PCIe SSDs still runs more Mac games than a modern Apple silicon Mac. Nearly my entire Steam Library runs on my 2010 Mac. In OSX. A few more things like GTA5 run in bootcamp. But since Metal, dropping 32bit and moving to ARM Apple gaming has been horrible. I moved to Windows in 2021. After more than a decade, I have given up on Mac gaming.
And this is why Apple gaming dies, because Apple likes to depreciate things very often and very quickly. They ditched the original Rosetta after like a year, and then they dropped 32 bit support and OpenGL stopped getting updated (why???). Even Metal doesn't get that many features updates, to be honest. After that, I was done with OS X, but my brother keeps saying that every time he updates he finds more of his apps don't work anymore. How can the Mac be a good gaming machine when every game needs constant updates in order to work at all?
Same boat for me. I ditch my 2009 Mac Pro in favor of a dedicated gaming pc in 2017. Once my Mac games stopped working in Catalina, that was the nail in the coffin. Now I just have a Mac Studio as my daily and my dedicated gaming rig. I could be interested in trying AAA games on the studio but why bother if I can just play it better on my pc. Secondly I picked up the Ally for on the go gaming instead of getting a Mac book pro or equivalent gaming laptop.
Valve's effort with proton perfectly shows the level of commitment needed to get a foothold in the gaming space. Steam Deck would have been a flop if Proton was there for developers to implement like the porting toolkit
I certainly agree with the premise that apple needs to figure out a more cohesive business strategy for getting gaming on the Mac to become a real, viable business for developers to get into. That said, that still can’t happen without proper tools to get their titles running on ARM, which they just started providing. It looks like they’ve done a great job of creating tools that highlight the compute performance of their laptops, but they need to have a better performance angle for their desktops and needs a better solution for distributing games on their platform.
the biggest issue that affected gaming on massive scale was cutting opengl and 32-bit support. Many friends of mine just cut ties with Apple because of this decision and went either Linux or Windows.
Apple can't generate money from games unless its from Apple Arcade, that's why they are so passive. They are not the traditional PC vendor that needs to make better components for gamers so they can sale year after year.
Apple can generate money from games, but they're too passive. Sony spends 220 million dollars on their latest first party titles. Microsoft spends billions to buy game studios. Apple spends, well probably some millions for the yearly Mac game they port, but people don't invest in a gaming platform for one AAA game per year.
They absolutely can generate money from games, it’s just not that easy. The games themselves don’t pay Apple, it’s the customers that come with the games. For a lot of people, not being able to play their favorite games on a Mac is more or less the only remaining reason not to switch to a Mac, especially since the hardware has become really great, and even kinda affordable in comparison.
Apple Arcade seems full of toy games for children. I can't find anything worth playing. At least Call of Heroes 2 runs in my Mac M2 just fine - a proper grown up game.
*it's from (contraction of "it is" or "it has") its = possessive *Arcade. That's (to fix your comma splice run-on) *sell (verb) sale = noun (and pronounced slightly differently)
I was gaming on a mac. In fact, paradoxically, because when I was gaming on a mac, I haven't played the best games worth playing yet, I had an absolute blast gaming on a mac as some of those games did work on it, mostly but not exclusively in windows over bootcamp. Now I have a vastly superior as a gaming machine PC (inferior in every other way), and I have only comparable quality of an experience overall, simply because the games left to play aren't as good in departments other than graphics, resolutions, and frames per second. It's a pure coincidence created by the timing of the events, however. Point being, one, there are amazing games out there for everyone, whether they value competition and the game game part of the game, or they value experiences, stories, character development, world building, role playing, escapes from reality, playing with friends and social and/or para-social relationships, whether they are fast or slow, have a couch and a TV, or a laptop, or a desk with a computer on it - everyone will find something deeply enjoyable in gaming space, if they try. And two, games just working is far more important, than anything else like ultra-high FPS extravaganza (albeit it is nice), or retina resolutions (for text - YES, for games - not as important), etc. Apple needs to bring games to the mac. Macs make very good computers. They are being handicapped by being unable to deliver soon to be leading form of entertainment. And that's a damn shame.
All the things you said need to happen and I don't even own a Mac. It would increase the knowledge and experience of developers with ARM based systems, and prove that you can have a balance of upper mid range gaming with the gains in power efficiency. With greater market competition and accessibility everyone wins. Of course, this will never happens because the executives, at best, play one game ever, so I think that is why they continue the cycle of "look, here is a game!"
minor thing about the performance data you presented at around the 2 and a half minute mark, it seems that these results would look even worse on the M series chips if you showed data that would more easily show frametime data i.e. stutters. The continuous graphs you showed running ingame seem to be stuttering quite often (according to the graphs)
It does't help that Apple tends to refuse to support cross-platform APIs like Vulkan to make development easier and insist on everyone using only their own APIs and tools. (Microsoft isn't super great in that regard either with e.g directx but they have the marked share for it)
Yes. Apple should make Vulkan work well on both Intel and ARM Macs. Apple should make sure as many games on Steam run on Mac. Especially current "Mac games" on Steam as a lot of those were developed for x86 and run poorly or not at all on Apple silicon. So they will probably do a walled garden, Metal only, a few AAA titles solution that nobody cares about.
There is a reason, and it has to do with bandwidth and sections of metal that were deprecated. If you want 4 M3 Ultra cards in your Mac Pro, then some graphics APIs just aren't going to work.
@@retrocomputing No, but power efficiency isn't that relevant with portable gaming as you might assume, just take a look at the switch, steam deck or any gaming laptop. Most people considers "portable gaming" as you being able to sit wherever you want inside your house. Still close to an outlet.
@@retrocomputing It shouldn't even be related. Graphics API is just an abstraction layer to talk with GPU and requires support from hardware manufacturers or some serious reverse engineering. Things matter are how GPU manufacturers would utilise it. DirectX 11, for example, runs poorly in so many graphics processors outside Nvidia. Vulkan is quite easy to adopt on many hardware types because of how simple (yet complicated to use) it is, but Apple refuses to add a support for it.
They also need to optimize their OS for gaming a little bit, recently in the beta they added the option to disable mouse acceleration (finally) but there's still work to do, for example If you have 2 monitors, the game's cursor goes thru the borders of the main screen and appears for a bit in your secondary screen and gets kinda stuck in the 2nd screen.
Does Apple have a VP of gaming? Perhaps that would be a role to create to tie all the things together and make Apple Arcade a Steam-competitor. I'd love to game on my Mac, but gaming on my PC is just such a more smooth experience.
Game devs must also be looking at the loyalty of Mac Users and seeing that as a good thing. If you create a game as a service for a Mac you'll have a very long lasting user base because Apple's customers are so so loyal and keep buying their products.
Being able to emulate games with my air makes me think by 2025 there will be good games for the mac, not a wide variety but okayish games, by 2030 we will have a steam page for mac. and by 2040 or so the full transition will be completed. These machines are just too powerful to avoid gaming anymore.
It still doesn't outweigh the major userbase which is on Windows PC platforms. Larger paid userbase is much more important than small group of loyal users
@@phillipgoat00 The power of the system is almost completely irrelevant. The question is, whether the users of the specific system want to play games or not. Currently, the majority of PC gamers are on Windows, and that's not changing anytime soon. People buy Macs to do office work, not to play videogames.
I know it's inconvenient but if you're wanting to game on an ARM Mac, Asahi Linux is the main way to go right now. They've managed to get full x86 translation on ARM and once they've ironed out some bugs they'll have the full Windows game back catalogue just like PC Linux does. CrossOver is a Mac app that aims to do the same but it's not free.
I remember the good old days when AAA games came to the Mac thanks to the Quake III and Unreal T engines… And also when Tomb Raider II appeared… Hope this times will come back. Thanks for your work!
My M2 Air serves as the main work machine especially since I'm highly mobile on weekdays. Did little gaming on my M2 Air (X-Plane 12 and Subnautica) which runs nowhere near 60 fps but still works very well. The rest games especially AAA titles still play on a dedicated gaming PC.
Imagine apple not depreciating all other graphics tech in Mac OS in exchange for metal that move alone is probably what killed mac os gaming that and culling 32 bit mode which purged a good bit of Mac OS games
I keep beating on the Mac gaming drum with a similar take, Apple can’t take a field of dreams approach. The porting toolkit is fascinating as it’s so close yet so far. Not supporting Vulkan native or creating at the very least a hyper optimized translation layer like MoltenVK is just rough.
One of the worlds most popular games; Minecraft, works incredibly well on Mac and I’ve made a name for myself testing and proving that. Buts a crying shame so much on the Macs new potential is not being capitalised. I really hope they build a dedicated department will stuffed with cash to make this a different story
It brings me great pain to watch you use the built in keyboard and track pad on the Macbooks. I really hope developers get in on this because as much as I love my gaming PC, I hate windows so much. I used a 2012 21" iMac to play games for over 5 years before I switched to PC. I miss macOS so much.
I'm quite confused by the idea that the Bose QC45 (last updated in 2017) is still your gold standard in noise cancellation. There have been plenty of advances in ANC capabilities since then.
Valve tried the "If you build it they will follow it" approach with the Steam Machines running Linux and it flopped hard so they made Proton to get the games working on Linux.
If you ever make a second version of this video, could you tell us how the Mac Minis do? They look like a possible contender but I don’t know how to measure them.
I actually first really started to (mentally) shift to being a PC gamer after playing games on my MacBook Pro back in 2010 and on. Which is wild because it wasn't good at gaming and the game I played most was TF2. Which I used the trackpad for for an embarrassingly long time. But it happened to be a perfect storm of other factors that got me to start changing my thinking when it came to having. Which ended up being very frustrating because of how limited Macs were and are when it comes to gaming. But I still ran with it for a decade because that's what I had to work with. I do think there's a bit of an issue with Mac gaming as well where the current state of AAA games is to release half-baked and buggy, which I'm sure Apple doesn't like to see on their platform, as well as being horribly unoptimized and inefficient with regards to storage requirements, which is an area that Macs fall down in (in that it's not user upgradable outside of external storage and buying more on the first purchase is extra expensive.) So we'll see if Macs every truly catch up without something like cloud gaming becoming the norm
the m2 air lets you game whenever wherever without care, and that's a pretty strong niche to hold. you're right on with the strategy criticisms, and it'd be a shame for this kind of product to exist but ignore that potential. and it's entirely silent while it does it, some might not care, but the lower the ambient noise floor, the more I'm gonna enjoy anything I'm trying to focus on
I've been playing Diablo IV with max settings and 30-60fps on my M1X MBP. Works perfectly, I thought there was no way I could get it to work after Apple Silicon. Really hope people get their act together and change the culture so gamers who happen to have a Mac have real options.
yes, but my nitpick is that other displays are better than the ghosting MBP screen and its notch/16:10 aspect ratio. There are a lot of killer gaming laptop displays these days
@@imelliam And why would developers spend untold amounts of resources developing for something that a) isn't free to do so b) holds like 15% of the desktop OS market share as of February 2024, or 1.3% of Steam users according to the Steam Hardware Survey (same time period), and c) has more in common with smartphones than it does other PCs or even the current generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony? Thor of Pirate Software said that porting just ONE of his games was such a huge undertaking for him and this workload accounted for 0.02% of that game's sales. For every five THOUSAND copies, just one of them is for a Mac.
