Interview: "no evidence" Apple understands gaming - Page 5

What does that matter? The point is the far majority of the computer market uses integrated graphics.

I think it does. There was a time when we didn't have to think up excuses for why Macs use integrated graphics, because they used discrete chips for that. I remember when it was considered as a badge of honor by Mac fans and Apple promotional material that they didn't resort to that.

Todays integrated chips are far better than those of the past. Are these particular bragging rights necessary when these chips are capable enough for the majority of the market?

I think so teno. Though the gpus that apple was using in their low end weren't fantastically great... they at least had SOME nice gpu instruction / processing power. Intel's IG is great for most people that do 2d stuff. But in the future the OS is going to demand more gpu power along with other applications demanding the same or more power. It's nice to have a future proofed computer (at least for a little while)

Seeing as Leopard will support computers made 5-6 years ago. These same machines will be 8-9 years old by the next OS upgrade. I think anything today will be safe for a good while.

Today yes, but the machines from last year... kinda doubt it. (32bit)... since apple is pushing 64bit Objective-c (won't run on 32 bit machines)...

But from a graphics standpoint, there is no telling how far apple will push it. Just because the machine is supported doesn't mean the computer will work well.

I have one of my Mini's hooked up to a Sony HDTV and use a great little keyboard with an integrated trackball (it's made by nmediapc). It's wireless and very comfortable from a sofa/chair. I rarely go back to using my other systems which are connected to a Samsung 19" LCD. I do wish Apple would make a keyboard wit an integrated trackpad. It seems to me that the future is in portable small devices (iPhone, etc...) and small compact systems hooked up to large TV's . As HDTV comes down in price it just will make more and more sense. The days of towers and mini-towers are over except for specialized tasks.

Anyway, one could go on and on regarding the game thing. The fact is Apple is not really into higher-end gaming and it would be irresponsible to suggest a Mac for a gamer (not talking about the Sims and such here). I think the Wii has shown that killing games have a limited audience which only gets smaller as young males get married and have families. That demographic is already well served by PC's and consoles.

Gamers have been complaining about the Mac forever. Perhaps their dreams will come true but I don't think so.

philip

Another example of prophecies based on personal experiences.
I don't think the future of computers is in the living room at all.
I'd rather say the future of TV is in the computer and not vice versa.
But because I'm not a prophet, I'd not want to make any predictions based on my personal preference.

I doubt very much if I shall ever buy another game for my iMac. I started off with both Call of Duty programs and after I had succeeded in completing what they had to offer, I later was to find that I could proceed only so far into some actions and not at all into others. Aspyr's only reaction to this state of affairs was to ask for a further $10 each to replace the disks which I had already bought from them. To do so, IMO, would only encourage these companies to adopt this profitable approach to all their game disks. If this "throwing out the baby with the bath water" approach is their only way to ensure that duplicate DVDs aren't being provided to unscrupulous gamers, then why do they overlook the possible alternative of exchanging malfunctioning disks for ones that function properly, or is the fact that there is less money to be made from that more sensible approach, so they choose to ignore it. It really is a sad state of affairs and surely I am not the only one this has happened to. It has, incidentally, never happened to any game I have purchased to run on my PC.

Apple has officially said Leopard support will be limited to 867MHz G4 machines. 64 bit isn't a requirement. Most of the installed Mac base is 32 bit. Leopard is 32/64 optional.



The G4 Quicksilver is from 2002 will be supported by Leopard and is not 64 bit.


To be against Intel GMA you attempt to set up a scenario where Apple will suddenly have software that will not support Intel GMA. There are a relatively small number of Mac's Apple has to support. OS X has been good about throttling down the graphics for older machines. Tiger works fine on any GPU that does not support Core Image, Leopard will do the same.

The OS won't be required, but the 64bit Objective-c programs that apple is pushing will require a 64bit computer. In order for apple to do 64bit and objective-c 2.0 they had to make changes just for the 64bit library that won't be backwards compatible if you use certain aspects of objective-c 2.0 (which apple is telling devs to do so).

This will make 32 bit computers obsolete quickly if devs listen and abide to apple. This has nothing to do with the OS requirements.

And the GMA stuff, I'm not saying that apple would cut the support for the GMA, but there may be huge aspects that the end user couldn't take advantage of with one... just like Quartz Extreme and Core Image * 10.

I don't believe this is true. Everything I've read about Objective C 2.0 says it will support 64 bit, not 64 bit only.


Intel GMA does support Core Image and Core Animation. The chip will fully use Apple's current graphic frame work for the next 2-3 years. Of course things can change by 2010.

