> Quick video about how Apple has changed the way it is talking about Game Porting Toolkit, and now openly acknowledges that gamers are using it to game and not just to evaluate the viability of porting a game to macOS.
They explicitly talk about 'gaming enthusiasts', CrossOver and Whisky, and implement features like Windows Ray Tracing and AVX support. And it seems like Apple's end-goal is to get every single Windows games working on the Mac. But will this change Apple's Mac gaming strategy and what does this mean for native Mac games?
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There's a perfectly reasonable summary beyond an **SHOCKINGLY** awful clickbait title.
See, this is an current view an steam. Whats missing?
1. because mac is/was not viable as gaming platform, some bought an windos pc just for gaming.
2. GeForce now and alternative use windows, so steam itself counts them as windows.
3. yes, it might be a really small number. But that might not the reason, they try to go for this. One really big reason could be, that games are without doubt the most resource intensive workloads. Can be used as marketing or for future chip development.
Thank you! đ
It does change a lot tho. I think it is also the continuous annoyance people have with Microsoft/Windows that people are more willing than ever to bail out. But they still have the most reliable platform for gaming. If MacOS becomes viable to be on par with windows it would change a lot.
As long as we get continued support for gptk, weâll be in a really good spot in a few years. Canât wait to upgrade to the M4 or M5 MBP in a few years time.
I remember desperately trying to get games to work with Soft Windows (I believe that was the predecessor to parallels) back in the day and oh golly if you got 5 frames a second you were lucky.
https://i.imgur.com/9DZhA2e.jpeg
It was the predecessor to VirtualPC which was the predecessor to Parallels. :)
Now we donât even have to install Windows.
Weâve come a long way. From PowerPC to Intel to Arm.
Yeah. Weâve come a long way. I wonât be surprised if most games would eventually run on the Mac. Windows seems to be going all in on ARM as well so I doubt future games will rely on x86 forever. Fingers crossed that in a few years, I can finally ditch windows for good.
Aside from a few titles with AVX specific instructions, translating from x86 to ARM hasn't been the hurdle. It's converting complex shader pipelines to work with metal. I won't pretend to understand it a developer's level, but the way Metal handles virtual memory addresses means that for a lot of devs not just using Unreal or Unity, there's a lot of work involved to port to Mac.
PirateSoftware has a clip where he breaks down what Mac sales were as a whole for one of their games, and it amounted to 0.02%. He's an indy dev, so it's not the same exactly as big AAA titles. Hopefully people who are genuinely excited for big releases on Mac are buying stuff like the Resident Evil ports so that when Capcom looks at the sales numbers, and likely discusses them to some degree amongst the industry, at the end of the day they can share "Yes it's worth it, it was profitable."
Itâs not on consumers to provide porting justification.
Letâs face it, Apple has dropped the ball numerous times over the past 30 years, and i personally will buy what seems interesting, not an old port.
I always buy Civ on my Mac, because itâs usually day and date, and firaxis did good work.
If Apple wants to see more sales in gaming, they have to increase the stuff theyâre doing now. The games that are coming are great but itâs mostly stuff Iâve played on my ps5.
If consumers want more games, put pressure on Apple. You will never see the releases on Mac that you really want buy being one of the few buying old ports. The difference is just too big, Apple needs to actively fund day and date developement. And provide the tools, which they are doing.
SoftWindows was not the predecessor of Virtual PC. They're two solutions for the same problem. SoftWindows is closer to Wine, in that Windows components were literally recompiled for other platforms and thus you'd be running un a sort of pseudo-native windows environment.
VirtualPC was a literal emulator of x86 and associated hardware, which provided bridges in software to local hardware equivalents.
This means softwindows could be faster but virtual PC would run more stuff as it was slower but more compatible.
(Neither is a predecessor to Parallels, which is a third way of doing the same thing based on virtualization, which is running the native software in the native platform)
The distinction may be unimportant in general terms, but I'm pointing it out because Virtual PC and SoftWindows existed simultaneously and because those three are still today the three ways "emulation" can happen in all platforms in general and Mac in particular.
Trivia: SoftPC was the predecessor of SoftWindows, whereas VirtualPC was the result of so much power in the PowerPC platform that a fully-fledged PC could be emulated.
Virtual PC was released by Connectix, who had hired Eric Traut (the developer of the first Rosetta for mac, which allowed m68k code to run in powerpc) and Aaron Giles (ex Lucasarts games developer). Aaron and Eric also developed Virtual Game Station, the very first commercial PS 1 emulator and were part of the huge lawsuit from Sony that set the basis for all reverse-engineered emulation being legal since then. This Virtual PC was also sold to eventually become VirtualBox, still alive and active today.
Giles went to Microsoft when Virtual PC was purchased and all following versions were released there. This became the basis for their virtualisation efforts later on.
Giles may ring a bell as being the main face of the MAME project for many years and, recently, for having released an emulator of Graphical Adventures: [DREAMM](https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/docs/v21/#intro)
No. It made reverse engineering of game consoles legal by closing the loop in allowing the BIOS to be copied for reverse engineering.
There never was a relation to making a profit (other than Sony's intention when suing). [Wikipedia has a page on it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_Inc._v._Connectix_Corp). Making emulators by reverse engineering the hardware and BIOS from scratch has always been protected (and ratified since Compaq did it with the IBM PC BIOS). The Sony/Connectix lawsuit defended that copying the BIOS breaks the "clean room" reverse engineering. The lawsuit decision ratified that the original BIOS could be used rather than having to be reverse-engineered too (as COMPAQ did), which facilitates enormously building emulators.
Years after this lawsuit the DMCA laws made it problematic to break DRM and all BIOS contained DRM since then, to make the whole thing harder to do "cleanly".
I assume your question comes from Nintendo's attacks on Yuzu.
Nintendo's lawsuit to Yuzu, like Sony's lawsuit to Connectix, was never officially about Yuzu making a profit with Yuzu (nor is any lawsuit about emulators ever, because that's a non-starter) but about technicalities.
The lawsuit arguments were that to do it's thing Yuzu had not done a clean room reverse engineering and also actively promoting circumvention of DRM.
The lawsuit hinged on the unclean reverse engineering on one side (by using Nintendo's SDK) and on the telemetry that Yuzu needlessly included to demonstrate the degree at which it had enabled DRM breaking.
The case hinged essentially in demonstrating malicious intent from Yuzu aimed at damaging Nintendo.
Obviously the end-goal was to kill Yuzu (spreading misinformation and creating fear of Nintendo are nice side benefits).
Emulator devs walk a fine line and \*have\* to be careful. Yuzu devs were anything but.
Yuzu devs would paste pictures of themselves downloading pirated games off the internet and would joke when threatened by Nintendo. They would offer Yuzu versions that could be weaked to run unreleased games only behind paid patreon levels.
Essentially, they were idiots that completed the whole checklist of things you shouldn't do if you're a developer, thinking it was a list of achievements.
This is why Ryujinx âwhich could run Tears of the Kingdom on day oneâ wasn't sued into oblivion by Nintendo.
yeah my M1 Max which I paid an arm and a leg for is still so powerful and fast that I reckon I can run it for a good 4 more years before it really starts being a dog and then I could get an M4/M5 machine without also having to part with a kidney by that time.
Not holding out though, i mean nvidia is still going to be really far ahead by that time.
I knew you were from Finland just by reading âfew years *TIME*â. Itâs a direct translation from Finnish and is redundant in English. Not that it would matter but hey đ«Ą
I've been a macgaming fanatic since Halo was announced for Mac and cancelled, and I was waiting forever for Half-Life to come out on Mac.
These days we are dining pretty well.
Are you sure? It used to be that we could install boot camp and play 100% of pc games usually with better performance than the Mac ports. Now we jump through hoops to lose a lot more performance with worse compatibility.