They also need to create partnerships with the lead engine developers, such as Epic and Unity. Integrate the porting tool kit into these engines and get the ball rolling.
I do game on my MacBook Air m1, however only fairly simple and undemanding games like game dev tycoon or papers, please. It's a good experience, barring some problems with scaling on the 16:10 display in gdt. I also do like playing civ VI on my m2 Mac mini, which can get somewhat laggy in the end phase, but that's because I have a base model with 8 gb ram. Overall, not something I'd play AAA games on (I managed to play through the whole batman Arkham city), but for casual games it's fine
A while back, Apple had a serious hardware failure. While creating the new graphics engine for the M2, they hit a thermal dead end. So, Apple released a whole bunch of engineers to go do something else at another company, then they joined Blender and sent the remaining engineers to "go and help" get metal working with Blender. Eventually, they did fix the heat problem, but by that time the 3nm line at TSMC was busy making things that go boom. So, Apple pushed forward with their half step M2 (M2 processor + M1 graphics) for this year. If things work out and there is a TSMC next year, the M3 should be the gaming platform we have always wanted. Of course, TSMC sending engineers to the Arizona desert to "help" build their plant does not make one feel optimistic.
I think you're confusing the A16 with M2. M2's GPU is significantly faster than M1's. Even if the fundamental architecture of the GPU cores didn't change, there are 25% more cores on the base M2 (18.75% more on M2 Pro and above) and those cores are clocked 7.7% faster. That makes for a 35% higher theoretical throughput on the M2 and 28% higher throughput on the M2 P/M/U. And in some workloads like Blender the M2 series were found to be anywhere from 75% to >2x faster. Even if at peak power draw the M2 was capable of drawing 30% more power, it was still more energy efficient than the M1 due to the performance increase. However, it's the A16 that improved on the GPU of its predecessor by a very small amount. While as you mentioned there have been rumors floating around about Apple engineers' blunder on the A16's GPU rumoredly causing them to fall back on the A15's GPU again and delaying the new GPU design, I think it's just as possible that they delayed the design due to TSMC's process node delays and 4nm not being a very big improvement over 5nm+/N5P, which means the new GPU design was probably not very efficient, or not very cheap to implement, or both. N4, despite the name being "1nm" less than N5P, only increases density by 5%. N4's improvement was so small in fact that while implementing an LPDDR5 interface on the A16 to increase mem. bw by 50%, they had to lower the system level cache from 32MB on the A15 to 24MB, which in some cases means slight performance regression or at least stagnation. Though I wouldn't be surprised if this decrease in cache amount was planned when the A15 was also in the design process, as it felt weird for A15 to not have adopted LPDDR5 back when it was released and that Apple might have given the A15 32MB of cache to compensate for that.
I do game on a Mac. Hell I am even "old enough user" to remember glorious days when Valve announced Steam for Mac at the Apple Keynote. However I am still skeptical about Mac gaming though I am trying to support it. Maybe, one day. We will see.
In your frame rate per dollar, to compare apples to, well, Apples, you should be comparing the $500 M2 Mac Mini (which should perform better than the Air) or better yet, the M2 Pro Mac Mini.
For a random PC you can replace the graphics card for future needs, for Macs you can't. And so on. That's a problem for Macs because it's "PC gaming" that we're talking about. So Mac Mini is not even interesting. I cannot imagine that PC gamers that buy a PC that they can upgrade wanna but a Mac Mini instead. Not even Mac Mini Pro. Macs are great for "content creation". Not for gaming. Macs - can - do gaming but not great at it.
yeah i thought it was weird to use a macbook air and then the mac pro. like a laptop that doesnt even have a fan is obviously not meant for sustained load, and then the mac pro is purely a terrible buy for 98% of people vs the mac studio because most won't need those PCIe slots. mac mini and mac studio are better apples-to-apples (hah) comparisons
@@cjeelde The fix for this is well... selling your mac mini and buying a new one. Which could be perceived as being no worse value than a similar desktop system assuming apple actually keeps upgrading M substantially each other year. They have pretty good resale value.
I was a Mac gamer for many years. I remember in college playing counter strike, global offensive, guild wars 2, and League of Legends. The 2012 15-in MacBook pro was my go-to until the computer died.
I’ve recently gotten into playing games on my Intel Mac, but only really old games (Portal, Half Life, The Witcher), and that’s all I would want out of a proper gaming on Mac experience. Anything new and AAA, I would only want to play on my console.
I would definitely agree. The infuriating thing is that Resident Evil Village and No Mans Sky, although very critically acclaimed, definitely *feel* like console games, which makes me so uninterested when they're announced on the mac. On the other hand, support for older franchises like The Witcher, Portal and Half Life, which almost exclusively make sense to play on mouse and keyboard, don't even get silently ported in the background. Weirdly, it feels like Apple is trying to compete with the console market, when at that point, the console versions of these games would clearly be superior with the ergonomics of a controller, and being able to lay far back on the couch, starring at a big TV.
Supporting Vulkan and having better first party support for C++ would be a HUGE boost for Apple gaming. Having to port your code from C++ to Swift and even Vulkan games to Metal is a major hurdle to serious gaming. The other alternative is to encourage iOS games grow up and incentivize making them platform compatible with the Mac on launch. Ultimately I think the base model macs, and iOS/iPadOS, need to be powerful enough to play games at 1080p 60Hz for any major gaming support. Because the base models, and iOS devices, are going to be what the average college student or normie user buys. The best strategy probably will be to leverage iOS development to bring more games to the Mac. But Apple has to stop getting in pissing contests with companies like Epic, the most cutting edge game engine developer on the planet! Dropping Fortnite before the release of unreal engine 5 support was just dumb. You can’t claim to be interested in gaming and alienate Epic Games on your platform.
Not gonna happen. AI is huge these days, plus Apple vision pro also needs metal to be tuned to Apple’s demand at anytime. Vulcan is crap in comparison. Nobody uses it for AI, and Apple cannot modify it to adapt to new features quickly and effortlessly because it needs to work with iPhone, iPad, Apple TV where metal already does.
@@AaronFigFront AI is huge these days. But Apple isn't even a bit player in AI. Having an inferencing engine in a mobile device is somewhat useful, but the big money is in the server market. Right now Apple doesn't have anything that would be useful for the server market. Period. The type of AI engines Apple provides are for processing a pre trained Neural Network locally, not training a neural network. And their GPUs are generally are weaker than the competition's. A fully specced M2 pro with 19GPU cores is weaker than an AMD rx6600, a sub $200 GPU. Until Apple has a server solution that the big tech service providers are interested in they have nothing of interest for AI.
@@keco185 Not exactly first party support is it? And Unity is not a top tier game engine. It's a entry level game engine for developers without the experience to use something like Unreal or the ability to write their own as some studios do.
@@pweddy1 Apple has suddenly benefited from the open source community because of the *SUPER large* unified ram, which speed is as fast as vram. Some of the most popular LLM models can run locally on a m2 ultra. A single 4090 cannot do that. Even a single h100 is about half that.
I tried gaming on the Mac, its just not in the cards for Apple, they don’t want it bad enough to pivot to selling gaming macs as opposed to macs for creators. The only way I can see them marketing such a machine is them bragging about how you can design and build a AAA game and play it all on the same computer. Hence opening a gateway for gaming macs. For now, the Razer Blade 15 is my gaming pc, and the mac is my everything els.
I always spent most of my free time programming, not gaming. So I bought a Mac like I always did. And then I started playing a couple of games on the Switch, and now I’m suuuper-jealous of all the emulators and modding tools on Windows. Because modding combines programming-ish and games. But no. Never thought I’d regret not getting a Windows machine.
@@accountid9681 I only care about modding Breath of the Wild and, probably eventually Tears if the Kingdom. 😅 A very specific use-case. And the tools for modding them are not available on Mac. They are my special interest. I realise (now) that most people are more flexible with their games. But I can’t help thinking that if more games were on Mac, there would be more tools there as well. Even when Ryujinx can finally run these games well, the tools I need may never come. But I support people working on them, so hopefully that will pay dividends one day.
There already was something like a golden age for Mac gaming, that's from when Steam came to Mac until Apple cut 32bit support. It must be really frustrating for any game dev to work for Mac, not to mention users. On the PC I can still run the same games that would've been through 3 "cuts" by Apple already, nobody's going to update their 10 year old game every time Apple feels the itch to cut out legacy support again. For a short time in the mid 2010s I couldn't believe my eyes when I opened Steam on Mac and saw how many of the games I had bought on the PC side actually were ready to install in a native Mac version - for a short time I even believed one could actually live with just a Mac as a gaming platform. But with 32bit support at least 2/3 of my game library disappeared, that was probably the worse cut than the Apple Silicon switch which just sorted out a few more of the already meager library. You just can't rely on Apple for long time support, nor on game studios to play this stupid game and regulary re-port their games again and again. Also, every other platform than Steam would stand no chance on the Mac, Apple's App Store won't do it - but whether Apple would leave that yummy 30% cut to Valve - doubtful. Although, I doubt Valve's long-term support too under these conditions, I noticed even staples of games on Mac like the Sims aren't available for MacOS on Steam anymore, you have to get that elsewhere. Last but not least there's the issue of the high entry price for adequate gaming hardware, adequate for gaming meaning no base model, and the biggest issue everyone has with Apple is surely their upgrade prices for +8GB RAM or whatever, not to mention SSD space when today's games easily need >100GB.
I’ve somehow squeezed every last drop out of my 5,1 Mac Pro. I now re-enter the market for a new machine at the WORST possible time. I’m currently contemplating a 2019 Mac Pro with a 7900 XTX so I can game in Windows. I assume it’ll do 4k@120hz, but I can’t be certain. My other option is a Mac Mini + Windows machine and a monitor with a KVM. What to do?!
