There are some iOS games that would be amazing on the Mac. Don’t disagree that having huge blockbuster titles are unlikely to show, but there are some incredible games that could possibly be ported to Mac under Marzipan.
Marzipan is about UIKit, while games are doing their own thing. If a game has been written for iOS they could do their own port to macOS without Marzipan being a factor.
If a game has been written for iOS, porting it to the Mac should be easier with Marzipan. If anything, this should help gaming on the Mac flourish.
There are some iOS games that would be amazing on the Mac. Don’t disagree that having huge blockbuster titles are unlikely to show, but there are some incredible games that could possibly be ported to Mac under Marzipan.
Marzipan is about UIKit, while games are doing their own thing. If a game has been written for iOS they could do their own port to macOS without Marzipan being a factor.
If a game has been written for iOS, porting it to the Mac should be easier with Marzipan. If anything, this should help gaming on the Mac flourish.
Marzipan will make no difference at all. The parts that Marzipan covers is a tiny proportion (near zero) of what the game is actually doing. But if a game uses Metal then no problem.
At $50 for a game that makes Avengers 3 look like chump change.
Must be getting them on sale; they’re 60 for consoles these days. Oh, and don’t forget to buy the Collector’s Edition of every game you want… and then the game, because the games don’t even come with these boxes of tertiary garbage.
Remember the ‘80s? Remember when the game came with filler and not “buy the filler instead of the game”?
I'm not active in the world of games - so my opinion / experience is suspect. But:
It seems to me that many of the PC gamers do so with high end gamer PCs (oherwise they would just buy an X-Box or PlayStation).
Many of those PC gamer boxes are custom built from the ground up. Others are highly customized. Apple's Mac line fails on both counts: They are designed so that customization is difficult or impossible and, building one from scratch is even less realistic.
Years ago I heard a factoid that said PC games brought in more money worldwide than Hollywood. At $50 for a game that makes Avengers 3 look like chump change.
Indeed. And my impression is that PC gaming is finding a resurgence among the young. The 13 year old boy living in my house grew up on Xbox, but is now choosing PC gaming instead. He is coming to appreciate the superiority of the keyboard+mouse interface.
There are some iOS games that would be amazing on the Mac. Don’t disagree that having huge blockbuster titles are unlikely to show, but there are some incredible games that could possibly be ported to Mac under Marzipan.
That's why I think they are getting rid of OpenGL and switching macOS to Metal2 so that a bunch of simple games can be ported to macOS (eventually).
This could be even easier too if Apple releases Macs with their own ARM based CPU/GPU.
Rayz2016 said: Marzipan will make no difference at all. The parts that Marzipan covers is a tiny proportion (near zero) of what the game is actually doing. But if a game uses Metal then no problem.
The impression that I get is that it's mainly going to benefit 2D games, not games that use 3D engines.
On many PC games it's hard to tell the different between high and ultra settings. And the amount of detail you need depends on your screen size anyway. I think Rise of the Tomb Raider (Mac version) on the latest Macbook Pro internal 15" screen looks amazing, even without an egpu.
On many PC games it's hard to tell the different between high and ultra settings. And the amount of detail you need depends on your screen size anyway. I think Rise of the Tomb Raider (Mac version) on the latest Macbook Pro internal 15" screen looks amazing, even without an egpu.
Even on my 3 yrs old Mid 2015 15" Macbook Pro, with its R9 M370X. It also runs at max 57 C / 135 F without any performance loss. That is Metal... You don't ruin your expensive laptop by running it continuously at peak temperatures.
Looking to the future, gaming on the Mac overall seems unlikely to get better.
True.
The company isn't really interested in gaming for the Mac. But then they’re not interested in lots of things. If they thought they could bring something unique to the table then they’d probably have a crack at it, but gamers like large machines that can heat a small office; that’s just no in Apple’s DNA.
From my limited survey, none of the Mac users I know are into PC Gaming. Admittedly, most are over 50 years old.
I could say,
So What? Who Cares?
TBH, does it really matter?
People keep quoting that mac users aren't interested in PC gaming. This argument seems to be pretty myopic. What is true is that Mac users are not playing games on their Macs. That's simply because of the very point this article was trying to make: Macs generally are terrible at running games, and games ported to Macs often make too many sacrifices to run on the platform, meaning people who are genuinely interested in gaming will purchase a version that runs better on other hardware/consoles.