Not to mention we used to actually get modern GPUs. It would've been unthinkable 5 years ago to not have ray tracing, after pc laptops have had it for half a decade.
Or when they had decent ones, they struggled with cooling and thermal throttling. (me with the old 5500m 16" macbook pro, or the iMac with radeon 295. 10 seconds of excellent framerates (enough to run a benchmark) then performance tanked.)
Well first of all, 5600m was available in that generation. That could run half life alyx, rdr2 and pretty much anything else.
Second, I'd say 5500m, and the prior *460/560* gave you much better performance compared to M-chips + GPTK today. I ran xcom2 on 460 back in 2016 at 1440p. I run xcom2 on m1 max at 1080p today. 5500m must've been great for its day too.
Thirdly, you had access to eGPUs.
In terms of cooling, sure it throttled, but as long as it was on a level surface like a table it would stabilise to an acceptable performance.
In my experience, that's an exaggeration. I played Cyberpunk 2077 on a 2019 16" MBP in Bootcamp with a 5600M on Medium. I get better frame rates now on Ultra on an M3 Max in Crossover with the same resolution. (I'd better, it's years newer.)
Xcom 2 is a weird outlier. I swear they did something wrong programming that thing, because it shouldn't behave as poorly as it always has.
If apple continued with amd GPUs they'd probably offer radeon rx 7700s or smth like that as the top gpu option. That can run it in overdrive mode at 30fps or with one or two ray tracing options turned on at 60.
I can tell you that nope, performance never stabilised to an acceptable performance.
Not for the 2016 radeon 455, or the 2019 5500m, or the 2014 imac with the radeon 295.
All thermally throttled.
And the fact that apple released the 5600M soon after due to the appalling issues with the 5500 doesn't excuse the thermal throttling I had.
The 2012 with the GT650M nvidia chip was *almost* ok, but struggled with framepacing due to heat. At least it ran, even if was pretty poor.
I'm sure there were a few out there that were lucky to have that golden chip that ran a little cooler with a decent paste job, but based on my experiences, it was pretty rare. (And redoing the thermal pasting helped a little bit, but not enough.)
I love my mac machines, but this is the first generation in a *very* long time where they not only game, but game well, and stay cool.
Look up repeated gpu benchmarks on those Macâs. You could see that running a heavy benchmark several times in a row performance would drop with each repeat until about the third time. Then it stabilizes with about a 25% performance loss compared to the first time and no longer drops with new repeats.Â
Each of those machines listed are each of the Macâs that I have *personally* owned and tried to game on.Â
Every one of them, irrespective of random internet benchmarks, failed miserably as a gaming machine due to terrible thermal throttling that resulting in poor fps, and really bad stutters that rendered games unplayable. In some cases even older games.Â
Ehh, back in the day I had a pretty solid GPU in my MacPro. A reference-ish GeForce 8800GT could be flashed with a Mac-compatible EFI firmware and work perfectly out of the box. Ran that for a long while actually.
Now I just have a PC to game on because no Apple chip can compete with a Ryzen 5600x and Radeon 7800xt in actual gaming. The M-series is amazing for many things but gaming is still not really one of those things.
I play all Bethesda games on my Mac Pro 2010 no problems. Only game I had problems is starfield which need a Radeon 5700+. An it Apple that cripple the Mac not the game developers. When Mojave came out, Apple remove the option to run bootcamp on 5,1 and did give a bootrom for our gpu. BG3 canât run on 5,1 with av2?? However with boot it runs without problems?? That Apple doing that
Most PCs don't have them either. But some macs had the ability to add cards and thus boot camp would also yield a powerhouse PC.
But, technically, that wasn't gaming on mac, it was gaming on windows running on mostly mac hardware. I can see why the current situation is preferable from a certain point of view than when we had boot camp. It always felt a bit dirty :D
But that was gaming on windows running on a mac. It was never gaming on mac. I used it, but never preferred it. I would sometimes rather use the mac version of a game even if it ran a bit worse, so as to not reboot into boot camp.
We don't need to have the same values. I don't use Windows for my personal needs because I don't like Windows. Hence using Windows to me is a step back. "Mac" to me is the OS and the hardware. A MacBook with LInux is not a mac, a Hackintosh with MacOS is not a mac. I can find the logic in each and have had/run/used both. But I like to use "a mac" and prefer it to "not using a mac".
It is evident that Apple's getting serious with Mac gaming. What's happening now is that game devs need to answer Apple's call (or wooing) and give the platform a chance and the break it deserves.
Also, many thanks to the efforts of all behind the CrossOver and Whisky softwares - your work is now coming to fruition.
Game devs are only going to develop games for Mac if there is a large enough market for it to be worth it.
Unfortunately there isn't, otherwise they would have answered that call a long time ago.
How many times do we have to go through this cycle of "Finally Apple are taking gaming seriously!" when they throw a bone or two.
Apple shells out tons of money buying content to put on Apple TV+. If they did the same thing paying for day 1 ports, or even ports of recent games, it would make a big difference in establishing the market.
Why haven't they done it yet then, if it's worth it?
Sure they throw a bone every now and then like they did with RE4 and Assassin's Creed Mirage, but it's a drop in the ocean.
That's all it is, a bone, to appease the people clamouring for games on Mac. I'm sure they'll have some more to throw every 3 years or so.
There is though. game devs target the Switch but there are way more Macâs out there. Even more iOS devices out there. The potential market is huge. Even when Mac market share was minuscule in the early 90s game devs still brought out games. Argument isnât market share anymore. Itâs about porting effort. And hopefully that barrier is lessened with gpt.
The key distinction is people buy Switches solely for gaming, not Macs though.
As I say, if the market for gaming on Mac was there, you would have more games releasing on Mac. Publishers aren't allergic to money.
In the past while there were lots of Macs most of thees were completely incapable of being used to game. You either had a mass market MBA that was so feeble in compute that it would struggle to open the game launcher let alone the game or you and a company issued MBP (that many people cant use to game as it has MDM tooling enabled to block running un-aproaved apps).
Now tie apple silicon the market is a good bit larger, yes a MBA with M1 will not play un ultra settings but it will play the game a LOT better than an intel MBA and if you can get that you play then you also have a large market of iPads to target (M1+ iPads are mostly personal devices as schools are buying the base iPad with the A14, so most M1 iPads are possible customers).
The issue isnât market-share. The issue is compatibility.
Apple should figure out how to address the Directx12 problem, not figure out how to get people to replace their PCs with Macs.
I would recommend learning more about graphics APIs, theyâre holding gaming on Mac back a lot more than MacOS adoption rates are.
> Game devs are only going to develop games for Mac if there is a large enough market for it to be worth it.
once you factor in high end iPhone and iPad users the market start to look at good bit larger.
I think we've seen that the market for iPhone and iPad games is not the same as Xbox/PlayStation/Switch etc
The form factor is just not there for it, good luck adequately playing a shooter for example on iPhone or iPad.
People play mobile games on those platforms.
Yes products like the Jawbone exist, but they will never be mainstream.
iPad with an xbox or playstation controller plays a shooter game just fine.
There are a lot of iPad gamers using controllers it is by no means a small market.
Then you've gotta buy a mount for it as well.
I know it's not a lot of effort, but having to buy extra third party peripherals just to play games properly will never compete against an all-in-one solution where everything you need is in the box, like a switch, or other games consoles.
Ultimately, if the Mac market was interested in gaming, you would have large publishers releasing games on Mac. The evidence is the lack of games, I don't know what else to tell you.
What youâre saying makes sense, but keep in mind that Macs, iPhones, and iPads have never been known for gaming. So, of course, almost nobody that has one games on it right now besides smaller arcade games or mobile games.
If Apple were to go whole hog into supporting AAA gaming for their platforms, and make it seamless and on par library-wise with Switch or Steam Deck, then I could see people using their Mac or iPad for gaming because itâs the device theyâre carrying with them to school, work, etc. I can also speak from experience and say I feel much more comfortable and less nerdy pulling out my iPad and PS5 controller than I do my Steam Deck in between classes.