This video is gold. I think your "hot take" is pretty much on point. However I wouldn't say that macOS does not have a software issues as well. Apple still killed off OpenGL. They still don't intend to allow DirectX running on macOS, that's just the Game Porting Toolkit for devs. They still don't support Vulkan officially... So the only option for game developers is using Metal which the majority does not know, hasn't learned or doesn't care much about. I've seen videos of a developer using WebGPU because it runs cross-compatible on all modern desktop operating systems. Just like Vulkan should... but doesn't because of Apple. We've also seen game engines doing the heavy lifting of supporting all major platforms in the past. Have you tried to compare the Vulkan, OpenGL and DirectX ports of Unity for example... I tell you what, everything besides DirectX sucks because the developers from Unity do not care enough. It will be similar with Metal. DirectX or Vulkan will be used on Windows, Linux, maybe even on consoles (I think the PS5 uses something custom but XBox might just use DirectX 12) and macOS will need porting afterwards... likely with far less priority. So as long as Apple tries to enforce game developers to use their own tools besides the industry standard, I will only see a few ports and web games coming to macOS. But maybe I'm wrong...
Just watched the first 27 seconds so far. Resident Evil Village IS NOT a old game. Its actually a top of the line AAA game released just 1 year after its PC/Console release which is pretty amazing :D
True, but the standard title always shown in marketing is usually Shadow of the Tomb Raider, not quite as fresh anymore. Death Stranding isn't exactly new either. He was probably more referring to those titles.
@@skycubix8943 Cyberpunk at least has the one thing going for it that it's basically THE benchmark tool for everything nVidia, no other game on the market is using these high levels of raytracing etc., so some testers still think it's the best test for "future games" (although I doubt it). It's also constantly updated with new features.
The biggest hindrance to gaming on Mac is their monetization policy. Their App Store charges publishers 30% good luck convincing gaming publishers just hand over that kind of revenue.
Is that a Gigabyte M32U or M28U behind you? If so would love to know your settings. I find it’s a decent gaming monitor but you really need to dial in the settings to get it to look good.
Apple has no chance in the modern gaming ecosystem, their walled garden approach practically forces game devs to use unfamiliar tools, and APIs, if they want games, they need a partnership with unity or unreal, and they need to bring back openGL, as well as adding vulcan support, then, and only then will they have a chance.
OpenGL is DEAD. No one is using that for new games. This isn't a tooling issue. It's a marketing issue. No one wants to game on mac when they can play the same releases, better, on MUCH cheaper systems. Even if the big developers could port their games to macOS with ease, they'd still be behind the latest releases on Windows, and they'd run worse than on cheaper hardware - this is what has happened with PC games ported to console. Macs have always been about productivity.
The worst I think is they force devs to constantly update and port and port again every time they decide to cut out some legacy support. I can see compatibility issues coming with every major MacOS update, while in Windows it's still mostly possible to run a 20 year old game.
@@chrissoclone The ability to run ancient software on the latest Windows is so underappreciated! Even software and games going back to the 90s. If I want to a run a mac game from even 10 years ago, say a 32bit intel release. I can't. I'll need an emulator, which is iffy. 68k and PPC stuff is not too difficult to emulate, provided it's CPU only. But there's about a decades worth of software, from the late PPC era to the early intel era, which is basically unsable.
I had bootcamp on my mac27 and was successfully running GTA V and online for a couple years, then it just stopped working and with no support for bootcamp it was goodbye to GTA until I bought my PC laptop and fired the game back up on that. I love Macs and don't really spend all my time playing games but it is still annoying especially now when they have PC chips etc in them anyway.
The Mac of gaming already exists, it's called a PlayStation. It does precisely what Apple does for PCs. It's highly integrated, very easy to use, just works and has a bunch of desirable exclusives. As a bonus it just costs $500.
This is exactly why I love my 2019 Mac Pro which I purchased in 2022 seeing I only wanted Intel which goes along with it just like a normal PC. I did the same with my 2012 Mac Pro holding out for the announcement of trash can and the day of the announcement I bought the 2012 Mac Pro knowing it was the older version at that point. Call me old school but I needed and still do PCIe and back then had TBs of 10K rpm spinning rust which is now converted into solid state. Not to mention my CPU was the 8 core on the 2019 which is now a 16 core plus ram I keep adding when I see fit. I like macs but with a PC style approach. Prob why I’ve gravitated to the Mac Pro. Main use is music creation, also photo and video editor of the family. Hence the big library of photos, videos, documents of at least 12 people other then me. Then there’s my music samples, plug-ins, programs and the rest. That’s the macOS side of my needs. I also either have PC just for gaming (currently do) but with my 5,1 I used a SSD using the second sata port for another DVD drive which was my boot camp drive. Back then nvidia and apple played ball so I always had either the current x80 or last gens x80. My last one that I used in the 5,1 was a GTX980. Plus I would flash the firmware to support boot screen support and nvidia used to release drivers fairly regularly. First AMD card I ever owned was a RX580 when I decided to upgrade to Mojave as it was a better option then the GTX680 that was supported. Haven’t done bootcamp yet on the 7,1 yet as my PC still plenty full. Plus I prefer nvidia. Though would like to run a bunch of test on it with the W5700x Pro I have and my RTX4090. Haven’t been able to find anyone who has tried it yet. I will prob get rid of 4090 and use AMDs latest so it will at lease boot if installed into macOS Anyway I do believe this new model is a stop gap, they must of ran out of time or something similar.
@@ramp6727E-sport folks insist they can. And if you do it day and night, it's possible*. But for most it's placebo; And a marketing tactic that relies on "F.O.M.O". *Debatable (ad infinitum/nauseam).
I play FF14 on my M1 iMac. I used to play at 30 fps on Medium graphics until SE improved their official launcher and the fps shot up to 60 on high settings! So like you said the hardware performance is there!
@@VioletVolchok I would recommend the official launcher now that it is more optimized for MacOS than before. I've never used a MacBook Air, so I can't say if it would run FF14 well or not. I'm sure you can look online for reviews from people that have.
I want something like an iPad mini and switch hybrid - thin, light and power efficient to play proper games - controller could be detachable or not - and you could then dock it with your tv for an Apple Tv experience with games
This is the biggest reason I miss being able to install windows via bootcamp on my new M2 Max MBP. I have a gaming desktop, but I did like to go to friends places and play games together without lugging my big desktop around, bootcamp allowed me to do that. Sure I had to dial back settings and whatnot but I could get the game to run comfortably and have a fun time. I would really like for gaming to be taken seriously on the mac especially now that Apple Silicon has the much much better graphics than the intel integrated that preceded it on many macs prior.
I think Game Center should be re-tooled as the "entirely separate program" mentioned at 8:07 to distribute games if Apple ever did this. The app exists, people know about it, and it's easy to say "In the past Game Center was a great way to connect with friends on iPhone and Mac. Now it's the best place to get great games for your devices"
I agree with your overall argument - it really isn't a hardware or software issue. I expected to see a gaming oriented WWDC this year. That didn't happen. Not sure why? The AR/VR headset would have been a perfect opportunity. It may have something to do with the operation of the headset that or that Apple is betting that individual programers will come up with case uses for the headset. I think the developer program (which surprised me and may be a part of Apple's gaming plan) will help with a later event in the year. I am hypothesizing that we will see a gaming focus with either the iPhone event in September or a more broadly gaming event in October with a new M3 Mac or two. The iPhone/gaming event (whichever it is???) will come with Apple demonstrating new games, new ties to the gaming world (they may have bought a gaming company or two??) and an Apple TV ultra - with new type of chip with more memory and GPU processing - meant specifically for casual/more serious gamers. I believe this will have lidar gaming like the Microsoft Kinect allowing us to get off the couch and work out (fitness+) and game. Imagine being able to move your arms on the couch to raise the volume or change the channels. It will probably use the iPhone and/or iPad lidar camera to do this. If the TV ultra has its own camera, it will have a physical shutter to protect everyone's privacy. It will be a huge grab for the living room. Additionally, gamers will be able to do this with iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Macs. It will contest with or possibly replace the Switch and be a grab for casual gamers and move partway into the Switch, Xbox, and PS world. Timing pre-Christmas holidays (could be good)!
Baldur’s Gate 3 on an M1 Pro plays very decently and it’s an awesome game with 100’s of hours of content - I highly recommend the early access and the full release is coming within a few months.
The funny thing is that if they were to just make porting most of these to Apple Arcade, and do a discounted price of the games they’re offering instead of msrp, they’d easily gain the market share they need for proper footing.
I have a Macbook Pro 14" with M2 Pro and 32GB of RAM that I use for coding and web browsing. Lately an interesting thought came to mind if it is actually capable of running some of the games I occasionally play on my gaming PC. I might try it in the future.
with the benchmarks i would like to know what resolution since many of apples displays are over 2k pixels so it’s kind of subjective when certain people only game at 1080p or 1440p but with apple products your are stuck with 4k and higher and the performance penalty that comes with it
I do game on my M2 MacBook Pro via a mix of native Apple Silicon games, Rosetta 2 (which is surprisingly good), Parallels desktop / Windows 11 arm VM and Crossover (... Elite Dangerous). I am even dual booting Mac OS Ventura and Sonoma developer beta (later via an external TB3 SSD as games and VMs consume a lot of space on my internal 2TB SSD storage), so I can play around with the Game Porting Tool. The TB3 SSD is as fast as my internal SSD! Having done all this, it is still much more straightforward to install and run games on my Steam Deck!
Funny how UA-cam videos always have good timing to relatable events, just started trying out PCSX2 and AetherSX2 on my Mac yesterday, and it runs very well!
You also have things like DX/Vulkan APIs that are more mature than Metal API. Plus for PC you typically have access to DLSS or FSR or even XeSS that has a huge advantage over Apple's offerings.
Gamed on my Intel MacBook Air for the approximately 20 minutes that eGPUs were supported/championed. Also played a decent amount of older Valve games on Steam on the Mac before 32-bit software support was kicked to the curb.
i used to game on macbook pro 2009 ( i think) but it turned out it was the most defected mainboard ever. yes, my mainboard crashed, so i ended up selling it for scraps. Now i am afraid to use it to game again.
i used to play kerbal space program on my 2020 m1 macbook pro and id have to force the fans to run at 100%, run it at 50% resolution and have it plugged in but it was impressive. i don't think we should consider the air macbooks as capable though with their throttling.
The vision pro can't even provide a proper vr gaming experience I wish they didn't get rid of vulkan on the Mac I have a m1 iMac I don't think I could get any games running on that
I can see Apple reinventing their store and creating a new app / hub for gaming and doing it in their own style; the app icon would be a joystick and it’s simply just called “Games” or something, which is where Apple Arcade will be moved. With the powerful chips they’re designing, a decent gaming experience is totally possible.
I do recall setting up a network for playing Unreal Tournament on several different spec'd Macs back in the day. I did game a lot more on my iMac, but I haven't really bothered playing anything other than Starcraft II on my "newer" Apple kit.
7:40. Made me 😂. Really great video, man. Everyone at Apple should see it. Did not realize the gaming performance gap was as bad as that. Wow. And this is the year 2023?? Crazy.
i game on my 16" m1 bacbook pro i play oldschool runescape it makes the m1 work hard battery life drops to about 2 hours and it get hot ish a round 70c but putting the fans on manual at 60% drops the temp fast so its comfortable on your lap but it runs the game very well
I have been thinking of making the switch to Apple for the M2 Ultra... just yeah no dedicated game title to really showcase it. I would like a silent gaming behemoth.