I used to be quite immersed in PC gaming, even building my own rigs (though I preferred to keep those machines small, quiet, and unassuming). I always had a better impression from MacOS than Windows, for the rest of my computing needs, so I eventually replaced my portable and desktop computers with Apple machines. As a result, though, I had to let my PC gaming hobby wither and die. Fortunately game consoles really started to offer a more comparable experience (not equal, but FPS games were never my favorite genre anyway) around that time so I was content to do my gaming on them for the years to come.
Another, less frivolous sacrifice that I have made with the choice to use MacOS exclusively for my personal computing relates directly to my career. I work in the computer animation industry and much of the software I use, especially the latest and greatest, is Windows only. A few of the primary applications are available for Mac, but as someone mentioned earlier that's really more of a token gesture on the part of the developers and they are much less optimized than the Windows and even the Linux versions. What that amounts to is that trying to do any work related to my actual career while I'm at home, especially skill development and R&D with cutting edge or specific task-oriented tools, suffers from my choice to use a Mac. It leaves me lagging in an industry that used to be at the heart of what Mac was about: creative professionals.
Last year I decided to build a new gaming PC instead of upgrading from my aging 2010 iMac since that machine was still working quite well. I continued to use the iMac for all of my simple computing, but started gaming again on the PC. Eventually I got back into doing side-projects related to my field of work to expand my skill set, but did that on the PC since most of the software was Windows-only anyway. Now my iMac has experienced a graphics card failure and I find myself unable to justify replacing it with anything currently on offer from Apple, even though I find Windows 10 to be almost unbearable. That's the problem I see with the direction Apple has been going. Over the years I have convinced quite a lot of friends and family to move over to the Apple Ecosystem because they looked to me for advice and I was passionate about Apple's products. I was able to enthusiastically recommend Apple to them knowing that the sacrifices made by me were more unique to my circumstances. Happily, I watched Apple's popularity grow as many others like me were doling out the same advice and praises for Apple. Now we are at a point where Apple is no longer making sincere efforts to support professionals and passionate enthusiasts in the area of personal computing, and are even making decisions that are harmful to the productivity of people in those audiences. I feel that if Apple keeps moving in that direction, they will lose the support of those trend-setters and their mainstream popularity will drop later on as a result.
There are some iOS games that would be amazing on the Mac. Don’t disagree that having huge blockbuster titles are unlikely to show, but there are some incredible games that could possibly be ported to Mac under Marzipan.
The UIKit piece is a red-herring. UIKit covers view controllers and classes which have little to do with gaming. The core technologies upon which games are built (Metal in particular) have been portable for years.
I don't understand why Feral and Aspyr publish their games on Steam. Isn't it the case that if someone already has the PC version (which is likely due to porting time) then they get nothing? That's crazy, why not exclusively publish on the Mac App Store and get paid for every copy?
MP Digital is the most prolific Mac porting house on the MAS, you get a new game almost every week which is great!
Looking to the future, gaming on the Mac overall seems unlikely to get better.
True.
The company isn't really interested in gaming for the Mac. But then they’re not interested in lots of things. If they thought they could bring something unique to the table then they’d probably have a crack at it, but gamers like large machines that can heat a small office; that’s just no in Apple’s DNA.
From my limited survey, none of the Mac users I know are into PC Gaming. Admittedly, most are over 50 years old.
I could say,
So What? Who Cares?
TBH, does it really matter?
People keep quoting that mac users aren't interested in PC gaming. This argument seems to be pretty myopic. What is true is that Mac users are not playing games on their Macs. That's simply because of the very point this article was trying to make: Macs generally are terrible at running games, and games ported to Macs often make too many sacrifices to run on the platform, meaning people who are genuinely interested in gaming will purchase a version that runs better on other hardware/consoles.
I used to be quite immersed in PC gaming, even building my own rigs (though I preferred to keep those machines small, quiet, and unassuming). I always had a better impression from MacOS than Windows, for the rest of my computing needs, so I eventually replaced my portable and desktop computers with Apple machines. As a result, though, I had to let my PC gaming hobby wither and die. Fortunately game consoles really started to offer a more comparable experience (not equal, but FPS games were never my favorite genre anyway) around that time so I was content to do my gaming on them for the years to come.