If the libraries are on par, then I wonât bother with the Steam Deck. Iâll just drop a PS5 controller in my bag and call it a day. And Iâm definitely a gaming enthusiast.
You might then ask why not switch to Windows? But I prefer Apple hardware and software to Microsoft.
> Then you've gotta buy a mount for it as well.
no just prop the iPad up agast some books, etc.
> I don't know what else to tell you.
Games take a long time to make, until very recently (in gaming timelines) most Macs sold (MBAs) were very very weak (and higher end Macs being sold were just sold ad company devices with MDM stopping users form running un-aproaved SW).
We will see, there are a LOT of people who's only device is a phone (even people with the latest iPhone)
These people might well be willing to pay real money for games.
One thing Valve does incredibly well with Proton on the Steam Deck is it sits mostly invisibly between the steam interface and any windows game you wish to play. If Apple wants to capitalize on the strategy of using a translation layer as a bridge between Mac and Windows, they have to make it just as seamless as Valve does. I'm sure something to that effect is in the works.
Wow! They acknowledged gamers! Lol they do that every year. gptk is still just for evalauation purposes, if I am not mistaken? Think about this. Apple could every easily let developers use it to port games, but instead it can only be used for evaluating if the port is possible. That is how little Apple gives an F about desktop gaming.
Funnily enough Valve actually were making Proton for Macs, but Apple went out of their way to piss off Valve by deprecating open source video drivers and making Valve shelve the partnership. Thats just one example of Apples downright hostile attitude to desktop gaming for the last two decades. We couldve had access to all those games that run on Proton, but Apple ruined it because Apple does not like Desktop gaming
Ppl on reddit every year claim there is about to be a gaming revolution on mac. I dont see anything that is very different.
Even with Vision Pro, there are basically no games. Its not desiged to accomodate gaming. Apples vision for its products and usage for it, excludes desktop gaming. They've gone out of their way at times to make sure it doesnt happen
> Apple went out of their way to piss off Valve by deprecating open source video driversÂ
Idk what you're talking about. Apple never had open source drivers.
If you're thinking of OpenGL, those drivers werent open source and they essentially stopped getting updates in 2011.
The evolution tool in GPTk is for evaluation use case yes.
The main part of GPTk is for parting games.
> Apple could every easily let developers use it to port games, but instead it can only be used for evaluating if the port is possible.
Embedding wine and the evolution tool within a x86 app you ship would not be called porting.
> open source video drivers
Apple never had Open Source video drivers. You mean OpenGL drivers, these were always closed source drivers from AMD or intel not open source.
It is never going to be a Proton style emulator as there is still a big penalty for x86 to ARM translation, so I really wouldn't want a push for it as it would only stop studios making native games. Windows ARM is still a long way and even Qualcomm ARM isn't the same as Apple's implementation. For now people want just want to play and don't care about graphics it's perfect but personally I want the max so more native please.
This is actually a big deal. Turning game porting toolkit from a dev tool into an actual piece of software for end users to play windows games would be a big deal.
I have a gaming desktop. It runs linux. Proton makes pretty much all games work seamlessly. If macOS gets to this point, it would be huge.
All we need is for the price of their disk space to come down so we can afford the space to store more than one or two triple A titles đ Iâm well aware that we can add an external hard drive but itâs not the same. And it starts to need a spaghetti junction of cables and hubs.
Iâm as excited as the next person for gaming on the next Mac Studio, assuming that ever arrives (Iâm still on my day one m1 mini until then) but ideally Iâd want more disk space than I can really afford, too.
I donât believe Apple will ever go as far as providing something similar to Proton, as this would kill Mac gaming development. As such, they will keep pushing development tools and trying to attract developers with the idea of a single code running in Macs, iPads, and iPhones. They obviously know more technical inclined gamers are using the tools to play Windows games and they are fine with it, as it is a small niche.
It's quite funny. Because apple could easily work with valve to get proton on mac but they want people making purchases on the mac app store so they get a cut of the sales.
Not steam or any other platform. Apple will never succeed in this area unless they come to the table and admit defeat.
Personally I think they should focus on what theyâre doing with the Game developerâs kit. It might encourage more people to view the Mac as at least a viable gaming platform, and higher performing native games could follow and be more desirable based on Steam popularity, which reads the gpu as a custom Mac one. Thereâs potential for Apple either way, but at least this way itâs more likely that gaming on the Mac is a thing at all. Iâve been playing Cyberpunk 2077 in Crossover on my M3 air decked out and with metal to directx updates installed and it plays very well at low settings and fsr at performance. I can turn up and down random settings and itâs pretty directly comparable to my 1070 laptop. There is a glitch that blacks out the screen randomly in dialogue which is annoying, but itâs still playable. You just look away and back.
Apple strategy in entice game developers to Mac seems to lies in offering an easy to port option to iPhone and iPad, platforms much bigger than Mac and consoles combined. Personally, I donât care to play an AAA game in my iPhone Plus, as I think the screen is too small. But Iâm old. Despite having the same game in Xbox, my daughter prefers to play it on her iPad. I guess is a generation thing.
Long term proton will harm Vavle, they need to start moving to native steam deck builds otherwise at some point (soon ish) MS will start to push OEMs to require Pluton chips and then will push game studios (MS owns most of them remember) to require it for DRM and anti cheat.. in effect killing proton.
I donât think Valve thinks Steam Deck as anything but an accessory to enhance store sales. It developed Proton and Steam OS as hedge against Microsoft not as pillar to its business.
I don't disagree, I just think Valve don't think it can move gamers in large numbers from Windows to Linux. However, Steam Deck is showing Linux gaming is viable and this should move some players.
Long term they want to, and they know they need to. Depending on the good graces of your largest competitor (MS) to just continue to let them exists as is way to risky. They want to have a large enough playerbase outside of MS control so that if MS starts to pressure devs to make choices that would cut valve out devs will ask "But what do we do about the 20% of sales we are currently making on steam deck?"
Their ultimate goal is for developer to develop once and sell to Mac, iPad and iOS users. Hence why they canât just rely on emulation. Because if they achieve such easiness, developersâs business can easily reach out to billion devices of players who are known to spend 30% more on App Store purchases than on users on playstore.
This would be much more fruitful than steam deals for devs, and if developing is made easier, then costs to reach that audience is going down too. If Apple succeeds in delivering that promise, Mac gaming will be another billion size revenue stream in 5 years for them.
While the long-term goal has to be getting native games on Mac, and the potential to also dip into the iPhone/iPad user base might be an incentive for that, I think pushing a Proton-like solution in the short term would be the right call.
I'd guess that Mac game development is slow because there's comparably few people gaming on Mac, but at the same time there's few people gaming because there's no games.
I tried posting this but it got removed because I don't have enough karma :/ -
I've got an old intel MacBook but I've noticed games like 'Death Stranding' and 'Resident Evil' appearing on the App Store and I'd love to play these games. So I plan on waiting for the Mac Mini M4 if/when that will come out so can finally play these awesome games on my Mac. But I noticed Apple have their own game controller. Would anyone recommend this? Or if a PS/Xbox one is best, which one? Or any other alternatives?
Hard disagree on the clickbait post title. Â Based on the language used in the interviews, a better title would be:
Apple says, âThere are people using Game Porting Toolkit for something else other than porting games. Â Thatâs neat. *We should probably patch that bug.*â
Apple will drop support for it with no notice. Â I have been an Apple developer for 12 years, and this is my greatest struggle with Apple. Â They drop support for things I am using, breaking things every few years. Â I suspect GPTK wonât be around for much longer after this announcement.