I bought my first Mac a couple f years ago (MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 16 gb etc) after being a dedicated Windows guy for decades. I love the device and the OS. I am a gamer and have a MSI gaming laptop and a SteamDeck. Love them all. I would love to game better on my Mac. I use CrossOver when I can for those games that do not run under Rosetta with mostly good results, for those games that run under Crossover. I can use Parsec (hosted on my MSI laptop) on my MacOS to run games not supported with Crossover or able to run in Crossover and that don't display well on my SteamDeck (tiny text) when needed and if on a great wifi. When No Man's Sky came out running under Apple Silicon I downloaded it to my Mac on Steam (already owned the game for a couple of years) and it runs great. Now I can run it on my Mac and SteamDeck with the cross saves and I do it all the time. So the Mac has the ability to do wonderful things. Real games, not those in the App Store that want to keep selling you coins or what ever to pay and play but real games. But I may have a decision coming up very soon. Starfield releases next month. I suspect it will not run or not well on the SteamDeck initially if at all. My MSI gaming laptop I suspect will run it but I am not real confident it will be as great as I want. And I would bet real money it will not run under crossover at all. So, when it comes out I will buy it day one and install it on my MSI and we will see what we see. If it runs terrible, then I will pull the trigger on a new laptop. I would love to buy a new MacBook Pro with M2 Max with 32gb of memory and be done with it. But I suspect Starfield will not run under Rosetta and of course it will not be an Apple Silicon native game. So I may end up buying another PC gaming laptop for half the price of the Macbook I would want. Sad really, I would love the latest high end MacBook Pro as mentioned for all the other benefits it would give me but if I can't game on it with newer titles I just can't do it. If my existing MSI gamer runs it great then I can still wait things out and enjoy Starfield on my Mac via Parsec which maybe would be the best outcome for me at least. Just a few more weeks and I will know...
I loved my MacBook Pro 14". Great enclosure, (seriously) great trackpad, fast internals, battery life was brilliant, silent, cool to the touch. Sadly, I had to replace it with a PC laptop for 3 reasons - it wasn't fit for my professional workloads (software engineering), had issues with external displays, and it couldn't play games. While MacOS is serviceable for development (about as good as Windows), I was faced with the prospect of needing to carry two computers while travelling. One for work, one for play. I looked at buying a SteamDeck or ROG Ally but instead decided to replace my MBP with a Dell Precision laptop that could do both. The Dell is not as nice as the MBP but it's 90% the way there. The trackpad feels 80% as good, the screen is 60hz which is noticeably choppy and the battery isn't as long lasting - but I now just need to carry the one computer. I can also run Linux to get the optimal software development experience and Steam for gaming (dual boot for a backup). I held out for the Asahi project, hoping that I could eventually use Linux on the MBP where Proton/FEX would enable gaming - but that's years away from being a reality. The games porting toolkit is just further proof that Apple aren't serious about gaming on MacOS. Apple is prioritising vendor lock in over the experience of their customers and the utility of their platform. I hope they change their attitude one day, but until then, I had to jump ship
I did game a lot on my Macs… The 2012 15“ retina worked quite well in bootcamp and with the 2016 15“ I paired an eGPU (GTX 1080) that was great until 2021. Now I use a M1 Pro for work and have a 7950X + 4080 Workstation for CAD/FEM and gaming… I would love to game on my M-series macs, the hardware could do well….
Is there a specific reason why discrete gpus can't be paired to apple silicon via TB/usb4 or in the case of the mac pro pcie slot. Is it just lack of drivers or is there more to it?
Apple has started exactly a subscription based game distribution system where you can easily find exclusive games. It’s called Apple Arcade. It doesn’t work though because it lacks AAA titles, and, I believe, because you can’t own the games. I don’t feel like investing my time and money games that I am not sure I can revisit again in a few years because a platform owner decides to drop it from their subscription offering. Games are very different from movies and series in that sense (although this limited time offering is also becoming a problem on streaming platforms I believe).
I've been trying to run No Man's Sky on my M2 Max MBP since like early June and every time I load into a save the game crashes. Is it just because I'm running the beta?
My new motherboard went off to be tested and while it was gone I downloaded cities skylines on to my base spec M1 Mac mini, it ran ok but as my city started to grow it got slow and at times unresponsive to input even tho the simulation was still happening.. nice to know it can do it if I need it to…
I game on my Mac all the time. The closed lid of my Macbook Pro is the purfect surface to plonk my Switch onto.
Macbooks can be great mousepads as well, you know
@@skycubix8943 Only PRO :)
Could also emulate the switch on mac. Performance would be better lol
@@kibabyte I did consider that, but I only have one Macbook Pro, and that's holding up my Switch. I guess maybe I could buy a second one, I mean it is already the right size to sit ontop of my current Macbook Pro, whereas the Switch looks kinda silly sitting ontop like that.
@@notenoughmonkeys Understandable, have a great day!
I was this close to buying the M1 MacBook Pro. Gaming was the reason I changed my mind and never looked back. I wonder how many people felt the same, and whether Apple would ever manage to win us over.
Funny coz I was the same lol back in 2015 I wanted to game on PC. My mac... Was not an option. I installed windows on bootcamp and started gaming with amd reasonably well. But then I started to get used to windows, and bought a legit gaming laptop. since than I never went back to apple
Bought the strong m2 MacBook and I didn’t think of that
@@Carbon1344 Idk I'm a programmer. I bought an m2 max and gaming performance was if anything an after-thought.
Same, thats the sole reason i went with an ASUS ROG instead
I game on my MacBook all the time with Xbox cloud gaming. It works perfectly.
None of this would’ve been possible without both the Valve and the Linux community.
Wildly innacurate statement
@@danceyrselfkleen what? You realize that the game porting toolkit is literally just rebranded wine + Molten VK right?
and Codeweavers they contributed nearly 50% of the whole WINE code
@@danceyrselfkleenapple literally admitted it in their documentation they just repurposed the Linux wine
@@accountid9681 MoltenVK isn't involved but the funding of Wine development by Valve is still a huge deal.
This is the best breakdown on this subject in a single video.
I think you're right, that the management doesn't realize what the issue actually is. It's not about getting game devs to port things at this point. It's proving that the Mac is a stable ecosystem for games. A good first step would be to have some sort of translation layer for 32bit libraries, since a lot of games specifically have that. Libraries having backwards compatibility would go a long way in building trust. I didn't say re-building, because Apple has never had that trust the same way Microsoft did. Not to mention, it would go a long way in making things that are currently - "this will never work again on Mac" - and fixing it.
I, and a lot of other developers I know, stay in the Windows environment because it's stable. And I don't mean like, "oh Windows doesn't crash." I mean, Windows doesn't fundmentally *change* its internals. Shit, we bitch when Microsoft changes a function in .NET *slightly.* What I appreciate about MacOS is that the desktop doesn't change. I love that it's the same thing it's been since OSX, really, with new things added on. I don't like that Windows' UI has changed. I *do* like that .NET 3.0 still works on Windows 11. I *do* like that old sound libraries from 1998 still work on Windows 11, if you tinker enough (granted that's an extreme use case.) My apps don't randomly break from OS to OS version. Microsoft takes great care not to break userspace. With MacOS, the guts have changed so much that I was excited to find out midis still worked natively. 32 bit libraries are gone. Apple's frameworks are far behind everyone else's in some ways. Swift is hidden behind some obscure wall that you have to go somewhere other than Apple to find good documentation on it. Their graphic APIs are not well documented, etc, etc.
I *remember* the PowerPC era. Games came out for Windows and Mac at a pretty even tilt during this era. Anything you could play on Windows, you could play on the PowerPC in MacOS. Now you can't even play shit from the PowerPC era on a modern Mac, and you're probably better off trying to find a source port or running a GOG version through a translation layer. Apple switching architectures didn't initially destroy that trust, but god damn if it didn't add to it. And Apple has fundamentally always been at odds with game devs, because game development as a rule of thumb doesn't really "advance" in the same way other programming disciplines do. Apple loves to leave old stacks behind. Game devs will stick on a specific version of a tool that they're using and never move away from it if they don't have to, most times, because it works for their creative flow. It's the same thing with musicians, but Apple has less control over their toolsets.
The best Mac gamers can hope for here is that Apple gets their head out of their ass on this particular subject, and works on a tool to translate these older programs to run on modern MacOS. That alone would incentivize a lot of game developers to take a second look at MacOS. And the best bet there is to create a translation layer that makes it easy for Devs to target. They also need to develop this as a *stable* framework, that even if it's the 1.0 of the framework, will still work on their OS in 10 years. Which Apple has *never* guaranteed. And is what is currently shooting them in the foot.
I think another way Apple could potentially fix this would be with their universal packaging system, in that, each App is it's own "environment." Therefore the App never breaks as long as a Mac can read the package. As long as the hardware instruction sets are there, it could fix it. Similar to how Flatpaks/AppImages/Snaps run in Linux. There would never be a worry for me, as a dev, that my app is going to randomly break, and I'm going to have people screaming at me and opening tickets.
Either way, this was a great video. Thank you. One day, I hope I'll be able to daily drive a Mac and *not* have to regularly switch to Windows for various things. But. Today is not that day.
purely out of interest: from a stability pov (I am talking about the one you described here), which one do you think is better from a game dev pov currently: macOS or Linux Desktop
Holy essay
@@carstenb23And it’s so long most people won’t even bother to read it.
Man and I complain when an older game doesn't work on windows lol, imagine having your whole mf os and all it's apps faced out and turned incompatible with what's new
This is so true. Apple's commitment to gaming has been extremely halfhearted and spotty. They keep announcing these new "Gaming on Mac" things but then they ignore them for years
I mean it makes much more sense for them to commit to it now that you don't have to spend in excess of £3000 just to get playable frame rates in AAA games, at least now games are accessible to the majority of the user base and not around or less than 10%.
They have been too busy waxing their hipster mustaches.
@@thebuddercweeper You do know you don't have to run the games at max settings, right? 99% of the games you find on PC were either developed first with consoles in mind or will eventually get ported there anyways. Xbox Series X is what, $500? A high end gaming PC may have a CPU that costs close to that amount and a GPU that is pricy enough to buy 2 consoles and three full games. But there are also computers that are comparable to what the current gen consoles offer for like $800-1200. And the flexibility in terms of parts selection is insane, and you aren't stuck with a given config for the lifetime of the machine. Drop in another SSD, swap out the GPU or RAM, etc.
@@ZeldagigafanMatthew I don't see how anything you said relates to what I said... I'm talking about Mac gaming, not consoles or gaming PCs.