Another, less frivolous sacrifice that I have made with the choice to use MacOS exclusively for my personal computing relates directly to my career. I work in the computer animation industry and much of the software I use, especially the latest and greatest, is Windows only. A few of the primary applications are available for Mac, but as someone mentioned earlier that's really more of a token gesture on the part of the developers and they are much less optimized than the Windows and even the Linux versions. What that amounts to is that trying to do any work related to my actual career while I'm at home, especially skill development and R&D with cutting edge or specific task-oriented tools, suffers from my choice to use a Mac. It leaves me lagging in an industry that used to be at the heart of what Mac was about: creative professionals.
Last year I decided to build a new gaming PC instead of upgrading from my aging 2010 iMac since that machine was still working quite well. I continued to use the iMac for all of my simple computing, but started gaming again on the PC. Eventually I got back into doing side-projects related to my field of work to expand my skill set, but did that on the PC since most of the software was Windows-only anyway. Now my iMac has experienced a graphics card failure and I find myself unable to justify replacing it with anything currently on offer from Apple, even though I find Windows 10 to be almost unbearable. That's the problem I see with the direction Apple has been going. Over the years I have convinced quite a lot of friends and family to move over to the Apple Ecosystem because they looked to me for advice and I was passionate about Apple's products. I was able to enthusiastically recommend Apple to them knowing that the sacrifices made by me were more unique to my circumstances. Happily, I watched Apple's popularity grow as many others like me were doling out the same advice and praises for Apple. Now we are at a point where Apple is no longer making sincere efforts to support professionals and passionate enthusiasts in the area of personal computing, and are even making decisions that are harmful to the productivity of people in those audiences. I feel that if Apple keeps moving in that direction, they will lose the support of those trend-setters and their mainstream popularity will drop later on as a result.
I absolutely agree with you. The list of disadvantages to having a Mac are slowly growing once again, but the cons are shrinking. All of which is due to Apple's current direction, ignoring and taking for granted their once core supporters. They bought amazing software such as Shake, only to let it die. It's happened with a fair few of Apple's acquired titles. The uncertainty around and erratic Mac hardware releases also puts Pros off. No new Mac Pro for 6 years? It's a joke.
While macOS itself isn’t really big for gaming, I can still using Wine to play what’s not available for it. I have an old Mac to begin with, and I can say that Valve’s game runs much smoother under Wine......
Several billion dollars. It has become a self-sustaining propaganda tool in its own right.
Walking around in a Fry’s or MicroCenter the gaming PCs are humongous boxes with LED lighting flashing all over them, ugly as hell.
Oh, I love those designs. Everyone needs to see a clown or a mime once in a while, you know? Certainly not all the time–clowns get annoying quickly–but if you’re walking along and you see a clown making an absolute fool of himself (cough Alienware cough), it brings a smile to your face.
I do play games–not so much “hardcore” as in “competitive” but as in “deep, esoteric, and varied”–and for the life of me I could never understand the mindset that would lead to WANTING your computer’s case to look bad, meaning like any “gaming” tower I’ve ever seen. I’m function over form, absolutely. If a “weird” design makes it possible for hardware configurations that otherwise couldn’t have existed, I’ll support that design. But… function is absolutely not improved by these forms.
I’ve been hoping for a repeat of the Crash since about 2009. All these companies need to be destroyed, not only for what they’ve done to the classical industry, but for what they’re turning games into. EA, in particular, needs to stop existing.
Well...many builds are truly eye-catching at first, but overtime it’s just getting old. Not to mention almost every PC manufacturer jumping into that bandwagon like it got to be some cyberpunk thingy.
Looking to the future, gaming on the Mac overall seems unlikely to get better.
True.
The company isn't really interested in gaming for the Mac. But then they’re not interested in lots of things. If they thought they could bring something unique to the table then they’d probably have a crack at it, but gamers like large machines that can heat a small office; that’s just no in Apple’s DNA.
From my limited survey, none of the Mac users I know are into PC Gaming. Admittedly, most are over 50 years old.
I could say,
So What? Who Cares?
TBH, does it really matter?