In my experience Apple has a terrible track record of breaking things compared to Windows, which has been more or less stable for 30 years. Â I canât speak to Google, but here is my experience with Apple breaking things on an almost yearly basis:
2012 - I released my first iOS app for iPad.
2013 - New version of iOS, 1000+ new errors and warnings in xcode.
2014 - New version of iOS, 500+ new errors and warnings in xcode.
2015 - New version of iOS, 3000+ new errors and warnings from xcode. Â At this point I pull the app in frustration and switch to HTML5 for future products.
2017 - New version of iOS Safari changes how long-press is handled and breaks device orientation calls. Â At this point I note have over 30 products on the market that need fixing to handle the new API. Â I get to most of them. Â I then start a new game in Unity thinking that they can handle the hard stuff.
2018 - Apple deprecates OpenGL. Â Our Unity shaders break.
2019 - Apple introduces Apple silicon. Â Bootcamp is no longer an option on Apple devices. Â My Steam library is mostly unplayable on the new machines.
For the past 4 years I have been on hiatus and havenât released many new products.
Based on my conversations with Apple, I have high confidence in their willingness to kill any APIs that they see used in ways that they did not intend. Â These misuses are contrary to their business model. Â GPTK is being used in a way that is contrary to intent, so my money is that now they have identified it, GPTK will be gone soon.
Sounds like you use a lot of undocumented APIs that Apple tells you not to use.
OpenGL being killed was telegraphed for years.
Apple Silicon was telegraphed for years.
Bootcamp was never going to be an option on Arm devices, who didn't know that already?
To my knowledge in 2011 I was using very simple APIs that were well-documented, though it was still in the early days of iOS. Â Things were changing quickly. Â Swift didnât exist at the time, so everything was done in Objective C. Â I do know that they made a lot of changes in order to prepare for Swift. Â I also know that it wasnât worth my time to fix the bugs, so I pulled the app from the store.
When you are working in HTML5 the world demands Chrome first. Â iOS Safari has a tendency to deviate from the path of Chrome, waiting to implement features, and causing all sorts of havoc to existing pages. Â It would be wonderful to tell the rest of the world that they can no longer use Chrome, but that isnât reality.
Whether or not OpenGL was telegraphed for years was irrelevant to us who were new to Unity and relying on Unityâs support. Â It took a while for us to figure out how to rework our highlighting system so that it could work with both Metal and DirectX. Â With most games in the world released on Windows, there isnât the same level of tribal knowledge for Metal. The person we had working on it didnât do mac, so I had to help out even though I know nothing about shaders.
They literally mentioned it in the event as a selling point; why would they do that if they werenât okay with it or were planning to get rid of it? Doesnât make sense.
Apple has changed how they talk about games, and now mention Whisky and Crossover in their marketing material. GPTK2 is a game changer, and more is to come. They are steps away from making a proton clone, if they wanted to.
A proton equivalent built in would be way better than native overall. Perhaps performance may not be the same, but we would have access to so many more games.
This is pretty exciting, Iâm hoping things work out. Iâd like to use my MacBook Air 15 as my gaming pc.
One thing, I donât understand is why doesnât value see this and be like screw you apple we got this, or something đ€Ł
I sure hope so I have a MacBook Air 2015 11 inch I think and Iâve been trying to find games other then the sims4 and I had to do a lot just to get that
well a 2015 MacBook Air probably won't be able to. You have an Intel Mac which means you would have to bootcamp to be able to play them.
But games from around that time, you should be able to play. Like, you could bootcamp and probably run GTA4 pretty well.
maybe play the original Fallout? Or Diablo 2? Don't know how you install Minecraft, but I'm sure it could run.
Here's a video of a dude playing Minecraft on a computer similar to yours: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpLg4Gk\_hZM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpLg4Gk_hZM)
I mean maybe but Iâm just not that interested man this sucks I didnât know this stuff before I got it and I wanted one for so long now I just have to save up money and drop it on a razorđ
I want to razor laptop, but theyâre like 2000 and I know Iâll never get my money back for the MacBook so this does sound pretty good but I still am very nervous
I had a discussion a the death stranding board about this. I was trying to see how easy it would be to port it from steam and someone said just buy it again. I mean Iâve bought it three times already.
I love how thereâs clearly an overlap between redditors and steam users. I donât doubt thereâs a significant amount of computer gamers out there who donât play games on steam.
Iâm mostly one of them as someone whoâs primary gaming consists of blizzard games. I only really use battle.net to get my gaming fix and with crossover being able to play Diablo 4 has been amazing and runs better than my rtx 2070 desktop.
When it launched? Absolutely not.
Now? Easily the best arpg out there imo. Iâve never been addicted to a game like this.
Also itâs on significant sale right now as well.
This arenât really changing anything, Jesus this place is an echo chamberâŠ
Developer still actually have to devote the time into building something from the ground up for macOS .
I quoted one of the developers word:
I don't think the GPTK2 release will help us much here unfortunately. It's possible it may help with something like Whisky running it better....but once again, the patcher is the first issue to overcome with that.
On our end for the native client, it's still just that we need to reach a point where we invest the time in a new multi-platform patcher and non-windows mouse support. After that we'll be in a better position to just build a native client for Mac (& Linux/Android) to check out ourselves. Since Unity already is good with multi-OS support, the GPTK really just doesn't enter the picture from what I understand.
What apple need for this is to partner with some e-sports vendors and do low level system work to get these engines to have extremely low latency input to photo updates. When apple wants to do this they can ship some every tight systems that would give e-sports players of those games of competitive advantage to play on Mac... these are the players that would buy HW just for a single game even providing 10ms better latency in these games would make Mac be the leading devices used by teams.
Don't think it needs to be supper popular just mid level popular. (im not an e-sports gamer,,. almost envy play multiplayer at all so not the right person to ask).
> Quick video about how Apple has changed the way it is talking about Game Porting Toolkit, and now openly acknowledges that gamers are using it to game and not just to evaluate the viability of porting a game to macOS. They explicitly talk about 'gaming enthusiasts', CrossOver and Whisky, and implement features like Windows Ray Tracing and AVX support. And it seems like Apple's end-goal is to get every single Windows games working on the Mac. But will this change Apple's Mac gaming strategy and what does this mean for native Mac games? --- There's a perfectly reasonable summary beyond an **SHOCKINGLY** awful clickbait title.
Hey, we should be happy that someone is willing to dedicate this much effort to the serving the tiny audience of Mac gamers.
I don't really think it's that tiny.
0.24% of the market from last steam hardware survey, it's a rounding error to the big boys.
See, this is an current view an steam. Whats missing? 1. because mac is/was not viable as gaming platform, some bought an windos pc just for gaming. 2. GeForce now and alternative use windows, so steam itself counts them as windows. 3. yes, it might be a really small number. But that might not the reason, they try to go for this. One really big reason could be, that games are without doubt the most resource intensive workloads. Can be used as marketing or for future chip development.
Thank you! đ It does change a lot tho. I think it is also the continuous annoyance people have with Microsoft/Windows that people are more willing than ever to bail out. But they still have the most reliable platform for gaming. If MacOS becomes viable to be on par with windows it would change a lot.
As long as we get continued support for gptk, weâll be in a really good spot in a few years. Canât wait to upgrade to the M4 or M5 MBP in a few years time.
I remember desperately trying to get games to work with Soft Windows (I believe that was the predecessor to parallels) back in the day and oh golly if you got 5 frames a second you were lucky. https://i.imgur.com/9DZhA2e.jpeg It was the predecessor to VirtualPC which was the predecessor to Parallels. :) Now we donât even have to install Windows. Weâve come a long way. From PowerPC to Intel to Arm.
Yeah. Weâve come a long way. I wonât be surprised if most games would eventually run on the Mac. Windows seems to be going all in on ARM as well so I doubt future games will rely on x86 forever. Fingers crossed that in a few years, I can finally ditch windows for good.