@@thebuddercweeper "I mean it makes much more sense for them to commit to it now that you don't have to spend in excess of £3000 just to get playable frame rates in AAA games"
your words.
I have had a Mac as my main gaming computer from about 2007 to 2017. I have used a Mac since 1997.
I think my 2010 Mac Pro, with GTX1080, 32 GB RAM, upgraded X5690 CPU and PCIe SSDs still runs more Mac games than a modern Apple silicon Mac. Nearly my entire Steam Library runs on my 2010 Mac. In OSX. A few more things like GTA5 run in bootcamp.
But since Metal, dropping 32bit and moving to ARM Apple gaming has been horrible. I moved to Windows in 2021. After more than a decade, I have given up on Mac gaming.
My steam game list went from 30 to 3, with the 32bit deprecation.
And this is why Apple gaming dies, because Apple likes to depreciate things very often and very quickly. They ditched the original Rosetta after like a year, and then they dropped 32 bit support and OpenGL stopped getting updated (why???). Even Metal doesn't get that many features updates, to be honest. After that, I was done with OS X, but my brother keeps saying that every time he updates he finds more of his apps don't work anymore. How can the Mac be a good gaming machine when every game needs constant updates in order to work at all?
Apple silicon Macs will have more luck at running Windows games under native Linux. Especially once the Vulkan driver arrives
Same boat for me. I ditch my 2009 Mac Pro in favor of a dedicated gaming pc in 2017. Once my Mac games stopped working in Catalina, that was the nail in the coffin. Now I just have a Mac Studio as my daily and my dedicated gaming rig. I could be interested in trying AAA games on the studio but why bother if I can just play it better on my pc. Secondly I picked up the Ally for on the go gaming instead of getting a Mac book pro or equivalent gaming laptop.
@@ericbauer4559pc is just a better platform
Valve's effort with proton perfectly shows the level of commitment needed to get a foothold in the gaming space. Steam Deck would have been a flop if Proton was there for developers to implement like the porting toolkit
The steam Machine and Steam Controller walked so the Steam Deck could run.
I certainly agree with the premise that apple needs to figure out a more cohesive business strategy for getting gaming on the Mac to become a real, viable business for developers to get into. That said, that still can’t happen without proper tools to get their titles running on ARM, which they just started providing. It looks like they’ve done a great job of creating tools that highlight the compute performance of their laptops, but they need to have a better performance angle for their desktops and needs a better solution for distributing games on their platform.
There are proper tools for having native support. The tooling is not the issue.
They just have to do what Microsoft is doing and buy big publishers
the biggest issue that affected gaming on massive scale was cutting opengl and 32-bit support. Many friends of mine just cut ties with Apple because of this decision and went either Linux or Windows.
Finally, an awesome take on the whole macOS Gaming marketing gibberish and fiasko!
Apple can't generate money from games unless its from Apple Arcade, that's why they are so passive. They are not the traditional PC vendor that needs to make better components for gamers so they can sale year after year.
Apple can generate money from games, but they're too passive.
Sony spends 220 million dollars on their latest first party titles.
Microsoft spends billions to buy game studios.
Apple spends, well probably some millions for the yearly Mac game they port, but people don't invest in a gaming platform for one AAA game per year.
They absolutely can generate money from games, it’s just not that easy. The games themselves don’t pay Apple, it’s the customers that come with the games. For a lot of people, not being able to play their favorite games on a Mac is more or less the only remaining reason not to switch to a Mac, especially since the hardware has become really great, and even kinda affordable in comparison.
Apple Arcade seems full of toy games for children. I can't find anything worth playing. At least Call of Heroes 2 runs in my Mac M2 just fine - a proper grown up game.
*it's from (contraction of "it is" or "it has")
its = possessive
*Arcade. That's (to fix your comma splice run-on)
*sell (verb)
sale = noun (and pronounced slightly differently)
but with games they would sell more apple hardware and attract young people to the ecosystem. most people can't afford 2 systems.
I was gaming on a mac. In fact, paradoxically, because when I was gaming on a mac, I haven't played the best games worth playing yet, I had an absolute blast gaming on a mac as some of those games did work on it, mostly but not exclusively in windows over bootcamp.
Now I have a vastly superior as a gaming machine PC (inferior in every other way), and I have only comparable quality of an experience overall, simply because the games left to play aren't as good in departments other than graphics, resolutions, and frames per second. It's a pure coincidence created by the timing of the events, however.
Point being, one, there are amazing games out there for everyone, whether they value competition and the game game part of the game, or they value experiences, stories, character development, world building, role playing, escapes from reality, playing with friends and social and/or para-social relationships, whether they are fast or slow, have a couch and a TV, or a laptop, or a desk with a computer on it - everyone will find something deeply enjoyable in gaming space, if they try.
And two, games just working is far more important, than anything else like ultra-high FPS extravaganza (albeit it is nice), or retina resolutions (for text - YES, for games - not as important), etc.
Apple needs to bring games to the mac. Macs make very good computers. They are being handicapped by being unable to deliver soon to be leading form of entertainment. And that's a damn shame.
All the things you said need to happen and I don't even own a Mac. It would increase the knowledge and experience of developers with ARM based systems, and prove that you can have a balance of upper mid range gaming with the gains in power efficiency. With greater market competition and accessibility everyone wins. Of course, this will never happens because the executives, at best, play one game ever, so I think that is why they continue the cycle of "look, here is a game!"
minor thing about the performance data you presented at around the 2 and a half minute mark, it seems that these results would look even worse on the M series chips if you showed data that would more easily show frametime data i.e. stutters. The continuous graphs you showed running ingame seem to be stuttering quite often (according to the graphs)
It does't help that Apple tends to refuse to support cross-platform APIs like Vulkan to make development easier and insist on everyone using only their own APIs and tools. (Microsoft isn't super great in that regard either with e.g directx but they have the marked share for it)
Yes.
Apple should make Vulkan work well on both Intel and ARM Macs.
Apple should make sure as many games on Steam run on Mac.
Especially current "Mac games" on Steam as a lot of those were developed for x86 and run poorly or not at all on Apple silicon.
So they will probably do a walled garden, Metal only, a few AAA titles solution that nobody cares about.
There is a reason, and it has to do with bandwidth and sections of metal that were deprecated. If you want 4 M3 Ultra cards in your Mac Pro, then some graphics APIs just aren't going to work.
Is it possible to make iOS/Mac apps as optimised on Vulcan as on Metal though? Think about power efficiency
@@retrocomputing No, but power efficiency isn't that relevant with portable gaming as you might assume, just take a look at the switch, steam deck or any gaming laptop. Most people considers "portable gaming" as you being able to sit wherever you want inside your house. Still close to an outlet.
@@retrocomputing It shouldn't even be related. Graphics API is just an abstraction layer to talk with GPU and requires support from hardware manufacturers or some serious reverse engineering. Things matter are how GPU manufacturers would utilise it. DirectX 11, for example, runs poorly in so many graphics processors outside Nvidia. Vulkan is quite easy to adopt on many hardware types because of how simple (yet complicated to use) it is, but Apple refuses to add a support for it.
They also need to optimize their OS for gaming a little bit, recently in the beta they added the option to disable mouse acceleration (finally) but there's still work to do, for example If you have 2 monitors, the game's cursor goes thru the borders of the main screen and appears for a bit in your secondary screen and gets kinda stuck in the 2nd screen.
Does Apple have a VP of gaming? Perhaps that would be a role to create to tie all the things together and make Apple Arcade a Steam-competitor. I'd love to game on my Mac, but gaming on my PC is just such a more smooth experience.
Game devs must also be looking at the loyalty of Mac Users and seeing that as a good thing. If you create a game as a service for a Mac you'll have a very long lasting user base because Apple's customers are so so loyal and keep buying their products.
Being able to emulate games with my air makes me think by 2025 there will be good games for the mac, not a wide variety but okayish games, by 2030 we will have a steam page for mac. and by 2040 or so the full transition will be completed. These machines are just too powerful to avoid gaming anymore.
You're forgetting the loyalty of gamers. Mac users isn't even remotly close to gamers.
It still doesn't outweigh the major userbase which is on Windows PC platforms. Larger paid userbase is much more important than small group of loyal users
@@phillipgoat00 The power of the system is almost completely irrelevant. The question is, whether the users of the specific system want to play games or not. Currently, the majority of PC gamers are on Windows, and that's not changing anytime soon. People buy Macs to do office work, not to play videogames.
I know it's inconvenient but if you're wanting to game on an ARM Mac, Asahi Linux is the main way to go right now. They've managed to get full x86 translation on ARM and once they've ironed out some bugs they'll have the full Windows game back catalogue just like PC Linux does. CrossOver is a Mac app that aims to do the same but it's not free.
Thanks!
I remember the good old days when AAA games came to the Mac thanks to the Quake III and Unreal T engines… And also when Tomb Raider II appeared… Hope this times will come back.
Thanks for your work!
My M2 Air serves as the main work machine especially since I'm highly mobile on weekdays. Did little gaming on my M2 Air (X-Plane 12 and Subnautica) which runs nowhere near 60 fps but still works very well. The rest games especially AAA titles still play on a dedicated gaming PC.
Imagine Apple adding Vulkan API support besides their Metal..
Imagine apple not depreciating all other graphics tech in Mac OS in exchange for metal that move alone is probably what killed mac os gaming that and culling 32 bit mode which purged a good bit of Mac OS games
@@alexmeek610imagine OpenGL not lagging behind years and years behind DirectX
@@saileshrachapudi8486opengl 4.6 is the last ever version of opengl
I keep beating on the Mac gaming drum with a similar take, Apple can’t take a field of dreams approach. The porting toolkit is fascinating as it’s so close yet so far. Not supporting Vulkan native or creating at the very least a hyper optimized translation layer like MoltenVK is just rough.
One of the worlds most popular games; Minecraft, works incredibly well on Mac and I’ve made a name for myself testing and proving that. Buts a crying shame so much on the Macs new potential is not being capitalised. I really hope they build a dedicated department will stuffed with cash to make this a different story
Java is Minecraft's greatest weakness and greatest strength at the same time
Does bedrock edition work on Mac OS btw?
@@mskiptr If it doesn’t, it can probably be done with an android emulator.
@@mskiptr It doesn't, only Java is supported
So true! Max need a coherent strategy for gaming. A decent launcher or shop would be a great place to start.
I meant a central shop like steam or epic.
Who is Max? Is he the brother of Tim Apple?
Max Max Max super Max Max super super Max Max super Max
It brings me great pain to watch you use the built in keyboard and track pad on the Macbooks. I really hope developers get in on this because as much as I love my gaming PC, I hate windows so much. I used a 2012 21" iMac to play games for over 5 years before I switched to PC. I miss macOS so much.
