As we see here today, people who hate Apple in general are always angry with Apple's bad decisions, but that makes no sense. If they really hated Apple they would be happy when Apple made bad decisions, because then hopefully Apple will die. But no, they hate Apple and they hate when Apple makes bad decisions. That's a contradiction.
One of or possibly the best point made in a long time. This needs to be pinned at the top of every forum thread for the likes of Lkrupp; who thinks at least 50% of commenters are trolls since they don't think Apple's every move is idyllic.
People that criticise Apple's direction are doing it because they want Apple to be more successful, by not screwing over customers and developers.
No big studio (maybe except Blizzard's WoW) uses Metal directly. They use it via an engine, like Unity or UE, as stated in above post. Pretty much every major game in that list uses Unity or UE.
All games are built on an engine, whether it's an internal one or external. Big developers often use an internal engine as they don't have to pay a commission on sales but this is changing the more complex games are becoming and the harder it is to maintain a stable, competitive engine while developing games using them. A lot of game developers are shifting to Unreal 5.
Hitman uses Glacier engine Metro uses 4A Engine Mafia uses Illusion engine Call of Duty uses Infinity Ward engine Tomb Raider uses Foundation engine Baldur's Gate use Infinity engine
These all support Metal. EA added some Metal support to Frostbite at one point.
Some Apple developers added Metal support to Blender Cycles and that shows what's involved as it's open source. They started last October and have it working now after around 10k lines of code changes. A typical game engine has over 1 million lines of code.
All Metal is for is the rendering pipeline, not the entire engine. In Unreal Engine 5, Metal is about 30k lines of code out of several million. It's obviously extra work but the compatibility layers like MoltenVK can take care of a lot of things for some games. There was an attempt at using Metal for a Wii emulator and they decided MoltenVK was the better route for long-term maintenance:
The biggest issue is finding developers who know how to use Metal to be able to add support. This is why Apple is having to help out 3rd parties directly. Supporting Vulkan would have been the easier route for game devs but then Apple would have to use it internally for things Vulkan wasn't designed for. There's not so many complaints that Microsoft DirectX only works on Microsoft's own system or that CUDA only works on Nvidia and that's just because of the volume of users. Apple has over 1.5 billion users on their hardware so they have just as much right to use Metal as Microsoft does to use DirectX and Nvidia to use CUDA and given that so many major engines support it now, it's not that big of a deal.
Once support is in an engine, that's it sorted from now on and while there will be new versions of Metal, updates will much easier to add after having the base support. DirectX 12 has been around for 7 years now. Once all the features are added to an API, they don't need to make major changes.
Good article. The author and others are only arguing that Apple has put forth improvements that will help gaming and hoping that this improves things enough to get more games on the Macs.
Then we have the usual doom and gloom plus what Apple should do that happens to every thread. Oh yes how AAA gaming isn’t the biggest market.
AAA gaming is now the smaller market for revenue versus mobile gaming. If anything, Apple is ahead of the curve for making money from gaming versus AAA oriented companies. That's why you see Epic and Microsoft suddenly doing a full-court press of lawmakers and claiming that Apple's mobile operating systems are anti-competitive. They're the ones that are behind.
Where Apple is going to be ahead is in a graphics system SOC that uses less 200 watts for the entire system, with great performance but to do that, you have to start over and build from the ground up like the 13 year drive to kick Intel out.
Even Apples arch enemy Qualcomm knows what time it is, they didn’t buy Nuvia for nothing low power Arm SOC’s are the future and that is Apple is ahead…..
Good article. The author and others are only arguing that Apple has put forth improvements that will help gaming and hoping that this improves things enough to get more games on the Macs.
Then we have the usual doom and gloom plus what Apple should do that happens to every thread. Oh yes how AAA gaming isn’t the biggest market.
The gaming Geeks are in an uproar, Apple obviously isn’t headed to a high Wattage burn the battery future, use Intel, Nvidia, or AMD if that is what you want.
As we see here today, people who hate Apple in general are always angry with Apple's bad decisions, but that makes no sense. If they really hated Apple they would be happy when Apple made bad decisions, because then hopefully Apple will die. But no, they hate Apple and they hate when Apple makes bad decisions. That's a contradiction.
One of or possibly the best point made in a long time. This needs to be pinned at the top of every forum thread for the likes of Lkrupp; who thinks at least 50% of commenters are trolls since they don't think Apple's every move is idyllic.