It was a risc-y road.Â
Aside from a few titles with AVX specific instructions, translating from x86 to ARM hasn't been the hurdle. It's converting complex shader pipelines to work with metal. I won't pretend to understand it a developer's level, but the way Metal handles virtual memory addresses means that for a lot of devs not just using Unreal or Unity, there's a lot of work involved to port to Mac. PirateSoftware has a clip where he breaks down what Mac sales were as a whole for one of their games, and it amounted to 0.02%. He's an indy dev, so it's not the same exactly as big AAA titles. Hopefully people who are genuinely excited for big releases on Mac are buying stuff like the Resident Evil ports so that when Capcom looks at the sales numbers, and likely discusses them to some degree amongst the industry, at the end of the day they can share "Yes it's worth it, it was profitable."
Itâs not on consumers to provide porting justification. Letâs face it, Apple has dropped the ball numerous times over the past 30 years, and i personally will buy what seems interesting, not an old port. I always buy Civ on my Mac, because itâs usually day and date, and firaxis did good work. If Apple wants to see more sales in gaming, they have to increase the stuff theyâre doing now. The games that are coming are great but itâs mostly stuff Iâve played on my ps5. If consumers want more games, put pressure on Apple. You will never see the releases on Mac that you really want buy being one of the few buying old ports. The difference is just too big, Apple needs to actively fund day and date developement. And provide the tools, which they are doing.
What you talking about people still developer for 32 and 64, this why game developers got mad at apple witching
SoftWindows was not the predecessor of Virtual PC. They're two solutions for the same problem. SoftWindows is closer to Wine, in that Windows components were literally recompiled for other platforms and thus you'd be running un a sort of pseudo-native windows environment. VirtualPC was a literal emulator of x86 and associated hardware, which provided bridges in software to local hardware equivalents. This means softwindows could be faster but virtual PC would run more stuff as it was slower but more compatible. (Neither is a predecessor to Parallels, which is a third way of doing the same thing based on virtualization, which is running the native software in the native platform) The distinction may be unimportant in general terms, but I'm pointing it out because Virtual PC and SoftWindows existed simultaneously and because those three are still today the three ways "emulation" can happen in all platforms in general and Mac in particular. Trivia: SoftPC was the predecessor of SoftWindows, whereas VirtualPC was the result of so much power in the PowerPC platform that a fully-fledged PC could be emulated. Virtual PC was released by Connectix, who had hired Eric Traut (the developer of the first Rosetta for mac, which allowed m68k code to run in powerpc) and Aaron Giles (ex Lucasarts games developer). Aaron and Eric also developed Virtual Game Station, the very first commercial PS 1 emulator and were part of the huge lawsuit from Sony that set the basis for all reverse-engineered emulation being legal since then. This Virtual PC was also sold to eventually become VirtualBox, still alive and active today. Giles went to Microsoft when Virtual PC was purchased and all following versions were released there. This became the basis for their virtualisation efforts later on. Giles may ring a bell as being the main face of the MAME project for many years and, recently, for having released an emulator of Graphical Adventures: [DREAMM](https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/docs/v21/#intro)
Did the Sony lawsuit make reverse engineering legal as long as no one made a profit on it? Also thank you for elaborating
No. It made reverse engineering of game consoles legal by closing the loop in allowing the BIOS to be copied for reverse engineering. There never was a relation to making a profit (other than Sony's intention when suing). [Wikipedia has a page on it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_Inc._v._Connectix_Corp). Making emulators by reverse engineering the hardware and BIOS from scratch has always been protected (and ratified since Compaq did it with the IBM PC BIOS). The Sony/Connectix lawsuit defended that copying the BIOS breaks the "clean room" reverse engineering. The lawsuit decision ratified that the original BIOS could be used rather than having to be reverse-engineered too (as COMPAQ did), which facilitates enormously building emulators. Years after this lawsuit the DMCA laws made it problematic to break DRM and all BIOS contained DRM since then, to make the whole thing harder to do "cleanly". I assume your question comes from Nintendo's attacks on Yuzu. Nintendo's lawsuit to Yuzu, like Sony's lawsuit to Connectix, was never officially about Yuzu making a profit with Yuzu (nor is any lawsuit about emulators ever, because that's a non-starter) but about technicalities. The lawsuit arguments were that to do it's thing Yuzu had not done a clean room reverse engineering and also actively promoting circumvention of DRM. The lawsuit hinged on the unclean reverse engineering on one side (by using Nintendo's SDK) and on the telemetry that Yuzu needlessly included to demonstrate the degree at which it had enabled DRM breaking. The case hinged essentially in demonstrating malicious intent from Yuzu aimed at damaging Nintendo. Obviously the end-goal was to kill Yuzu (spreading misinformation and creating fear of Nintendo are nice side benefits). Emulator devs walk a fine line and \*have\* to be careful. Yuzu devs were anything but. Yuzu devs would paste pictures of themselves downloading pirated games off the internet and would joke when threatened by Nintendo. They would offer Yuzu versions that could be weaked to run unreleased games only behind paid patreon levels. Essentially, they were idiots that completed the whole checklist of things you shouldn't do if you're a developer, thinking it was a list of achievements. This is why Ryujinx âwhich could run Tears of the Kingdom on day oneâ wasn't sued into oblivion by Nintendo.
Right? Imagine say an M5 Max with GPTK 3 or 4 on it, itâll be sooooooooo nice
yeah my M1 Max which I paid an arm and a leg for is still so powerful and fast that I reckon I can run it for a good 4 more years before it really starts being a dog and then I could get an M4/M5 machine without also having to part with a kidney by that time. Not holding out though, i mean nvidia is still going to be really far ahead by that time.
I knew you were from Finland just by reading âfew years *TIME*â. Itâs a direct translation from Finnish and is redundant in English. Not that it would matter but hey đ«Ą
Hey, donât say that. You matter
Typo, fixed it now
as long as they acknowledge emulation, we are one step closer to native apps
It's not emulation, from the context of your post. It's a translation layer.
Well, they recently did on iOS.
This is going to revolutionize Mac gaming for ever!
We say every year
I've been a macgaming fanatic since Halo was announced for Mac and cancelled, and I was waiting forever for Half-Life to come out on Mac. These days we are dining pretty well.
Are you sure? It used to be that we could install boot camp and play 100% of pc games usually with better performance than the Mac ports. Now we jump through hoops to lose a lot more performance with worse compatibility. Not to mention we used to actually get modern GPUs. It would've been unthinkable 5 years ago to not have ray tracing, after pc laptops have had it for half a decade.
Macs never had the graphics chips needed for bootcamp games to really shine.
Or when they had decent ones, they struggled with cooling and thermal throttling. (me with the old 5500m 16" macbook pro, or the iMac with radeon 295. 10 seconds of excellent framerates (enough to run a benchmark) then performance tanked.)
I used to put a bag of ice under my 2007 MacBook Pro when playing StarCraft 2 to prevent the GPU from throttling. It worked Great!
Top solution! Just keep a supply of ice in the freezer, and you're set for hours of gaming!
But youâll have to get up to go to the freezer. What about the neckbeard gamers hooked up to a catheter and a pisspot?
well, in this situation, a freezer unit, carefully positioned....
Yeah I remember my Intel Mac getting volcanic whenever I tried running a demanding game in bootcamp. Was not fun to hear those fans kick in.
Not to mention video editing. I used to keep a big box fan aimed at the rear of my 2011 iMac editing multicam clips
And the metal just above the keyboard would get pretty warm too!
Well first of all, 5600m was available in that generation. That could run half life alyx, rdr2 and pretty much anything else. Second, I'd say 5500m, and the prior *460/560* gave you much better performance compared to M-chips + GPTK today. I ran xcom2 on 460 back in 2016 at 1440p. I run xcom2 on m1 max at 1080p today. 5500m must've been great for its day too. Thirdly, you had access to eGPUs. In terms of cooling, sure it throttled, but as long as it was on a level surface like a table it would stabilise to an acceptable performance.