I'm quite confused by the idea that the Bose QC45 (last updated in 2017) is still your gold standard in noise cancellation. There have been plenty of advances in ANC capabilities since then.
Valve tried the "If you build it they will follow it" approach with the Steam Machines running Linux and it flopped hard so they made Proton to get the games working on Linux.
Exactly
If it wasn’t for proton the deck would’ve flopped even harder than these machines
That's why Apple should do the same and help make Proton compatible with Mantle.
@DarthAnonymous1 Still it would at least make the games very playable so gamers would take the Mac seriously.
Linux has a much smaller install base than MacOS
@@CC-gy7el That's maybe true for laptops and desktop PCs, but the Linux Kernel is running on more systems than any other OS.
If you ever make a second version of this video, could you tell us how the Mac Minis do? They look like a possible contender but I don’t know how to measure them.
love your channel, could you do a "how i setup my mac , the settings and customization and shortcuts' video. keep up the awesome content.
I actually first really started to (mentally) shift to being a PC gamer after playing games on my MacBook Pro back in 2010 and on.
Which is wild because it wasn't good at gaming and the game I played most was TF2. Which I used the trackpad for for an embarrassingly long time.
But it happened to be a perfect storm of other factors that got me to start changing my thinking when it came to having. Which ended up being very frustrating because of how limited Macs were and are when it comes to gaming.
But I still ran with it for a decade because that's what I had to work with.
I do think there's a bit of an issue with Mac gaming as well where the current state of AAA games is to release half-baked and buggy, which I'm sure Apple doesn't like to see on their platform, as well as being horribly unoptimized and inefficient with regards to storage requirements, which is an area that Macs fall down in (in that it's not user upgradable outside of external storage and buying more on the first purchase is extra expensive.)
So we'll see if Macs every truly catch up without something like cloud gaming becoming the norm
the m2 air lets you game whenever wherever without care, and that's a pretty strong niche to hold. you're right on with the strategy criticisms, and it'd be a shame for this kind of product to exist but ignore that potential. and it's entirely silent while it does it, some might not care, but the lower the ambient noise floor, the more I'm gonna enjoy anything I'm trying to focus on
I actually play CS-GO on my MacBook and love how smoothly it works. I wish there could be more games, but I think time will tell what might happen.
I've been playing Diablo IV with max settings and 30-60fps on my M1X MBP.
Works perfectly, I thought there was no way I could get it to work after Apple Silicon.
Really hope people get their act together and change the culture so gamers who happen to have a Mac have real options.
yes, but my nitpick is that other displays are better than the ghosting MBP screen and its notch/16:10 aspect ratio. There are a lot of killer gaming laptop displays these days
If apple invested in gaming I would probably sell my PC next day I'm not even joking. Apple just needs to actually take it serious.
The only gaming they take seriously is Apple Arcade since they get a 30% cut of all sales.
They are? It’s about the developers……..
@@imelliam no they aren't, they made one dev tool they probably won't do much more to entice devs to bring their games to Mac.
@@imelliam And why would developers spend untold amounts of resources developing for something that a) isn't free to do so b) holds like 15% of the desktop OS market share as of February 2024, or 1.3% of Steam users according to the Steam Hardware Survey (same time period), and c) has more in common with smartphones than it does other PCs or even the current generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony?
Thor of Pirate Software said that porting just ONE of his games was such a huge undertaking for him and this workload accounted for 0.02% of that game's sales. For every five THOUSAND copies, just one of them is for a Mac.
Currently have a spec’d out MacBook Pro but I’m getting a PC just for gaming at half the price
They also need to create partnerships with the lead engine developers, such as Epic and Unity. Integrate the porting tool kit into these engines and get the ball rolling.
G.. g8d6d
Klp
Sadly, given their contentious relationship with Epic Games, that ship will never sail.
@magrudergrinder23 and their bad relationship with Valve, nvidia, etc; all doesn't help either.
I do game on my MacBook Air m1, however only fairly simple and undemanding games like game dev tycoon or papers, please. It's a good experience, barring some problems with scaling on the 16:10 display in gdt. I also do like playing civ VI on my m2 Mac mini, which can get somewhat laggy in the end phase, but that's because I have a base model with 8 gb ram. Overall, not something I'd play AAA games on (I managed to play through the whole batman Arkham city), but for casual games it's fine
A while back, Apple had a serious hardware failure. While creating the new graphics engine for the M2, they hit a thermal dead end. So, Apple released a whole bunch of engineers to go do something else at another company, then they joined Blender and sent the remaining engineers to "go and help" get metal working with Blender. Eventually, they did fix the heat problem, but by that time the 3nm line at TSMC was busy making things that go boom. So, Apple pushed forward with their half step M2 (M2 processor + M1 graphics) for this year. If things work out and there is a TSMC next year, the M3 should be the gaming platform we have always wanted. Of course, TSMC sending engineers to the Arizona desert to "help" build their plant does not make one feel optimistic.
I think you're confusing the A16 with M2. M2's GPU is significantly faster than M1's. Even if the fundamental architecture of the GPU cores didn't change, there are 25% more cores on the base M2 (18.75% more on M2 Pro and above) and those cores are clocked 7.7% faster. That makes for a 35% higher theoretical throughput on the M2 and 28% higher throughput on the M2 P/M/U. And in some workloads like Blender the M2 series were found to be anywhere from 75% to >2x faster. Even if at peak power draw the M2 was capable of drawing 30% more power, it was still more energy efficient than the M1 due to the performance increase.
However, it's the A16 that improved on the GPU of its predecessor by a very small amount. While as you mentioned there have been rumors floating around about Apple engineers' blunder on the A16's GPU rumoredly causing them to fall back on the A15's GPU again and delaying the new GPU design, I think it's just as possible that they delayed the design due to TSMC's process node delays and 4nm not being a very big improvement over 5nm+/N5P, which means the new GPU design was probably not very efficient, or not very cheap to implement, or both. N4, despite the name being "1nm" less than N5P, only increases density by 5%. N4's improvement was so small in fact that while implementing an LPDDR5 interface on the A16 to increase mem. bw by 50%, they had to lower the system level cache from 32MB on the A15 to 24MB, which in some cases means slight performance regression or at least stagnation. Though I wouldn't be surprised if this decrease in cache amount was planned when the A15 was also in the design process, as it felt weird for A15 to not have adopted LPDDR5 back when it was released and that Apple might have given the A15 32MB of cache to compensate for that.
@@utubekullanicisi Turns out, I wasn't confused at all, see yesterday's announcement.
I do game on a Mac. Hell I am even "old enough user" to remember glorious days when Valve announced Steam for Mac at the Apple Keynote. However I am still skeptical about Mac gaming though I am trying to support it. Maybe, one day. We will see.
In your frame rate per dollar, to compare apples to, well, Apples, you should be comparing the $500 M2 Mac Mini (which should perform better than the Air) or better yet, the M2 Pro Mac Mini.
For a random PC you can replace the graphics card for future needs, for Macs you can't. And so on. That's a problem for Macs because it's "PC gaming" that we're talking about.
So Mac Mini is not even interesting. I cannot imagine that PC gamers that buy a PC that they can upgrade wanna but a Mac Mini instead. Not even Mac Mini Pro.
Macs are great for "content creation". Not for gaming. Macs - can - do gaming but not great at it.
yeah i thought it was weird to use a macbook air and then the mac pro. like a laptop that doesnt even have a fan is obviously not meant for sustained load, and then the mac pro is purely a terrible buy for 98% of people vs the mac studio because most won't need those PCIe slots.
mac mini and mac studio are better apples-to-apples (hah) comparisons
Great, and what add the Studio Display to it?
@@cjeelde Framerate per dollar will still be a lot better on the Mac minis.
@@cjeelde The fix for this is well... selling your mac mini and buying a new one. Which could be perceived as being no worse value than a similar desktop system assuming apple actually keeps upgrading M substantially each other year. They have pretty good resale value.
I was a Mac gamer for many years. I remember in college playing counter strike, global offensive, guild wars 2, and League of Legends. The 2012 15-in MacBook pro was my go-to until the computer died.
I’ve recently gotten into playing games on my Intel Mac, but only really old games (Portal, Half Life, The Witcher), and that’s all I would want out of a proper gaming on Mac experience. Anything new and AAA, I would only want to play on my console.
Portal doesn't even work given it's 32-bit
I would definitely agree. The infuriating thing is that Resident Evil Village and No Mans Sky, although very critically acclaimed, definitely *feel* like console games, which makes me so uninterested when they're announced on the mac.
On the other hand, support for older franchises like The Witcher, Portal and Half Life, which almost exclusively make sense to play on mouse and keyboard, don't even get silently ported in the background. Weirdly, it feels like Apple is trying to compete with the console market, when at that point, the console versions of these games would clearly be superior with the ergonomics of a controller, and being able to lay far back on the couch, starring at a big TV.
Can you please elaborate on the specs of the PC in your chart?
Supporting Vulkan and having better first party support for C++ would be a HUGE boost for Apple gaming.
Having to port your code from C++ to Swift and even Vulkan games to Metal is a major hurdle to serious gaming.
The other alternative is to encourage iOS games grow up and incentivize making them platform compatible with the Mac on launch.
Ultimately I think the base model macs, and iOS/iPadOS, need to be powerful enough to play games at 1080p 60Hz for any major gaming support. Because the base models, and iOS devices, are going to be what the average college student or normie user buys. The best strategy probably will be to leverage iOS development to bring more games to the Mac. But Apple has to stop getting in pissing contests with companies like Epic, the most cutting edge game engine developer on the planet! Dropping Fortnite before the release of unreal engine 5 support was just dumb. You can’t claim to be interested in gaming and alienate Epic Games on your platform.
You don’t need to write your games in swift and most games use commonly available tools like unity which support compiling for Mac natively.
Not gonna happen. AI is huge these days, plus Apple vision pro also needs metal to be tuned to Apple’s demand at anytime. Vulcan is crap in comparison. Nobody uses it for AI, and Apple cannot modify it to adapt to new features quickly and effortlessly because it needs to work with iPhone, iPad, Apple TV where metal already does.
@@AaronFigFront
AI is huge these days.
But Apple isn't even a bit player in AI. Having an inferencing engine in a mobile device is somewhat useful, but the big money is in the server market. Right now Apple doesn't have anything that would be useful for the server market. Period.
The type of AI engines Apple provides are for processing a pre trained Neural Network locally, not training a neural network. And their GPUs are generally are weaker than the competition's. A fully specced M2 pro with 19GPU cores is weaker than an AMD rx6600, a sub $200 GPU.
Until Apple has a server solution that the big tech service providers are interested in they have nothing of interest for AI.
@@keco185
Not exactly first party support is it?