People keep quoting that mac users aren't interested in PC gaming. This argument seems to be pretty myopic. What is true is that Mac users are not playing games on their Macs. That's simply because of the very point this article was trying to make: Macs generally are terrible at running games, and games ported to Macs often make too many sacrifices to run on the platform, meaning people who are genuinely interested in gaming will purchase a version that runs better on other hardware/consoles.
I used to be quite immersed in PC gaming, even building my own rigs (though I preferred to keep those machines small, quiet, and unassuming). I always had a better impression from MacOS than Windows, for the rest of my computing needs, so I eventually replaced my portable and desktop computers with Apple machines. As a result, though, I had to let my PC gaming hobby wither and die. Fortunately game consoles really started to offer a more comparable experience (not equal, but FPS games were never my favorite genre anyway) around that time so I was content to do my gaming on them for the years to come.
Another, less frivolous sacrifice that I have made with the choice to use MacOS exclusively for my personal computing relates directly to my career. I work in the computer animation industry and much of the software I use, especially the latest and greatest, is Windows only. A few of the primary applications are available for Mac, but as someone mentioned earlier that's really more of a token gesture on the part of the developers and they are much less optimized than the Windows and even the Linux versions. What that amounts to is that trying to do any work related to my actual career while I'm at home, especially skill development and R&D with cutting edge or specific task-oriented tools, suffers from my choice to use a Mac. It leaves me lagging in an industry that used to be at the heart of what Mac was about: creative professionals.
Last year I decided to build a new gaming PC instead of upgrading from my aging 2010 iMac since that machine was still working quite well. I continued to use the iMac for all of my simple computing, but started gaming again on the PC. Eventually I got back into doing side-projects related to my field of work to expand my skill set, but did that on the PC since most of the software was Windows-only anyway. Now my iMac has experienced a graphics card failure and I find myself unable to justify replacing it with anything currently on offer from Apple, even though I find Windows 10 to be almost unbearable. That's the problem I see with the direction Apple has been going. Over the years I have convinced quite a lot of friends and family to move over to the Apple Ecosystem because they looked to me for advice and I was passionate about Apple's products. I was able to enthusiastically recommend Apple to them knowing that the sacrifices made by me were more unique to my circumstances. Happily, I watched Apple's popularity grow as many others like me were doling out the same advice and praises for Apple. Now we are at a point where Apple is no longer making sincere efforts to support professionals and passionate enthusiasts in the area of personal computing, and are even making decisions that are harmful to the productivity of people in those audiences. I feel that if Apple keeps moving in that direction, they will lose the support of those trend-setters and their mainstream popularity will drop later on as a result.
I absolutely agree with you. The list of disadvantages to having a Mac are slowly growing once again, but the cons are shrinking. All of which is due to Apple's current direction, ignoring and taking for granted their once core supporters. They bought amazing software such as Shake, only to let it die. It's happened with a fair few of Apple's acquired titles. The uncertainty around and erratic Mac hardware releases also puts Pros off. No new Mac Pro for 6 years? It's a joke.
Honestly that’s not something a “more powerful graphics card” can fixed. True, modern Macs are not 1080 rigs, but at least they’re doable, especially that Apple have the control of their software. That said, most of the game I played aren’t AAA that just got released, and many are capable to even run on an iGPU. Take Black Mesa as an example, and I can still running pretty smooth for the most environment on an Inspiron 11. But that doesn’t mean the team will port on a MacBook — heck, here comes Wine, and it have no issue whatsoever; not to mention again that games built from Source are always running better in Wine than their native counterpart.
So my point is, even if there are Mac Pros with SLI Titan X, it still doesn’t mean that game developers will definitely write games for it, because most simply use Windows and you want most people to play your game. and if Apple wants to be more serious about gaming, it should spend sometime to advertising their software & API and hopefully get some on board.
Looking to the future, gaming on the Mac overall seems unlikely to get better.
True.
The company isn't really interested in gaming for the Mac. But then they’re not interested in lots of things. If they thought they could bring something unique to the table then they’d probably have a crack at it, but gamers like large machines that can heat a small office; that’s just no in Apple’s DNA.
From my limited survey, none of the Mac users I know are into PC Gaming. Admittedly, most are over 50 years old.
I could say,
So What? Who Cares?
TBH, does it really matter?