People that criticise Apple's direction are doing it because they want Apple to be more successful, by not screwing over customers and developers.
Then they must be dense? Apple with their new SOC design isn’t headed to where Intel, Nvidia, and AMD are going, high wattage and low battery life, to do what Apple wants to do long term is a redesign from the ground up.
It feels like nobody knows that the world’s most popular and most played videogame (Minecraft) not only runs on old intel Macs (we have it running on a 2014 MBP) but is now also Apple Silicon native…
We all know it will be years before Macs get stacks of different games to run but Apple has never had games at the front of any of it’s product strategies. Even now the policy on iOS is that games have to support back several years old devices - there is no way to publish an iOS game that is cutting edge and only works on the fastest most recent devices.
Apple simply have no interest in making and selling Macs that run the most power hungry games available - that is a PC niche and always will be. Instead, Apple will gradually progress Mac gaming as that fits their strategy for the lowest 80% of users, not the top 1%
Good article. The author and others are only arguing that Apple has put forth improvements that will help gaming and hoping that this improves things enough to get more games on the Macs.
Then we have the usual doom and gloom plus what Apple should do that happens to every thread. Oh yes how AAA gaming isn’t the biggest market.
The gaming Geeks are in an uproar, Apple obviously isn’t headed to a high Wattage burn the battery future, use Intel, Nvidia, or AMD if that is what you want.
This. We have to think differently. Apple is touting environmental friendly. 1kW GPUs are not going to cut it. I’d be surprised if they don’t outlaw this high wattage GPUs for consumer usage. It is cheaper to conserve than to generate more power.
Apple has basically driven a stake into the heart of Windows games running on macOS. I don't think they have any interest in it. And why should they? It doesn't make much money for Apple compared to iOS games, and the user experience of playing slow, buggy, expensive ports of Windows games that came out years ago isn't particularly great.
Apple's path forward probably lies in promoting gaming on iOS/iPadOS/tvOS, evolving Apple TV into a better game console alternative (hopefully with well-designed controllers with buttons, improved 4K graphics with ray tracing, etc.), and ensuring that iOS/iPadOS/tvOS games can run on macOS as well. And implementing Continuity so that you can seamlessly migrate the same game session across all of your Apple devices.
Apple Arcade seems to be the first step, but if you look at Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft they all benefit from high profile first/second-party exclusives along with some third party exclusives and timed exclusives. Apple has a few (Fantasian, Sneaky Sasquatch) but could use many more. Also game developers would benefit from a longer window of backward compatibility rather than yearly breakage from iOS updates. Other platforms maintain compatibility over 7 years or more.
Nothing against Crossover or Parallels, but I think the path forward for Windows/Steam gaming on macOS, assuming it could ever happen, would be Windows for ARM running via an Apple Silicon version of Boot Camp. I'm not sure if Apple and Microsoft have any interest in making this happen however.
No big studio (maybe except Blizzard's WoW) uses Metal directly. They use it via an engine, like Unity or UE, as stated in above post. Pretty much every major game in that list uses Unity or UE.
And Blizzard is using Metal directly after getting much of the code supplied directly from Apple. I can't say it's a good showcase. My old Nvidia 1080 gets double frame rates in some areas over my M1 max, so 'metal support' is not a fix. There is still a very, very long way to go for Apple, but it's a market they clearly don't want. The upscale thing is nice, but it's just a wet bandaid.
Just spitballing here, but wouldn't it be great if Apple convinced Sony or Nintendo to use the Mx chips in their consoles, and then those games could be made available on iOS & MacOS devices?
Just spitballing here, but wouldn't it be great if Apple convinced Sony or Nintendo to use the Mx chips in their consoles, and then those games could be made available on iOS & MacOS devices?
The GameCube used a PowerPC chip, but the Mac didn't get any of those games. Why would Sony or Nintendo give up their advantage, especially to a rival with a cutthroat reputation like Apple?
Just spitballing here, but wouldn't it be great if Apple convinced Sony or Nintendo to use the Mx chips in their consoles, and then those games could be made available on iOS & MacOS devices?
Because Nintendo doesn't care about fidelity and focuses more on gameplay, and Sony focuses heavily on performance and GFX features, so the Mx won't be fit. They would also be way too expensive.