And Unity is not a top tier game engine. It's a entry level game engine for developers without the experience to use something like Unreal or the ability to write their own as some studios do.
@@pweddy1 Apple has suddenly benefited from the open source community because of the *SUPER large* unified ram, which speed is as fast as vram. Some of the most popular LLM models can run locally on a m2 ultra. A single 4090 cannot do that. Even a single h100 is about half that.
I tried gaming on the Mac, its just not in the cards for Apple, they don’t want it bad enough to pivot to selling gaming macs as opposed to macs for creators. The only way I can see them marketing such a machine is them bragging about how you can design and build a AAA game and play it all on the same computer. Hence opening a gateway for gaming macs. For now, the Razer Blade 15 is my gaming pc, and the mac is my everything els.
I always spent most of my free time programming, not gaming. So I bought a Mac like I always did. And then I started playing a couple of games on the Switch, and now I’m suuuper-jealous of all the emulators and modding tools on Windows. Because modding combines programming-ish and games. But no. Never thought I’d regret not getting a Windows machine.
macs have retroarch, ryujinx, cemu, and RPCS3, what else do you want?
There’s tons of emulators for mac
OpenEmu is the best emulator in existence, and it's Mac OS exclusive
I could never imagine regretting my Mac 😂
@@accountid9681 I only care about modding Breath of the Wild and, probably eventually Tears if the Kingdom. 😅 A very specific use-case. And the tools for modding them are not available on Mac. They are my special interest. I realise (now) that most people are more flexible with their games. But I can’t help thinking that if more games were on Mac, there would be more tools there as well. Even when Ryujinx can finally run these games well, the tools I need may never come. But I support people working on them, so hopefully that will pay dividends one day.
please help, i'm deciding between:
- MBP M2 8 GB + 512 SSD
- MBP M2 16 GB + 256 SSD
i'll mainly use it for note taking and some gaming (Sims 4, Minecraft, Stardew Valley)
There already was something like a golden age for Mac gaming, that's from when Steam came to Mac until Apple cut 32bit support. It must be really frustrating for any game dev to work for Mac, not to mention users. On the PC I can still run the same games that would've been through 3 "cuts" by Apple already, nobody's going to update their 10 year old game every time Apple feels the itch to cut out legacy support again.
For a short time in the mid 2010s I couldn't believe my eyes when I opened Steam on Mac and saw how many of the games I had bought on the PC side actually were ready to install in a native Mac version - for a short time I even believed one could actually live with just a Mac as a gaming platform. But with 32bit support at least 2/3 of my game library disappeared, that was probably the worse cut than the Apple Silicon switch which just sorted out a few more of the already meager library. You just can't rely on Apple for long time support, nor on game studios to play this stupid game and regulary re-port their games again and again. Also, every other platform than Steam would stand no chance on the Mac, Apple's App Store won't do it - but whether Apple would leave that yummy 30% cut to Valve - doubtful. Although, I doubt Valve's long-term support too under these conditions, I noticed even staples of games on Mac like the Sims aren't available for MacOS on Steam anymore, you have to get that elsewhere.
Last but not least there's the issue of the high entry price for adequate gaming hardware, adequate for gaming meaning no base model, and the biggest issue everyone has with Apple is surely their upgrade prices for +8GB RAM or whatever, not to mention SSD space when today's games easily need >100GB.
I’ve somehow squeezed every last drop out of my 5,1 Mac Pro. I now re-enter the market for a new machine at the WORST possible time. I’m currently contemplating a 2019 Mac Pro with a 7900 XTX so I can game in Windows. I assume it’ll do 4k@120hz, but I can’t be certain. My other option is a Mac Mini + Windows machine and a monitor with a KVM. What to do?!
If Apple embraced gaming, they'd probably have 40% of the market, instead of around 15% of it.
Muah, they would never have 40% of that market.
This video is gold. I think your "hot take" is pretty much on point. However I wouldn't say that macOS does not have a software issues as well. Apple still killed off OpenGL. They still don't intend to allow DirectX running on macOS, that's just the Game Porting Toolkit for devs. They still don't support Vulkan officially...
So the only option for game developers is using Metal which the majority does not know, hasn't learned or doesn't care much about. I've seen videos of a developer using WebGPU because it runs cross-compatible on all modern desktop operating systems. Just like Vulkan should... but doesn't because of Apple.
We've also seen game engines doing the heavy lifting of supporting all major platforms in the past. Have you tried to compare the Vulkan, OpenGL and DirectX ports of Unity for example... I tell you what, everything besides DirectX sucks because the developers from Unity do not care enough. It will be similar with Metal.
DirectX or Vulkan will be used on Windows, Linux, maybe even on consoles (I think the PS5 uses something custom but XBox might just use DirectX 12) and macOS will need porting afterwards... likely with far less priority.
So as long as Apple tries to enforce game developers to use their own tools besides the industry standard, I will only see a few ports and web games coming to macOS. But maybe I'm wrong...
Just watched the first 27 seconds so far. Resident Evil Village IS NOT a old game. Its actually a top of the line AAA game released just 1 year after its PC/Console release which is pretty amazing :D
True, but the standard title always shown in marketing is usually Shadow of the Tomb Raider, not quite as fresh anymore. Death Stranding isn't exactly new either. He was probably more referring to those titles.
@@chrissoclone Yes, I guess that is true ... but he was showing the RE8 slide from the Keynote at that moment in the video :)
Well a 2-year-old game certainly cannot be called 'new'. Imagine calling Cyberpunk 2077 "new"
@@skycubix8943 Cyberpunk at least has the one thing going for it that it's basically THE benchmark tool for everything nVidia, no other game on the market is using these high levels of raytracing etc., so some testers still think it's the best test for "future games" (although I doubt it). It's also constantly updated with new features.
1 year late makes it old
I am playing NMS on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro. After figuring out a “rumble” controller bug, it is awesome. And battery life is still great while gaming.
The biggest hindrance to gaming on Mac is their monetization policy. Their App Store charges publishers 30% good luck convincing gaming publishers just hand over that kind of revenue.
That’s what steam charges….?
@ Oh wow, they do! That’s BS imo. There should be a law against that. Devs and Publishers should have the option to sell games directly to consumers.
Is that a Gigabyte M32U or M28U behind you? If so would love to know your settings. I find it’s a decent gaming monitor but you really need to dial in the settings to get it to look good.
Apple has no chance in the modern gaming ecosystem, their walled garden approach practically forces game devs to use unfamiliar tools, and APIs, if they want games, they need a partnership with unity or unreal, and they need to bring back openGL, as well as adding vulcan support, then, and only then will they have a chance.
OpenGL is DEAD. No one is using that for new games.
This isn't a tooling issue. It's a marketing issue. No one wants to game on mac when they can play the same releases, better, on MUCH cheaper systems. Even if the big developers could port their games to macOS with ease, they'd still be behind the latest releases on Windows, and they'd run worse than on cheaper hardware - this is what has happened with PC games ported to console.
Macs have always been about productivity.
Indeed. They would need to go all in on open standards and make sure they use the big game stores like Steam and Epic.
The worst I think is they force devs to constantly update and port and port again every time they decide to cut out some legacy support. I can see compatibility issues coming with every major MacOS update, while in Windows it's still mostly possible to run a 20 year old game.
@@chrissoclone The ability to run ancient software on the latest Windows is so underappreciated! Even software and games going back to the 90s.
If I want to a run a mac game from even 10 years ago, say a 32bit intel release. I can't. I'll need an emulator, which is iffy.
68k and PPC stuff is not too difficult to emulate, provided it's CPU only. But there's about a decades worth of software, from the late PPC era to the early intel era, which is basically unsable.
@@kirishima638 with 32bit they basically cut 90% of everyone's alltime-favourite games I'd say.
I had bootcamp on my mac27 and was successfully running GTA V and online for a couple years, then it just stopped working and with no support for bootcamp it was goodbye to GTA until I bought my PC laptop and fired the game back up on that.
I love Macs and don't really spend all my time playing games but it is still annoying especially now when they have PC chips etc in them anyway.
The Mac of gaming already exists, it's called a PlayStation.
It does precisely what Apple does for PCs.
It's highly integrated, very easy to use, just works and has a bunch of desirable exclusives.
As a bonus it just costs $500.
This is exactly why I love my 2019 Mac Pro which I purchased in 2022 seeing I only wanted Intel which goes along with it just like a normal PC. I did the same with my 2012 Mac Pro holding out for the announcement of trash can and the day of the announcement I bought the 2012 Mac Pro knowing it was the older version at that point. Call me old school but I needed and still do PCIe and back then had TBs of 10K rpm spinning rust which is now converted into solid state. Not to mention my CPU was the 8 core on the 2019 which is now a 16 core plus ram I keep adding when I see fit. I like macs but with a PC style approach. Prob why I’ve gravitated to the Mac Pro.
Main use is music creation, also photo and video editor of the family. Hence the big library of photos, videos, documents of at least 12 people other then me. Then there’s my music samples, plug-ins, programs and the rest. That’s the macOS side of my needs. I also either have PC just for gaming (currently do) but with my 5,1 I used a SSD using the second sata port for another DVD drive which was my boot camp drive. Back then nvidia and apple played ball so I always had either the current x80 or last gens x80. My last one that I used in the 5,1 was a GTX980. Plus I would flash the firmware to support boot screen support and nvidia used to release drivers fairly regularly. First AMD card I ever owned was a RX580 when I decided to upgrade to Mojave as it was a better option then the GTX680 that was supported. Haven’t done bootcamp yet on the 7,1 yet as my PC still plenty full. Plus I prefer nvidia. Though would like to run a bunch of test on it with the W5700x Pro I have and my RTX4090. Haven’t been able to find anyone who has tried it yet. I will prob get rid of 4090 and use AMDs latest so it will at lease boot if installed into macOS
Anyway I do believe this new model is a stop gap, they must of ran out of time or something similar.
Omg I can finally play Minecraft at 60fps on a Mac 😂
@@ramp6727E-sport folks insist they can. And if you do it day and night, it's possible*. But for most it's placebo; And a marketing tactic that relies on "F.O.M.O".
*Debatable (ad infinitum/nauseam).
@@ramp6727 Input delay says hello
Noting that you can achieve less input delay with low frames, but how many games that really utilised that? One example in my mind is CS2
Apple could revive „Game Center“ and make it a Hub for all your games, friends, chats and Achivements
I play FF14 on my M1 iMac. I used to play at 30 fps on Medium graphics until SE improved their official launcher and the fps shot up to 60 on high settings! So like you said the hardware performance is there!
That's really interesting! Would you recommend the official launcher now over the fan-made one? Do you reckon it would play alright on a M1 Air?
@@VioletVolchok I would recommend the official launcher now that it is more optimized for MacOS than before. I've never used a MacBook Air, so I can't say if it would run FF14 well or not. I'm sure you can look online for reviews from people that have.