People keep quoting that mac users aren't interested in PC gaming. This argument seems to be pretty myopic. What is true is that Mac users are not playing games on their Macs. That's simply because of the very point this article was trying to make: Macs generally are terrible at running games, and games ported to Macs often make too many sacrifices to run on the platform, meaning people who are genuinely interested in gaming will purchase a version that runs better on other hardware/consoles.
I used to be quite immersed in PC gaming, even building my own rigs (though I preferred to keep those machines small, quiet, and unassuming). I always had a better impression from MacOS than Windows, for the rest of my computing needs, so I eventually replaced my portable and desktop computers with Apple machines. As a result, though, I had to let my PC gaming hobby wither and die. Fortunately game consoles really started to offer a more comparable experience (not equal, but FPS games were never my favorite genre anyway) around that time so I was content to do my gaming on them for the years to come.
Another, less frivolous sacrifice that I have made with the choice to use MacOS exclusively for my personal computing relates directly to my career. I work in the computer animation industry and much of the software I use, especially the latest and greatest, is Windows only. A few of the primary applications are available for Mac, but as someone mentioned earlier that's really more of a token gesture on the part of the developers and they are much less optimized than the Windows and even the Linux versions. What that amounts to is that trying to do any work related to my actual career while I'm at home, especially skill development and R&D with cutting edge or specific task-oriented tools, suffers from my choice to use a Mac. It leaves me lagging in an industry that used to be at the heart of what Mac was about: creative professionals.
Last year I decided to build a new gaming PC instead of upgrading from my aging 2010 iMac since that machine was still working quite well. I continued to use the iMac for all of my simple computing, but started gaming again on the PC. Eventually I got back into doing side-projects related to my field of work to expand my skill set, but did that on the PC since most of the software was Windows-only anyway. Now my iMac has experienced a graphics card failure and I find myself unable to justify replacing it with anything currently on offer from Apple, even though I find Windows 10 to be almost unbearable. That's the problem I see with the direction Apple has been going. Over the years I have convinced quite a lot of friends and family to move over to the Apple Ecosystem because they looked to me for advice and I was passionate about Apple's products. I was able to enthusiastically recommend Apple to them knowing that the sacrifices made by me were more unique to my circumstances. Happily, I watched Apple's popularity grow as many others like me were doling out the same advice and praises for Apple. Now we are at a point where Apple is no longer making sincere efforts to support professionals and passionate enthusiasts in the area of personal computing, and are even making decisions that are harmful to the productivity of people in those audiences. I feel that if Apple keeps moving in that direction, they will lose the support of those trend-setters and their mainstream popularity will drop later on as a result.
I absolutely agree with you. The list of disadvantages to having a Mac are slowly growing once again, but the cons are shrinking. All of which is due to Apple's current direction, ignoring and taking for granted their once core supporters. They bought amazing software such as Shake, only to let it die. It's happened with a fair few of Apple's acquired titles. The uncertainty around and erratic Mac hardware releases also puts Pros off. No new Mac Pro for 6 years? It's a joke.
Honestly that’s not something a “more powerful graphics card” can fixed. True, modern Macs are not 1080 rigs, but at least they’re doable, especially that Apple have the control of their software. That said, most of the game I played aren’t AAA that just got released, and many are capable to even run on an iGPU. Take Black Mesa as an example, and I can still running pretty smooth for the most environment on an Inspiron 11. But that doesn’t mean the team will port on a MacBook — heck, here comes Wine, and it have no issue whatsoever; not to mention again that games built from Source are always running better in Wine than their native counterpart.
So my point is, even if there are Mac Pros with SLI Titan X, it still doesn’t mean that game developers will definitely write games for it, because most simply use Windows and you want most people to play your game. and if Apple wants to be more serious about gaming, it should spend sometime to advertising their software & API and hopefully get some on board.
That wasn't really my point at least, not sure about Rossggg - my point was that Apple seems to be doing it's damnedest to stop pros (and the few even casual gamers) using Macs, including by axing OpenGL. Apple should be doing their hardest to make sure it's as easy as possible to port games from other architectures, it would increase Mac sales due to more games/applications. But they're doing the complete opposite, just as they did in the early to mid 90's.