Sounds like they’re 10-16 years behind. Metal 3 is great but if no one wants to use it, who cares?
Exactly this... There are essentially no big game developers writing their engines in Metal, it's nigh-on irrelevant to 99% of the gaming industry. Pissing about with game centre that is used by 3 people is not going to fix the cause of the Mac gaming problem. Doesn't matter what fancy new features Apple adds because anything that might actually use those features is running everything in Vulkan anyway, with MoltenVK translating it into Metal; causing a performance hit over and above the already dismal level of optimisation devs do for Mac games - causing a vicious circle of less Mac gamers -> less games -> less optimisation -> bad performance -> less mac gamers. Macs are way too small a market for developers to spend vast quantities of cash rewriting their game engine in Metal - and this is 100% Apple's fault for being anti-gaming since pretty much day 1. I imagine they hate the fact that most of the App Store revenue comes from games.
I miss the days of John Carmack/ID software having Linux versions of Doom, Quake, etc simply because they were tech enthusiasts. He even helped bring hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to Linux via Utah GLX. Sad to see the industry turned into another money fixated machine with no interest in alternative technologies.
It feels like nobody knows that the world’s most popular and most played videogame (Minecraft) not only runs on old intel Macs (we have it running on a 2014 MBP) but is now also Apple Silicon native…
Just goes to show that being able to animate hair folicles with full ray traced shininess isn't the be-all and end-all of gaming. The game devs with truly unique ideas and the mind to realize them independent of any particular game engine have always been the ones I've found most interesting. "Notch" (creator of Minecraft) was an interesting guy, though he should have stuck to talking about technology.
Metal 3 may very well be great, but it does seem like a major (and perilous) assumption that any game developers will care to bring games to macos in the absence of native Vulkan support -- aside from the 3 games already announced of course. Metal may be well established for mobile games but it is a remote island when it comes to AAA.
Another glaring omission is the complete lack of support for adaptive sync on external displays. Apple is years behind in this department.
Metal 3 is compatible with games using DirectX 12, Vulkan and MoltenVK. That was a major point for showing No Man's Sky (Vulkan) and Resident Evil Village (DirectX 12 on Windows).
Unfortunately you've completely missed the point of the video. Feature parity between Metal 3 and Vulkan/Dx12 is great, and it means it may be possible for some games to run in emulation. And of course a small number of developers have already been convinced to bring their games (three of them) over to mac. But feature parity is not at all the same thing as being a "compatible" API.
Apple has basically driven a stake into the heart of Windows games running on macOS. I don't think they have any interest in it. And why should they? It doesn't make much money for Apple compared to iOS games, and the user experience of playing slow, buggy, expensive ports of Windows games that came out years ago isn't particularly great.
Apple's path forward probably lies in promoting gaming on iOS/iPadOS/tvOS, evolving Apple TV into a better game console alternative (hopefully with well-designed controllers with buttons, improved 4K graphics with ray tracing, etc.), and ensuring that iOS/iPadOS/tvOS games can run on macOS as well. And implementing Continuity so that you can seamlessly migrate the same game session across all of your Apple devices.
Apple Arcade seems to be the first step, but if you look at Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft they all benefit from high profile first/second-party exclusives along with some third party exclusives and timed exclusives. Apple has a few (Fantasian, Sneaky Sasquatch) but could use many more. Also game developers would benefit from a longer window of backward compatibility rather than yearly breakage from iOS updates. Other platforms maintain compatibility over 7 years or more.
Nothing against Crossover or Parallels, but I think the path forward for Windows/Steam gaming on macOS, assuming it could ever happen, would be Windows for ARM running via an Apple Silicon version of Boot Camp. I'm not sure if Apple and Microsoft have any interest in making this happen however.
Yup. Running Windows on Macs or Windows games on macOS provides no real benefit to macOS or Apple platforms. Nice for Mac users who want to play Windows games, but for Apple it really isn't benefit at all. Apple just really haven't tried to be a gaming platform for the last 20 years. They'll tout it when a game is ported, maybe provide help to game developers, but they haven't attempted to carve out their own gaming niche.
It's the same situation with cloud gaming. All the games will be running on Windows or Linux. It really doesn't provide a benefit to Apple. The value always will lay with platform owner, and that's not the client platform.