I want something like an iPad mini and switch hybrid - thin, light and power efficient to play proper games - controller could be detachable or not - and you could then dock it with your tv for an Apple Tv experience with games
Im halfway through i hope you add the graphics settings you used. You can run almost anything on anything at low settings.
This is the biggest reason I miss being able to install windows via bootcamp on my new M2 Max MBP. I have a gaming desktop, but I did like to go to friends places and play games together without lugging my big desktop around, bootcamp allowed me to do that. Sure I had to dial back settings and whatnot but I could get the game to run comfortably and have a fun time. I would really like for gaming to be taken seriously on the mac especially now that Apple Silicon has the much much better graphics than the intel integrated that preceded it on many macs prior.
I think Game Center should be re-tooled as the "entirely separate program" mentioned at 8:07 to distribute games if Apple ever did this. The app exists, people know about it, and it's easy to say "In the past Game Center was a great way to connect with friends on iPhone and Mac. Now it's the best place to get great games for your devices"
The game porting toolkit was the best DOA announcement at WWDC.
I agree with your overall argument - it really isn't a hardware or software issue. I expected to see a gaming oriented WWDC this year. That didn't happen. Not sure why? The AR/VR headset would have been a perfect opportunity. It may have something to do with the operation of the headset that or that Apple is betting that individual programers will come up with case uses for the headset. I think the developer program (which surprised me and may be a part of Apple's gaming plan) will help with a later event in the year. I am hypothesizing that we will see a gaming focus with either the iPhone event in September or a more broadly gaming event in October with a new M3 Mac or two. The iPhone/gaming event (whichever it is???) will come with Apple demonstrating new games, new ties to the gaming world (they may have bought a gaming company or two??) and an Apple TV ultra - with new type of chip with more memory and GPU processing - meant specifically for casual/more serious gamers. I believe this will have lidar gaming like the Microsoft Kinect allowing us to get off the couch and work out (fitness+) and game. Imagine being able to move your arms on the couch to raise the volume or change the channels. It will probably use the iPhone and/or iPad lidar camera to do this. If the TV ultra has its own camera, it will have a physical shutter to protect everyone's privacy. It will be a huge grab for the living room. Additionally, gamers will be able to do this with iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Macs. It will contest with or possibly replace the Switch and be a grab for casual gamers and move partway into the Switch, Xbox, and PS world. Timing pre-Christmas holidays (could be good)!
Baldur’s Gate 3 on an M1 Pro plays very decently and it’s an awesome game with 100’s of hours of content - I highly recommend the early access and the full release is coming within a few months.
The funny thing is that if they were to just make porting most of these to Apple Arcade, and do a discounted price of the games they’re offering instead of msrp, they’d easily gain the market share they need for proper footing.
I have a Macbook Pro 14" with M2 Pro and 32GB of RAM that I use for coding and web browsing. Lately an interesting thought came to mind if it is actually capable of running some of the games I occasionally play on my gaming PC. I might try it in the future.
with the benchmarks i would like to know what resolution since many of apples displays are over 2k pixels so it’s kind of subjective when certain people only game at 1080p or 1440p but with apple products your are stuck with 4k and higher and the performance penalty that comes with it
I do game on my M2 MacBook Pro via a mix of native Apple Silicon games, Rosetta 2 (which is surprisingly good), Parallels desktop / Windows 11 arm VM and Crossover (... Elite Dangerous). I am even dual booting Mac OS Ventura and Sonoma developer beta (later via an external TB3 SSD as games and VMs consume a lot of space on my internal 2TB SSD storage), so I can play around with the Game Porting Tool. The TB3 SSD is as fast as my internal SSD! Having done all this, it is still much more straightforward to install and run games on my Steam Deck!
Funny how UA-cam videos always have good timing to relatable events, just started trying out PCSX2 and AetherSX2 on my Mac yesterday, and it runs very well!
Vice city looks great
I wonder what's the popular RAM configuration for M1 or M2 MacBool Air
Good video. Its crazy to think that there is an even more powerful GPU for the 2019 Mac Pro and someone used it to game at 6k.
You also have things like DX/Vulkan APIs that are more mature than Metal API. Plus for PC you typically have access to DLSS or FSR or even XeSS that has a huge advantage over Apple's offerings.
Gamed on my Intel MacBook Air for the approximately 20 minutes that eGPUs were supported/championed. Also played a decent amount of older Valve games on Steam on the Mac before 32-bit software support was kicked to the curb.
Was the MacBook Air he tested the base model m2 mba 15 inch?
i used to game on macbook pro 2009 ( i think) but it turned out it was the most defected mainboard ever. yes, my mainboard crashed, so i ended up selling it for scraps. Now i am afraid to use it to game again.
i used to play kerbal space program on my 2020 m1 macbook pro and id have to force the fans to run at 100%, run it at 50% resolution and have it plugged in but it was impressive. i don't think we should consider the air macbooks as capable though with their throttling.
The vision pro can't even provide a proper vr gaming experience
I wish they didn't get rid of vulkan on the Mac
I have a m1 iMac I don't think I could get any games running on that
i used to play rome total war and KOTOR on mac and the fact they could be played on laptop used for work was the best thing ever
100% agree with you - the only game I’ve really played on Mac was Fortnite on my old intel MacBook Pro but then the epic games thing happened
2:18 lol your slides say "Macbok Air" XD
I can see Apple reinventing their store and creating a new app / hub for gaming and doing it in their own style; the app icon would be a joystick and it’s simply just called “Games” or something, which is where Apple Arcade will be moved. With the powerful chips they’re designing, a decent gaming experience is totally possible.
Can you compare m2 mac air with a very slim nice looking notebook?
I do recall setting up a network for playing Unreal Tournament on several different spec'd Macs back in the day. I did game a lot more on my iMac, but I haven't really bothered playing anything other than Starcraft II on my "newer" Apple kit.
7:40. Made me 😂. Really great video, man. Everyone at Apple should see it. Did not realize the gaming performance gap was as bad as that. Wow. And this is the year 2023?? Crazy.
i game on my 16" m1 bacbook pro i play oldschool runescape it makes the m1 work hard battery life drops to about 2 hours and it get hot ish a round 70c but putting the fans on manual at 60%
drops the temp fast so its comfortable on your lap but it runs the game very well
I have been thinking of making the switch to Apple for the M2 Ultra... just yeah no dedicated game title to really showcase it. I would like a silent gaming behemoth.
I bought my first Mac a couple f years ago (MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 16 gb etc) after being a dedicated Windows guy for decades. I love the device and the OS. I am a gamer and have a MSI gaming laptop and a SteamDeck. Love them all. I would love to game better on my Mac. I use CrossOver when I can for those games that do not run under Rosetta with mostly good results, for those games that run under Crossover. I can use Parsec (hosted on my MSI laptop) on my MacOS to run games not supported with Crossover or able to run in Crossover and that don't display well on my SteamDeck (tiny text) when needed and if on a great wifi.
When No Man's Sky came out running under Apple Silicon I downloaded it to my Mac on Steam (already owned the game for a couple of years) and it runs great. Now I can run it on my Mac and SteamDeck with the cross saves and I do it all the time. So the Mac has the ability to do wonderful things. Real games, not those in the App Store that want to keep selling you coins or what ever to pay and play but real games.
But I may have a decision coming up very soon. Starfield releases next month. I suspect it will not run or not well on the SteamDeck initially if at all. My MSI gaming laptop I suspect will run it but I am not real confident it will be as great as I want. And I would bet real money it will not run under crossover at all. So, when it comes out I will buy it day one and install it on my MSI and we will see what we see. If it runs terrible, then I will pull the trigger on a new laptop. I would love to buy a new MacBook Pro with M2 Max with 32gb of memory and be done with it. But I suspect Starfield will not run under Rosetta and of course it will not be an Apple Silicon native game. So I may end up buying another PC gaming laptop for half the price of the Macbook I would want. Sad really, I would love the latest high end MacBook Pro as mentioned for all the other benefits it would give me but if I can't game on it with newer titles I just can't do it. If my existing MSI gamer runs it great then I can still wait things out and enjoy Starfield on my Mac via Parsec which maybe would be the best outcome for me at least. Just a few more weeks and I will know...
I loved my MacBook Pro 14". Great enclosure, (seriously) great trackpad, fast internals, battery life was brilliant, silent, cool to the touch. Sadly, I had to replace it with a PC laptop for 3 reasons - it wasn't fit for my professional workloads (software engineering), had issues with external displays, and it couldn't play games.
While MacOS is serviceable for development (about as good as Windows), I was faced with the prospect of needing to carry two computers while travelling. One for work, one for play. I looked at buying a SteamDeck or ROG Ally but instead decided to replace my MBP with a Dell Precision laptop that could do both.
The Dell is not as nice as the MBP but it's 90% the way there. The trackpad feels 80% as good, the screen is 60hz which is noticeably choppy and the battery isn't as long lasting - but I now just need to carry the one computer. I can also run Linux to get the optimal software development experience and Steam for gaming (dual boot for a backup).
I held out for the Asahi project, hoping that I could eventually use Linux on the MBP where Proton/FEX would enable gaming - but that's years away from being a reality. The games porting toolkit is just further proof that Apple aren't serious about gaming on MacOS. Apple is prioritising vendor lock in over the experience of their customers and the utility of their platform.
I hope they change their attitude one day, but until then, I had to jump ship
I did game a lot on my Macs…
The 2012 15“ retina worked quite well in bootcamp and with the 2016 15“ I paired an eGPU (GTX 1080) that was great until 2021. Now I use a M1 Pro for work and have a 7950X + 4080 Workstation for CAD/FEM and gaming…
I would love to game on my M-series macs, the hardware could do well….
Is there a specific reason why discrete gpus can't be paired to apple silicon via TB/usb4 or in the case of the mac pro pcie slot. Is it just lack of drivers or is there more to it?
hardware wise it's all there, it's just driver support, something Apple locks down like Fort Knox.
That would be so cool if Apple had a mascot like Super Mario
Apple has started exactly a subscription based game distribution system where you can easily find exclusive games. It’s called Apple Arcade. It doesn’t work though because it lacks AAA titles, and, I believe, because you can’t own the games. I don’t feel like investing my time and money games that I am not sure I can revisit again in a few years because a platform owner decides to drop it from their subscription offering. Games are very different from movies and series in that sense (although this limited time offering is also becoming a problem on streaming platforms I believe).
I've been trying to run No Man's Sky on my M2 Max MBP since like early June and every time I load into a save the game crashes. Is it just because I'm running the beta?
My new motherboard went off to be tested and while it was gone I downloaded cities skylines on to my base spec M1 Mac mini, it ran ok but as my city started to grow it got slow and at times unresponsive to input even tho the simulation was still happening.. nice to know it can do it if I need it to…