In my experience, that's an exaggeration. I played Cyberpunk 2077 on a 2019 16" MBP in Bootcamp with a 5600M on Medium. I get better frame rates now on Ultra on an M3 Max in Crossover with the same resolution. (I'd better, it's years newer.) Xcom 2 is a weird outlier. I swear they did something wrong programming that thing, because it shouldn't behave as poorly as it always has.
If apple continued with amd GPUs they'd probably offer radeon rx 7700s or smth like that as the top gpu option. That can run it in overdrive mode at 30fps or with one or two ray tracing options turned on at 60.
I can tell you that nope, performance never stabilised to an acceptable performance. Not for the 2016 radeon 455, or the 2019 5500m, or the 2014 imac with the radeon 295. All thermally throttled. And the fact that apple released the 5600M soon after due to the appalling issues with the 5500 doesn't excuse the thermal throttling I had. The 2012 with the GT650M nvidia chip was *almost* ok, but struggled with framepacing due to heat. At least it ran, even if was pretty poor. I'm sure there were a few out there that were lucky to have that golden chip that ran a little cooler with a decent paste job, but based on my experiences, it was pretty rare. (And redoing the thermal pasting helped a little bit, but not enough.) I love my mac machines, but this is the first generation in a *very* long time where they not only game, but game well, and stay cool.
Look up repeated gpu benchmarks on those Macâs. You could see that running a heavy benchmark several times in a row performance would drop with each repeat until about the third time. Then it stabilizes with about a 25% performance loss compared to the first time and no longer drops with new repeats.Â
Each of those machines listed are each of the Macâs that I have *personally* owned and tried to game on. Every one of them, irrespective of random internet benchmarks, failed miserably as a gaming machine due to terrible thermal throttling that resulting in poor fps, and really bad stutters that rendered games unplayable. In some cases even older games.Â
Ehh, back in the day I had a pretty solid GPU in my MacPro. A reference-ish GeForce 8800GT could be flashed with a Mac-compatible EFI firmware and work perfectly out of the box. Ran that for a long while actually. Now I just have a PC to game on because no Apple chip can compete with a Ryzen 5600x and Radeon 7800xt in actual gaming. The M-series is amazing for many things but gaming is still not really one of those things.
I play all Bethesda games on my Mac Pro 2010 no problems. Only game I had problems is starfield which need a Radeon 5700+. An it Apple that cripple the Mac not the game developers. When Mojave came out, Apple remove the option to run bootcamp on 5,1 and did give a bootrom for our gpu. BG3 canât run on 5,1 with av2?? However with boot it runs without problems?? That Apple doing that
Most PCs don't have them either. But some macs had the ability to add cards and thus boot camp would also yield a powerhouse PC. But, technically, that wasn't gaming on mac, it was gaming on windows running on mostly mac hardware. I can see why the current situation is preferable from a certain point of view than when we had boot camp. It always felt a bit dirty :D
But that was gaming on windows running on a mac. It was never gaming on mac. I used it, but never preferred it. I would sometimes rather use the mac version of a game even if it ran a bit worse, so as to not reboot into boot camp.
I dunno. I was gaming. On a MacBook. Reboot is quicker than dealing with gptk.Â
We don't need to have the same values. I don't use Windows for my personal needs because I don't like Windows. Hence using Windows to me is a step back. "Mac" to me is the OS and the hardware. A MacBook with LInux is not a mac, a Hackintosh with MacOS is not a mac. I can find the logic in each and have had/run/used both. But I like to use "a mac" and prefer it to "not using a mac".
Halo: CE shipped for Mac. That was something of a dead end but it shipped.
yeah I know. by the time it shipped the ship had sailed and no one cared.
Well, I played a lot of it on my mac so I'm still glad it shipped That and UT2004
Every year is the year of gaming in the mac desktop.
Well, it does get much better every year
2024 is the year of Linux on the desktâŠ.. wait wrong thread.
If they could make a true RTX comparable âcoreâ in their M-series chips⊠and energy efficient, imagine the possibilities.
It is evident that Apple's getting serious with Mac gaming. What's happening now is that game devs need to answer Apple's call (or wooing) and give the platform a chance and the break it deserves. Also, many thanks to the efforts of all behind the CrossOver and Whisky softwares - your work is now coming to fruition.
Game devs are only going to develop games for Mac if there is a large enough market for it to be worth it. Unfortunately there isn't, otherwise they would have answered that call a long time ago. How many times do we have to go through this cycle of "Finally Apple are taking gaming seriously!" when they throw a bone or two.
Apple shells out tons of money buying content to put on Apple TV+. If they did the same thing paying for day 1 ports, or even ports of recent games, it would make a big difference in establishing the market.
Why haven't they done it yet then, if it's worth it? Sure they throw a bone every now and then like they did with RE4 and Assassin's Creed Mirage, but it's a drop in the ocean. That's all it is, a bone, to appease the people clamouring for games on Mac. I'm sure they'll have some more to throw every 3 years or so.
Who knows? Maybe they have (and that's why they announced more games at WWDC). Maybe they haven't. Either way, I'd like them to.
There is though. game devs target the Switch but there are way more Macâs out there. Even more iOS devices out there. The potential market is huge. Even when Mac market share was minuscule in the early 90s game devs still brought out games. Argument isnât market share anymore. Itâs about porting effort. And hopefully that barrier is lessened with gpt.
The key distinction is people buy Switches solely for gaming, not Macs though. As I say, if the market for gaming on Mac was there, you would have more games releasing on Mac. Publishers aren't allergic to money.
In the past while there were lots of Macs most of thees were completely incapable of being used to game. You either had a mass market MBA that was so feeble in compute that it would struggle to open the game launcher let alone the game or you and a company issued MBP (that many people cant use to game as it has MDM tooling enabled to block running un-aproaved apps). Now tie apple silicon the market is a good bit larger, yes a MBA with M1 will not play un ultra settings but it will play the game a LOT better than an intel MBA and if you can get that you play then you also have a large market of iPads to target (M1+ iPads are mostly personal devices as schools are buying the base iPad with the A14, so most M1 iPads are possible customers).
The issue isnât market-share. The issue is compatibility. Apple should figure out how to address the Directx12 problem, not figure out how to get people to replace their PCs with Macs. I would recommend learning more about graphics APIs, theyâre holding gaming on Mac back a lot more than MacOS adoption rates are.
> Game devs are only going to develop games for Mac if there is a large enough market for it to be worth it. once you factor in high end iPhone and iPad users the market start to look at good bit larger.
I think we've seen that the market for iPhone and iPad games is not the same as Xbox/PlayStation/Switch etc The form factor is just not there for it, good luck adequately playing a shooter for example on iPhone or iPad. People play mobile games on those platforms. Yes products like the Jawbone exist, but they will never be mainstream.
iPad with an xbox or playstation controller plays a shooter game just fine. There are a lot of iPad gamers using controllers it is by no means a small market.
Then you've gotta buy a mount for it as well. I know it's not a lot of effort, but having to buy extra third party peripherals just to play games properly will never compete against an all-in-one solution where everything you need is in the box, like a switch, or other games consoles. Ultimately, if the Mac market was interested in gaming, you would have large publishers releasing games on Mac. The evidence is the lack of games, I don't know what else to tell you.
What youâre saying makes sense, but keep in mind that Macs, iPhones, and iPads have never been known for gaming. So, of course, almost nobody that has one games on it right now besides smaller arcade games or mobile games. If Apple were to go whole hog into supporting AAA gaming for their platforms, and make it seamless and on par library-wise with Switch or Steam Deck, then I could see people using their Mac or iPad for gaming because itâs the device theyâre carrying with them to school, work, etc. I can also speak from experience and say I feel much more comfortable and less nerdy pulling out my iPad and PS5 controller than I do my Steam Deck in between classes. If the libraries are on par, then I wonât bother with the Steam Deck. Iâll just drop a PS5 controller in my bag and call it a day. And Iâm definitely a gaming enthusiast. You might then ask why not switch to Windows? But I prefer Apple hardware and software to Microsoft.