It's the classic chicken and the egg problem, er, which comes first, the games or the gamers? This is also a saturated niche, so they have to convert highly satisfied 3D gamers and game developers to their platform. The hardware is basically the easiest problem to solve; Apple already has the hardware available, they just need to do it (Mx Pro/Max in a Mac mini box) when the time is right. The software platform is not that hard either. It's providing game developers the economic conditions to publish software on macOS and getting enough buyers of Apple Macs or platforms to hand over money for games. As long as it is easier to just buy a game console or gaming PC, it's a tough niche to capture a slice of.
MS bought game devs, became a game publisher, funded the Xbox ecosystem, got the needed hits, and established itself into the game console market. It took what, 10 years of losses? And the games were already running on Windows, which is a huge advantage. Tough situation for Apple or any outsider. Maybe the only path forward is to convert Apple TV+ users into game buyers. If Apple gets enough TV+ subscribers, perhaps enough of them will buy a gaming level Apple TV box to play games. Any which way, it will involved billions and taking a loss for awhile, which Apple very rarely does.
tht said: Apple just really haven't tried to be a gaming platform for the last 20 years. They'll tout it when a game is ported, maybe provide help to game developers, but they haven't attempted to carve out their own gaming niche.
Here's what Apple knew about gaming on their hardware: iPhone/iPad were quite successful in terms of gaming and their desktop/laptop line and ATV were not. Apple Arcade was the first step in correcting that. It leverages the popularity of mobile style games from iPhone/iPad and makes them accessible across their entire hardware lineup. Being able to play those style of games on Mac and ATV as well as iPhone/iPad gets users more accustomed to "big screen" gaming. It also starts to effectively blur the line for what is "mobile" and what isn't. That blurring will be helped by Apple now having in-house processors for all of their lineups going forward + Metal 3.
tht said: Apple just really haven't tried to be a gaming platform for the last 20 years. They'll tout it when a game is ported, maybe provide help to game developers, but they haven't attempted to carve out their own gaming niche.
Here's what Apple knew about gaming on their hardware: iPhone/iPad were quite successful in terms of gaming and their desktop/laptop line and ATV were not. Apple Arcade was the first step in correcting that. It leverages the popularity of mobile style games from iPhone/iPad and makes them accessible across their entire hardware lineup. Being able to play those style of games on Mac and ATV as well as iPhone/iPad gets users more accustomed to "big screen" gaming. It also starts to effectively blur the line for what is "mobile" and what isn't. That blurring will be helped by Apple now having in-house processors for all of their lineups going forward + Metal 3.
THIS. Apple already has a viable gaming platform. A lot of people are glossing over the fact that the future of gaming is mobile multiplatform games and how it will impact he gaming industry. Games like Genshin Impact approach console quality of gaming and more are coming out (there is a lot of excitement for Tower of Fantasy and Blue Protocol). Other studios are taking note of the obscene amount of money Genshin makes and working on their own mobile titles. Just look at Diablo Immortal. Imagine playing a game in your living room in the evening then continuing the same game on your phone/table while on your commute to work then playing it on your desktop at work during your lunch break. That's the future. Apple just needs to make it easier to port games from iPhone/iPad OS to tvOS. That would make the Apple TV a viable gaming console (they might have to update the hardware though). If they really wanted to get serious they would make it easy to port from mobile to Mac OS but I don't think that's going to happen. *sigh* such a missed opportunity.
Comments
People that criticise Apple's direction are doing it because they want Apple to be more successful, by not screwing over customers and developers.
Hitman uses Glacier engine
Metro uses 4A Engine
Mafia uses Illusion engine
Call of Duty uses Infinity Ward engine
Tomb Raider uses Foundation engine
Baldur's Gate use Infinity engine
These all support Metal. EA added some Metal support to Frostbite at one point.
Some Apple developers added Metal support to Blender Cycles and that shows what's involved as it's open source. They started last October and have it working now after around 10k lines of code changes. A typical game engine has over 1 million lines of code.