You need to read again. There are 64bit extensions that apple could only make compatible with 64bit computers... namely in Objective-c 2.0. You can still compile 64bit to be friendly with 32bit computers, but it won't contain the new objective-c 2.0 optimized 64bit extensions (which apple is pushing devs to use).


I didn't say the GMA didn't support Core Image / CA. I used that as an example with older machines of today, but on a higher scale.

EDIT: Just letting you know I'm looking for the documentation. I saw this at WWDC and the Leopard Tech Talks during the Objective-c 2.0 and 64bit sessions. I don't have an account any more so it's not so easy to look it up.

UPDATE: Watch the Objective-c 2.0 Overview from the WWDC 06. It mentions this. I'll outline it later after I have time to fully watch it. (It's 55 min).

Unless I've missed it, I haven't seen anywhere where any one at all has said this was the case. Perhaps this is a distant plan for Apple to eventually have everything develop in 64 bit only.

A couple of reasons why it doesn't make sense to go full 64 bit in the consumer market right now. It will be awhile before 64 bit computers out number 32 bit. There are still a large number of 32 bit Mac's in the user base. I cannot see developers any time soon excluding those customers and that revenue.

Right now 64 bit isn't all pro with and no con. There are some advantages in currently maintaining a hybrid 32/64 environment because of the memory needed for 64 bit address space and registers are not always the most efficient speed wise.

If you watch the wwdc Session 302 Objective-c 2.0 overview, you will notice at around 48 minutes they talk about the new ABI for 64-bit which includes Non-fragile instance variables, zero-cost exceptions, faster dispatch. Fragile instance variables is a huge feature that will be 64bit only. It involves inheriting from a super class and if you added a new variable to that class, and something is changed in the super class, your class variables are hurt in memory and overwritten by the changes in the super class. Long story short, this is bad and objectve-c 2.0 64bit ONLY fixes this. The only way a dev could use this and get around it in a 32bit world is to code 1 piece for 64bit and 1 piece for 32bit, which would defeat the purpose of doing it in the 64bit piece in the first place. The point here is that apple has made important changes in Objective-c 2.0 in the 64-bit ABI that will require a 64bit computer to take advantage of. Will this happen overnight? Of course not. But apple has to start some where for improvements. Over the next 3-5 years more and more people will have taken advantage of these and future features.

While I agree with your point on 32bit vs 64bit registers and memory access, I find that it's so minute and hard to prove that it is 100% hardware. Will 32bit memory retrieve faster on a small bus? sure. But buses are so large now days that it is really insignificant. The days are gone where they were sticking 64bit cpus on 32bit north bridges.

Either way, 64bit is the future whether you want to admit it or not (and i'm sure you are right there with me). About 95% of 32bit macs are PPC. Many are predicting that 10.6 will be intel only... which in turn is mostly 64bit. By 10.6 the tables will have turned significantly. And apple preparing their devs by giving them the tools necessary now, is much better than waiting until that time has come.

I don't think that's the issue. Sun had proper 64 bit architecture on high performance systems for much longer and compiling for 32 bit has at times yielded faster code for them. That situation for that was a lot more equal for that than the ia32 and x86-64 though. Ia32 has a lot of other constraints that aren't there in x86-64, so that has an effect of appearing to balance out the impact.

Exactly. Steve doesn't think you should be gaming on a Mac. Steve doesn't want you to play games on a Mac, except for the pre-installed chess game I suppose.

Steve wants you busy "creating" things, like making movies suitable for YouTube with iMovie 08, or trying to figure out how the move to iPhoto 08 screwed up all of your pictures - so you can unscrew them and upload them to the .Mac service he wants you to have, and syncing them to the iPhone and iPod touch he thinks you should buy. See, you have no time to game!

Video cards have always been a sore spot on Macs, and always will until it starts to hurt Apple's bottom line when people stop buying. But that's unlikely to happen. Besides, Steve is busy with iPhones and iPods and gadgets to be concerned with the vocal minority who want substantial graphics card options in their Macs.

I myself am holding out on throwing $2500+ at Apple for a Mac Pro until they 1) update the hardware 2) offer value for my money ($323 for a 500 gig hard drive is not value, more like being impaled) and 3) update the friggin' graphics cards!!! I'm not paying Steve $400.00 for a two year old, under-performing, heat-plagued, and outclassed Radeon x1900xt that ATI themselves EOL'd nine months ago!! (Apple contracts Foxconn to make them). That card is three generations behind.