The Mac Pro & Shake point was an example to underline how neglected all of Apple's pro software and hardware is. The iMac Pro is an engineering showpiece rather than a proper pro machine; it's great if you want loads of CPU horsepower but pretty rubbish for anything else. Remember when the Mac Pro came out Schiller said it was "designed so we can easily upgrade it"? Where are those upgrades? The GPUs are socketed but nothing else will fit there because of the stupid shape. Apple seems to think businesses who have deadlines to meet can just play to Apples erratic/non existent release schedule and occasional FCPX-esque software titsup. Customers won't accept "It's not my fault, it's Apple's" as a reason for not having their job ready.
Assuming the early instalments of Black Mesa - it's pretty old and based on the source engine, which can almost run on a calculator. It should run on anything from 2009 onwards. Also, some modern Macs are most definitely "1080 rigs", you realise the 27" iMacs are 2880p.
Looking to the future, gaming on the Mac overall seems unlikely to get better.
True.
The company isn't really interested in gaming for the Mac. But then they’re not interested in lots of things. If they thought they could bring something unique to the table then they’d probably have a crack at it, but gamers like large machines that can heat a small office; that’s just no in Apple’s DNA.
From my limited survey, none of the Mac users I know are into PC Gaming. Admittedly, most are over 50 years old.
I could say,
So What? Who Cares?
TBH, does it really matter?
People keep quoting that mac users aren't interested in PC gaming. This argument seems to be pretty myopic. What is true is that Mac users are not playing games on their Macs. That's simply because of the very point this article was trying to make: Macs generally are terrible at running games, and games ported to Macs often make too many sacrifices to run on the platform, meaning people who are genuinely interested in gaming will purchase a version that runs better on other hardware/consoles.
I used to be quite immersed in PC gaming, even building my own rigs (though I preferred to keep those machines small, quiet, and unassuming). I always had a better impression from MacOS than Windows, for the rest of my computing needs, so I eventually replaced my portable and desktop computers with Apple machines. As a result, though, I had to let my PC gaming hobby wither and die. Fortunately game consoles really started to offer a more comparable experience (not equal, but FPS games were never my favorite genre anyway) around that time so I was content to do my gaming on them for the years to come.
Another, less frivolous sacrifice that I have made with the choice to use MacOS exclusively for my personal computing relates directly to my career. I work in the computer animation industry and much of the software I use, especially the latest and greatest, is Windows only. A few of the primary applications are available for Mac, but as someone mentioned earlier that's really more of a token gesture on the part of the developers and they are much less optimized than the Windows and even the Linux versions. What that amounts to is that trying to do any work related to my actual career while I'm at home, especially skill development and R&D with cutting edge or specific task-oriented tools, suffers from my choice to use a Mac. It leaves me lagging in an industry that used to be at the heart of what Mac was about: creative professionals.
Last year I decided to build a new gaming PC instead of upgrading from my aging 2010 iMac since that machine was still working quite well. I continued to use the iMac for all of my simple computing, but started gaming again on the PC. Eventually I got back into doing side-projects related to my field of work to expand my skill set, but did that on the PC since most of the software was Windows-only anyway. Now my iMac has experienced a graphics card failure and I find myself unable to justify replacing it with anything currently on offer from Apple, even though I find Windows 10 to be almost unbearable. That's the problem I see with the direction Apple has been going. Over the years I have convinced quite a lot of friends and family to move over to the Apple Ecosystem because they looked to me for advice and I was passionate about Apple's products. I was able to enthusiastically recommend Apple to them knowing that the sacrifices made by me were more unique to my circumstances. Happily, I watched Apple's popularity grow as many others like me were doling out the same advice and praises for Apple. Now we are at a point where Apple is no longer making sincere efforts to support professionals and passionate enthusiasts in the area of personal computing, and are even making decisions that are harmful to the productivity of people in those audiences. I feel that if Apple keeps moving in that direction, they will lose the support of those trend-setters and their mainstream popularity will drop later on as a result.
I absolutely agree with you. The list of disadvantages to having a Mac are slowly growing once again, but the cons are shrinking. All of which is due to Apple's current direction, ignoring and taking for granted their once core supporters. They bought amazing software such as Shake, only to let it die. It's happened with a fair few of Apple's acquired titles. The uncertainty around and erratic Mac hardware releases also puts Pros off. No new Mac Pro for 6 years? It's a joke.