All Metal is for is the rendering pipeline, not the entire engine. In Unreal Engine 5, Metal is about 30k lines of code out of several million. It's obviously extra work but the compatibility layers like MoltenVK can take care of a lot of things for some games. There was an attempt at using Metal for a Wii emulator and they decided MoltenVK was the better route for long-term maintenance:
https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/6385
The biggest issue is finding developers who know how to use Metal to be able to add support. This is why Apple is having to help out 3rd parties directly. Supporting Vulkan would have been the easier route for game devs but then Apple would have to use it internally for things Vulkan wasn't designed for. There's not so many complaints that Microsoft DirectX only works on Microsoft's own system or that CUDA only works on Nvidia and that's just because of the volume of users. Apple has over 1.5 billion users on their hardware so they have just as much right to use Metal as Microsoft does to use DirectX and Nvidia to use CUDA and given that so many major engines support it now, it's not that big of a deal.
Once support is in an engine, that's it sorted from now on and while there will be new versions of Metal, updates will much easier to add after having the base support. DirectX 12 has been around for 7 years now. Once all the features are added to an API, they don't need to make major changes.
Even Apples arch enemy Qualcomm knows what time it is, they didn’t buy Nuvia for nothing low power Arm SOC’s are the future and that is Apple is ahead…..
Then they must be dense? Apple with their new SOC design isn’t headed to where Intel, Nvidia, and AMD are going, high wattage and low battery life, to do what Apple wants to do long term is a redesign from the ground up.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/08/minecraft-java-edition-gets-native-apple-silicon-support
We all know it will be years before Macs get stacks of different games to run but Apple has never had games at the front of any of it’s product strategies. Even now the policy on iOS is that games have to support back several years old devices - there is no way to publish an iOS game that is cutting edge and only works on the fastest most recent devices.
Apple simply have no interest in making and selling Macs that run the most power hungry games available - that is a PC niche and always will be. Instead, Apple will gradually progress Mac gaming as that fits their strategy for the lowest 80% of users, not the top 1%
Apple Arcade seems to be the first step, but if you look at Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft they all benefit from high profile first/second-party exclusives along with some third party exclusives and timed exclusives. Apple has a few (Fantasian, Sneaky Sasquatch) but could use many more. Also game developers would benefit from a longer window of backward compatibility rather than yearly breakage from iOS updates. Other platforms maintain compatibility over 7 years or more.
Nothing against Crossover or Parallels, but I think the path forward for Windows/Steam gaming on macOS, assuming it could ever happen, would be Windows for ARM running via an Apple Silicon version of Boot Camp. I'm not sure if Apple and Microsoft have any interest in making this happen however.
It's the same situation with cloud gaming. All the games will be running on Windows or Linux. It really doesn't provide a benefit to Apple. The value always will lay with platform owner, and that's not the client platform.
It's the classic chicken and the egg problem, er, which comes first, the games or the gamers? This is also a saturated niche, so they have to convert highly satisfied 3D gamers and game developers to their platform. The hardware is basically the easiest problem to solve; Apple already has the hardware available, they just need to do it (Mx Pro/Max in a Mac mini box) when the time is right. The software platform is not that hard either. It's providing game developers the economic conditions to publish software on macOS and getting enough buyers of Apple Macs or platforms to hand over money for games. As long as it is easier to just buy a game console or gaming PC, it's a tough niche to capture a slice of.
MS bought game devs, became a game publisher, funded the Xbox ecosystem, got the needed hits, and established itself into the game console market. It took what, 10 years of losses? And the games were already running on Windows, which is a huge advantage. Tough situation for Apple or any outsider. Maybe the only path forward is to convert Apple TV+ users into game buyers. If Apple gets enough TV+ subscribers, perhaps enough of them will buy a gaming level Apple TV box to play games. Any which way, it will involved billions and taking a loss for awhile, which Apple very rarely does.
THIS. Apple already has a viable gaming platform. A lot of people are glossing over the fact that the future of gaming is mobile multiplatform games and how it will impact he gaming industry. Games like Genshin Impact approach console quality of gaming and more are coming out (there is a lot of excitement for Tower of Fantasy and Blue Protocol). Other studios are taking note of the obscene amount of money Genshin makes and working on their own mobile titles. Just look at Diablo Immortal. Imagine playing a game in your living room in the evening then continuing the same game on your phone/table while on your commute to work then playing it on your desktop at work during your lunch break. That's the future. Apple just needs to make it easier to port games from iPhone/iPad OS to tvOS. That would make the Apple TV a viable gaming console (they might have to update the hardware though). If they really wanted to get serious they would make it easy to port from mobile to Mac OS but I don't think that's going to happen. *sigh* such a missed opportunity.