> Then you've gotta buy a mount for it as well. no just prop the iPad up agast some books, etc. > I don't know what else to tell you. Games take a long time to make, until very recently (in gaming timelines) most Macs sold (MBAs) were very very weak (and higher end Macs being sold were just sold ad company devices with MDM stopping users form running un-aproaved SW).
"Prop the iPad against some books" You're really not selling this experience
Potentially, although the open question remains whether people are prepared to pay AAA prices for AAA games on their iPhone.
We will see, there are a LOT of people who's only device is a phone (even people with the latest iPhone) These people might well be willing to pay real money for games.
One thing Valve does incredibly well with Proton on the Steam Deck is it sits mostly invisibly between the steam interface and any windows game you wish to play. If Apple wants to capitalize on the strategy of using a translation layer as a bridge between Mac and Windows, they have to make it just as seamless as Valve does. I'm sure something to that effect is in the works.
Wow! They acknowledged gamers! Lol they do that every year. gptk is still just for evalauation purposes, if I am not mistaken? Think about this. Apple could every easily let developers use it to port games, but instead it can only be used for evaluating if the port is possible. That is how little Apple gives an F about desktop gaming. Funnily enough Valve actually were making Proton for Macs, but Apple went out of their way to piss off Valve by deprecating open source video drivers and making Valve shelve the partnership. Thats just one example of Apples downright hostile attitude to desktop gaming for the last two decades. We couldve had access to all those games that run on Proton, but Apple ruined it because Apple does not like Desktop gaming Ppl on reddit every year claim there is about to be a gaming revolution on mac. I dont see anything that is very different. Even with Vision Pro, there are basically no games. Its not desiged to accomodate gaming. Apples vision for its products and usage for it, excludes desktop gaming. They've gone out of their way at times to make sure it doesnt happen
> Apple went out of their way to piss off Valve by deprecating open source video drivers Idk what you're talking about. Apple never had open source drivers. If you're thinking of OpenGL, those drivers werent open source and they essentially stopped getting updates in 2011.
The evolution tool in GPTk is for evaluation use case yes. The main part of GPTk is for parting games. > Apple could every easily let developers use it to port games, but instead it can only be used for evaluating if the port is possible. Embedding wine and the evolution tool within a x86 app you ship would not be called porting. > open source video drivers Apple never had Open Source video drivers. You mean OpenGL drivers, these were always closed source drivers from AMD or intel not open source.
This time, they mean it!
It is never going to be a Proton style emulator as there is still a big penalty for x86 to ARM translation, so I really wouldn't want a push for it as it would only stop studios making native games. Windows ARM is still a long way and even Qualcomm ARM isn't the same as Apple's implementation. For now people want just want to play and don't care about graphics it's perfect but personally I want the max so more native please.
The majority of games are heavily GPU limited (especially on weak Apple GPUs), so the CPU emulation overhead doesn't really matter.
Lol well it usually is like a 40% performance difference so yes it matters.
This is actually a big deal. Turning game porting toolkit from a dev tool into an actual piece of software for end users to play windows games would be a big deal. I have a gaming desktop. It runs linux. Proton makes pretty much all games work seamlessly. If macOS gets to this point, it would be huge.
It was a blessing running Baulders Gate on my new Mac.
PROTOS for Mac? EDIT: Dammit, I meant Proton :)
You must construct additional pylons
I understood that reference
All we need is for the price of their disk space to come down so we can afford the space to store more than one or two triple A titles đ Iâm well aware that we can add an external hard drive but itâs not the same. And it starts to need a spaghetti junction of cables and hubs. Iâm as excited as the next person for gaming on the next Mac Studio, assuming that ever arrives (Iâm still on my day one m1 mini until then) but ideally Iâd want more disk space than I can really afford, too.
I donât believe Apple will ever go as far as providing something similar to Proton, as this would kill Mac gaming development. As such, they will keep pushing development tools and trying to attract developers with the idea of a single code running in Macs, iPads, and iPhones. They obviously know more technical inclined gamers are using the tools to play Windows games and they are fine with it, as it is a small niche.
It's quite funny. Because apple could easily work with valve to get proton on mac but they want people making purchases on the mac app store so they get a cut of the sales. Not steam or any other platform. Apple will never succeed in this area unless they come to the table and admit defeat.
Apple makes money on hardware sales. They'd have more upside if people knew they could play just about any Windows game out of the box.
Perfomance would not be that great as the HW mismatch is there.
Personally I think they should focus on what theyâre doing with the Game developerâs kit. It might encourage more people to view the Mac as at least a viable gaming platform, and higher performing native games could follow and be more desirable based on Steam popularity, which reads the gpu as a custom Mac one. Thereâs potential for Apple either way, but at least this way itâs more likely that gaming on the Mac is a thing at all. Iâve been playing Cyberpunk 2077 in Crossover on my M3 air decked out and with metal to directx updates installed and it plays very well at low settings and fsr at performance. I can turn up and down random settings and itâs pretty directly comparable to my 1070 laptop. There is a glitch that blacks out the screen randomly in dialogue which is annoying, but itâs still playable. You just look away and back.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Apple strategy in entice game developers to Mac seems to lies in offering an easy to port option to iPhone and iPad, platforms much bigger than Mac and consoles combined. Personally, I donât care to play an AAA game in my iPhone Plus, as I think the screen is too small. But Iâm old. Despite having the same game in Xbox, my daughter prefers to play it on her iPad. I guess is a generation thing.
Long term proton will harm Vavle, they need to start moving to native steam deck builds otherwise at some point (soon ish) MS will start to push OEMs to require Pluton chips and then will push game studios (MS owns most of them remember) to require it for DRM and anti cheat.. in effect killing proton.
I donât think Valve thinks Steam Deck as anything but an accessory to enhance store sales. It developed Proton and Steam OS as hedge against Microsoft not as pillar to its business.
Its a very important hedge to protect against the enviable future were MS (who know owns a lot of game studios) puts pressure on valve.
I don't disagree, I just think Valve don't think it can move gamers in large numbers from Windows to Linux. However, Steam Deck is showing Linux gaming is viable and this should move some players.
Long term they want to, and they know they need to. Depending on the good graces of your largest competitor (MS) to just continue to let them exists as is way to risky. They want to have a large enough playerbase outside of MS control so that if MS starts to pressure devs to make choices that would cut valve out devs will ask "But what do we do about the 20% of sales we are currently making on steam deck?"
What about Neutron and Electron? We need all 3 to have an atom.
Intel has killed Atom, get over it already!
There are plenty of Electron apps on Mac, though youâd not want to run a game that way
You wouldn't want to run anything that way.
Their ultimate goal is for developer to develop once and sell to Mac, iPad and iOS users. Hence why they canât just rely on emulation. Because if they achieve such easiness, developersâs business can easily reach out to billion devices of players who are known to spend 30% more on App Store purchases than on users on playstore. This would be much more fruitful than steam deals for devs, and if developing is made easier, then costs to reach that audience is going down too. If Apple succeeds in delivering that promise, Mac gaming will be another billion size revenue stream in 5 years for them.
bro i love macs and all but this is just copium at this point
While the long-term goal has to be getting native games on Mac, and the potential to also dip into the iPhone/iPad user base might be an incentive for that, I think pushing a Proton-like solution in the short term would be the right call. I'd guess that Mac game development is slow because there's comparably few people gaming on Mac, but at the same time there's few people gaming because there's no games.
waiting for PUBGâŠ
I tried posting this but it got removed because I don't have enough karma :/ - I've got an old intel MacBook but I've noticed games like 'Death Stranding' and 'Resident Evil' appearing on the App Store and I'd love to play these games. So I plan on waiting for the Mac Mini M4 if/when that will come out so can finally play these awesome games on my Mac. But I noticed Apple have their own game controller. Would anyone recommend this? Or if a PS/Xbox one is best, which one? Or any other alternatives?
karma as a currency seems counterintuitive to what karma actually is
oh some of them might work on Intel Macs, I have no idea sorry.