With the move to Intel architecture and the inception of BootCamp, Apple should have seen the demand for gaming on the Mac coming a mile away. Unfortunately, Steve's priority became the iPhone and multi-touch. Leopard suffered, the Mac Pro continues to suffer, the iMac suffers (poor, poor choice of cards), and both the Mini and the Macbook suffer.

Unfortunately their stock value doesn't suffer, thus nobody tells Steve to stop that crap!

I wanna cast magic misssillle!

Since the Mac user-base has increased Apple dragged gamer companies to the last WWDC to show that he is interested in gaming in some regard. As more people switch to Macs there will be more people who want to play games. This is inevitable.

But don't think Jobs does want you gaming on your Mac. He could care less what you do with it as long as you buy a Mac. The hard truth for gamers to swallow is that the gaming market is the smallest segment of the computerized industry. When the user-base reaches a certain threshold the games will come. If you build it they will come.

Don't you mean long long?

I got carried away ... sorry.

I see what you are saying but this sounds like Apple is pointing the direction it wants go in over the next 10 years. I think 32 bit machines should be safe for the next few years.

Heh, I wasn't criticizing your length...just a play on words since you used both long and short in a sentence about 32bit vs 64bit ints...

Read up on fragile binary interface/fragile base classes. Mkay, I understand now why I haven't had to think about that given all my stuff has been java or C# for almost the last decade. Oddly, I don't recall Meyers covering this topic. Maybe he did.

"Another example of prophecies based on personal experiences.
I don't think the future of computers is in the living room at all.
I'd rather say the future of TV is in the computer and not vice versa.
But because I'm not a prophet, I'd not want to make any predictions based on my personal preference."

Well, of course my post is based on my own experiences. Did you expect me to go out and poll the population? Most statements involve a complex combination of information sources (personal experiences, readings, etc...). That's not being a prophet, but rather a normal human.

TV in computer or vice versa. In either case the end result will be the same.

philip

HAHA wow, jokes on me 2 times in a row... I didn't get it .


Yah you gotta remember C wasn't an OOP language in the first place, so the OO part of objective-c has some downfalls. But damn, objective-c 2.0 is very very fast. Faster than c in some cases using iterators.

OK you're banned from AI... i'm just kidding though. You know how devs get when they talk about languages... it's worse than talking religion sometimes

Heh, I do C# because I'm lazy and there was an opensource project that used it. The dark side is not so bad really. Do not underestimate the power of managed code.

Mono runs on OSX and hey, there's a C# coaca wrapper and a C# plugin for XCode.

Too used to being sloppy with memory management now. Garbage Collectors may suck performance wise but it does cut down on leaks. To think I used to be a real-time coder...

Not to derail the thread any further, but Objective-c 2.0 has garbage collection now. And it's relatively resource free (according to apple). If I wasn't such an open source whore I probably wouldn't have turned down an $85k + benefits job here to do .net stuff.. that and I haven't touched .net since 2005.

I think the sad state of gaming for the mac was really derailed by Apple GOING with Objective-C and OpenGL not being so popular among console / windows games programmers. Honestly, everything needs 1 good graphics library. That raytracing that intel is researching looks kinda promising?

Either way, I'm happy with the Cider ports for now. If more and more companies do that, we might be home free! I mean some of my favorite games came out this year... Madden, C&C 3, Need For Speed, BF 2142. Now I just need Battlefield 2, Assassin's Creed, Crysis, World in Conflict, Colin McRae (ships the 20th of october FINALLY), and a few others and I'll NEVER get work done!

I was thinking about a mac pro for gaming then I saw that it was $1650 for the best graphics card and it was only 512mb. I think I will still have to keep my homebuilt windows rig. My windows nivida 730gt was only $79 and it was listed for $150 on a mac. That really stinks.

I was thinking about a mac pro for gaming then I saw that it was $1650 for the best graphics card and it was only 512mb. I think I will still have to keep my homebuilt windows rig. My windows nivida 7300gt was only $79 and it was listed for $150 on a mac. That really stinks.

the fx quadro 4500 is an amazing card, but it is not for gaming. If you plan on using you mac for gaming, in which case i presume you boot into windows, then you can stick most cards in it. I have used it in windows with non efi cards and even sli. You will just have to put an efi card back in for osx.





When apple does use the fx quadro 5600, will me with my current mac pro be able to buy one from the apple store and stick it in there? I know i should have waited to buy one, but then my company would only have paid for the base model opposed to the highest end model they bought for me.

You used SLI in your mac pro????????????