My advice to those that can afford it is to give up on gaming on a Mac be it macOS or ARMOS. I know, I know, lots of kiddy games but that's it and I am sure an ARM Mac, iPad or iPhone will take care of those games just fine. If you want serious games, forget it. Be in GTA V, RDR2, and so on, or the prospect I am drooling over, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (sorry X-Plane your scenery is so 1990s) I felt I had to change paths.
Did you ever look into cloud gaming?
A person with an old Mac with a weak graphics card can play RDR2 today and it'll look and play good too through Stadia for example. There are other options out there too as mentioned in the article.
Cloud gaming is also cheap and a person doesn't have to spend thousands on a PC. A person just needs a good internet connection, and unless somebody lives in the middle of nowhere, most people do have a good connection today.
Oh, the graphics is absolutely amazing, but that still doesn't really justify the kiddy/serious way or categorising it.
Graphics is graphics.
Is better graphics the same as a better, or more "serious", game?
Is "better graphics" are requirement for a good game?
I would answer no to both of those. Like there are some super serious people playing/competing in games from the 80's; not to mention real classics like Chess, Xiangqi, Shogi, and so on. So what makes a game good, and a gamer "serious" seems completely disconnected from anything that would disqualify the Mac.
That's why _I_ think that that judgy kiddy/serious way of looking at things should have staid back in the day when the kids argued about 8bit vs 16 consoles.
It depends what kind of game somebody is talking about.
If somebody is going to play Donkey Kong or PacMan, then no, the graphics don't matter much and you don't need a thousand dollar video card to enjoy it.
But if somebody is going to play a realistic FPS or RTS or a simulation then graphics do matter, as you want the world to look as good as it can. Some games look better than hollywood movies these days and you need a nice graphics card to play those games at decent settings. The look and realism of those games is part of the appeal and you want the game to look and run as good as possible.
If your idea of gaming is playing "Chess", then no, I guess you don't need a fancy new graphics card.
Article states that windows doesn’t run on ARM. This is incorrect, I agree bootcamp is unlikely because Apple will have custom silicon, but there are versions of Windows for ARM. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/
And any software written for Intel x86 Windows isn’t going to work on ARM Windows Bootcamp setups... unless there’s an x86 layer I haven’t heard about in ARM Windows. The article acts like being able to boot an ARM Windows installation will solve game availability. It won’t, unless an x86 emulation is available for it, and then the performance will likely be poor.
This is x86 emulation gaming for Windows 10 on ARM running on the Microsoft SQ1 in the Surface Pro X
x64 emulation hasn't come yet. As well, the SQ1 uses older lower power ARM cores. Once Cortex X1 comes to market (ARM's new performance focused large core), there will be a large performance boost available. The GPU in the SQ1 has a bit of kick though.
There will be no emulation. OpenGL, although deprecated, compiles to arm as does metal. That’s why iOS games work.
AI has been really bad at understanding the technology here. The transition isn’t the same as PPC to Intel because of the work done on the llvm compiler to compile to different architectures.
I can see the value of moving to Arm for mobile devices such as MacBooks, because of the (presumably) drop in power requirements. For desktop devices, it might be a win for Apple’s bottom line, there’s nothing advantageous for the end user in the switch unless you are real concerned about power usage. Plus all your legacy software is kaput - Apple for sure won’t be providing any kind of compatibility layer, ‘cos that’s what they’re like nowadays.
There will be no emulation. OpenGL, although deprecated, compiles to arm as does metal. That’s why iOS games work.
AI has been really bad at understanding the technology here. The transition isn’t the same as PPC to Intel because of the work done on the llvm compiler to compile to different architectures.
Comments
A person with an old Mac with a weak graphics card can play RDR2 today and it'll look and play good too through Stadia for example. There are other options out there too as mentioned in the article.
Cloud gaming is also cheap and a person doesn't have to spend thousands on a PC. A person just needs a good internet connection, and unless somebody lives in the middle of nowhere, most people do have a good connection today.
If somebody is going to play Donkey Kong or PacMan, then no, the graphics don't matter much and you don't need a thousand dollar video card to enjoy it.
But if somebody is going to play a realistic FPS or RTS or a simulation then graphics do matter, as you want the world to look as good as it can. Some games look better than hollywood movies these days and you need a nice graphics card to play those games at decent settings. The look and realism of those games is part of the appeal and you want the game to look and run as good as possible.
If your idea of gaming is playing "Chess", then no, I guess you don't need a fancy new graphics card.
x64 emulation hasn't come yet. As well, the SQ1 uses older lower power ARM cores. Once Cortex X1 comes to market (ARM's new performance focused large core), there will be a large performance boost available. The GPU in the SQ1 has a bit of kick though.
AI has been really bad at understanding the technology here. The transition isn’t the same as PPC to Intel because of the work done on the llvm compiler to compile to
different architectures.
https://clang.llvm.org/docs/CrossCompilation.html