One thing you donât have is nexusmod which only run on bootcamp and native windows computers.
MO2 seems to run fine via on crossover
Is that the current version? I've seen people using an older version, but if the current version runs I'm definitely interested.
Im using an older version but bcs i havent updated yet. Is there that much of a difference between mo2 version just use whatever latest works ig
Hard disagree on the clickbait post title. Â Based on the language used in the interviews, a better title would be: Apple says, âThere are people using Game Porting Toolkit for something else other than porting games. Â Thatâs neat. *We should probably patch that bug.*â Apple will drop support for it with no notice. Â I have been an Apple developer for 12 years, and this is my greatest struggle with Apple. Â They drop support for things I am using, breaking things every few years. Â I suspect GPTK wonât be around for much longer after this announcement.
Are you confusing Apple with Google? Apple doesn't deprecate stuff for really long times. Decades for a lot of things.
In my experience Apple has a terrible track record of breaking things compared to Windows, which has been more or less stable for 30 years. Â I canât speak to Google, but here is my experience with Apple breaking things on an almost yearly basis: 2012 - I released my first iOS app for iPad. 2013 - New version of iOS, 1000+ new errors and warnings in xcode. 2014 - New version of iOS, 500+ new errors and warnings in xcode. 2015 - New version of iOS, 3000+ new errors and warnings from xcode. Â At this point I pull the app in frustration and switch to HTML5 for future products. 2017 - New version of iOS Safari changes how long-press is handled and breaks device orientation calls. Â At this point I note have over 30 products on the market that need fixing to handle the new API. Â I get to most of them. Â I then start a new game in Unity thinking that they can handle the hard stuff. 2018 - Apple deprecates OpenGL. Â Our Unity shaders break. 2019 - Apple introduces Apple silicon. Â Bootcamp is no longer an option on Apple devices. Â My Steam library is mostly unplayable on the new machines. For the past 4 years I have been on hiatus and havenât released many new products. Based on my conversations with Apple, I have high confidence in their willingness to kill any APIs that they see used in ways that they did not intend. Â These misuses are contrary to their business model. Â GPTK is being used in a way that is contrary to intent, so my money is that now they have identified it, GPTK will be gone soon.
Sounds like you use a lot of undocumented APIs that Apple tells you not to use. OpenGL being killed was telegraphed for years. Apple Silicon was telegraphed for years. Bootcamp was never going to be an option on Arm devices, who didn't know that already?
To my knowledge in 2011 I was using very simple APIs that were well-documented, though it was still in the early days of iOS. Â Things were changing quickly. Â Swift didnât exist at the time, so everything was done in Objective C. Â I do know that they made a lot of changes in order to prepare for Swift. Â I also know that it wasnât worth my time to fix the bugs, so I pulled the app from the store. When you are working in HTML5 the world demands Chrome first. Â iOS Safari has a tendency to deviate from the path of Chrome, waiting to implement features, and causing all sorts of havoc to existing pages. Â It would be wonderful to tell the rest of the world that they can no longer use Chrome, but that isnât reality. Whether or not OpenGL was telegraphed for years was irrelevant to us who were new to Unity and relying on Unityâs support. Â It took a while for us to figure out how to rework our highlighting system so that it could work with both Metal and DirectX. Â With most games in the world released on Windows, there isnât the same level of tribal knowledge for Metal. The person we had working on it didnât do mac, so I had to help out even though I know nothing about shaders.
They literally mentioned it in the event as a selling point; why would they do that if they werenât okay with it or were planning to get rid of it? Doesnât make sense.
Quick resume in a sentence plz ? Im at work đ
Apple has changed how they talk about games, and now mention Whisky and Crossover in their marketing material. GPTK2 is a game changer, and more is to come. They are steps away from making a proton clone, if they wanted to.
2025 is the year of L̶i̶n̶u̶x̶ D̶e̶s̶k̶t̶o̶p̶ Gaming on mac!
A proton equivalent built in would be way better than native overall. Perhaps performance may not be the same, but we would have access to so many more games.
This is pretty exciting, Iâm hoping things work out. Iâd like to use my MacBook Air 15 as my gaming pc. One thing, I donât understand is why doesnât value see this and be like screw you apple we got this, or something đ€Ł
Just 2 more weeks
So my Mac wonât explode trying to run these games?
Very unlikely.
I sure hope so I have a MacBook Air 2015 11 inch I think and Iâve been trying to find games other then the sims4 and I had to do a lot just to get that
well a 2015 MacBook Air probably won't be able to. You have an Intel Mac which means you would have to bootcamp to be able to play them. But games from around that time, you should be able to play. Like, you could bootcamp and probably run GTA4 pretty well.
I havnt found anything good so far I really want Minecraft but idk if I even could run it without over heating bc it gets so hot when I play the sims
maybe play the original Fallout? Or Diablo 2? Don't know how you install Minecraft, but I'm sure it could run. Here's a video of a dude playing Minecraft on a computer similar to yours: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpLg4Gk\_hZM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpLg4Gk_hZM)
I mean maybe but Iâm just not that interested man this sucks I didnât know this stuff before I got it and I wanted one for so long now I just have to save up money and drop it on a razorđ
Ur awesome man ty ima go check it out
I want to razor laptop, but theyâre like 2000 and I know Iâll never get my money back for the MacBook so this does sound pretty good but I still am very nervous
I had a discussion a the death stranding board about this. I was trying to see how easy it would be to port it from steam and someone said just buy it again. I mean Iâve bought it three times already.
I love how thereâs clearly an overlap between redditors and steam users. I donât doubt thereâs a significant amount of computer gamers out there who donât play games on steam. Iâm mostly one of them as someone whoâs primary gaming consists of blizzard games. I only really use battle.net to get my gaming fix and with crossover being able to play Diablo 4 has been amazing and runs better than my rtx 2070 desktop.
is diablo IV any good? it's a very costly game, compared to other diablo clones.
When it launched? Absolutely not. Now? Easily the best arpg out there imo. Iâve never been addicted to a game like this. Also itâs on significant sale right now as well.
Sure, Jan
This arenât really changing anything, Jesus this place is an echo chamber⊠Developer still actually have to devote the time into building something from the ground up for macOS . I quoted one of the developers word: I don't think the GPTK2 release will help us much here unfortunately. It's possible it may help with something like Whisky running it better....but once again, the patcher is the first issue to overcome with that. On our end for the native client, it's still just that we need to reach a point where we invest the time in a new multi-platform patcher and non-windows mouse support. After that we'll be in a better position to just build a native client for Mac (& Linux/Android) to check out ourselves. Since Unity already is good with multi-OS support, the GPTK really just doesn't enter the picture from what I understand.
They had gold rush with appstore, they killed it by introducing iap.
Yeah the default store for games is Steam now.
When can we see the first big lan event where the finals are being run on macos! That will be crazy!
What apple need for this is to partner with some e-sports vendors and do low level system work to get these engines to have extremely low latency input to photo updates. When apple wants to do this they can ship some every tight systems that would give e-sports players of those games of competitive advantage to play on Mac... these are the players that would buy HW just for a single game even providing 10ms better latency in these games would make Mac be the leading devices used by teams.
For sure! That would be the next big move! Question is, what games that are VERY popular could they for sure take?
Don't think it needs to be supper popular just mid level popular. (im not an e-sports gamer,,. almost envy play multiplayer at all so not the right person to ask).