Honestly that’s not something a “more powerful graphics card” can fixed. True, modern Macs are not 1080 rigs, but at least they’re doable, especially that Apple have the control of their software. That said, most of the game I played aren’t AAA that just got released, and many are capable to even run on an iGPU. Take Black Mesa as an example, and I can still running pretty smooth for the most environment on an Inspiron 11. But that doesn’t mean the team will port on a MacBook — heck, here comes Wine, and it have no issue whatsoever; not to mention again that games built from Source are always running better in Wine than their native counterpart.
So my point is, even if there are Mac Pros with SLI Titan X, it still doesn’t mean that game developers will definitely write games for it, because most simply use Windows and you want most people to play your game. and if Apple wants to be more serious about gaming, it should spend sometime to advertising their software & API and hopefully get some on board.
That wasn't really my point at least, not sure about Rossggg - my point was that Apple seems to be doing it's damnedest to stop pros (and the few even casual gamers) using Macs, including by axing OpenGL. Apple should be doing their hardest to make sure it's as easy as possible to port games from other architectures, it would increase Mac sales due to more games/applications. But they're doing the complete opposite, just as they did in the early to mid 90's.
The Mac Pro & Shake point was an example to underline how neglected all of Apple's pro software and hardware is. The iMac Pro is an engineering showpiece rather than a proper pro machine; it's great if you want loads of CPU horsepower but pretty rubbish for anything else. Remember when the Mac Pro came out Schiller said it was "designed so we can easily upgrade it"? Where are those upgrades? The GPUs are socketed but nothing else will fit there because of the stupid shape. Apple seems to think businesses who have deadlines to meet can just play to Apples erratic/non existent release schedule and occasional FCPX-esque software titsup. Customers won't accept "It's not my fault, it's Apple's" as a reason for not having their job ready.
Assuming the early instalments of Black Mesa - it's pretty old and based on the source engine, which can almost run on a calculator. It should run on anything from 2009 onwards. Also, some modern Macs are most definitely "1080 rigs", you realise the 27" iMacs are 2880p.
I couldn’t agree with your points about the hardware. The Radeon Pro 580 in an iMac today are more likely to match a 1060 rather an 1080, respectively. It doesn’t matter what resolution you’re running on. Other than that, I don’t see how you’d think an iMac Pro is “nothing more than just a CPU.” What other things you’re thinking that has more impact than a CPU and a GPU? Besides, their RAID drive are fast and nothing wrong with the memory. My point about Black Mesa and rest of the Source games is, even a game that’s old as almost 9 years, it still won’t play natively on a Mac, and even if they do, they’re terrible and sometimes just better to have a Mac running Windows version. It didn’t matter what API they have, people simply cares less about it because most gamers is on Windows. Having a lousy API for supporting half-baked games in my opinion did no better job than just supporting Metal, at least you know the game developers did something just can barely play.
I might a bit geeky to think about the OpenGL (and probably lots of the games on Macs), but if you have a better luck with Wine than those natively written games, there’s no point to bothering it. Unless you’re running something pretty ancient and strange, Wine will do the job most of the time.
Comments
Remember the ‘80s? Remember when the game came with filler and not “buy the filler instead of the game”?
EDIT: fine, don’t embed the image. http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/hhgttg/hh06.jpg
It makes a ton of sense to me.
I used to be quite immersed in PC gaming, even building my own rigs (though I preferred to keep those machines small, quiet, and unassuming). I always had a better impression from MacOS than Windows, for the rest of my computing needs, so I eventually replaced my portable and desktop computers with Apple machines. As a result, though, I had to let my PC gaming hobby wither and die. Fortunately game consoles really started to offer a more comparable experience (not equal, but FPS games were never my favorite genre anyway) around that time so I was content to do my gaming on them for the years to come.
Another, less frivolous sacrifice that I have made with the choice to use MacOS exclusively for my personal computing relates directly to my career. I work in the computer animation industry and much of the software I use, especially the latest and greatest, is Windows only. A few of the primary applications are available for Mac, but as someone mentioned earlier that's really more of a token gesture on the part of the developers and they are much less optimized than the Windows and even the Linux versions. What that amounts to is that trying to do any work related to my actual career while I'm at home, especially skill development and R&D with cutting edge or specific task-oriented tools, suffers from my choice to use a Mac. It leaves me lagging in an industry that used to be at the heart of what Mac was about: creative professionals.
Last year I decided to build a new gaming PC instead of upgrading from my aging 2010 iMac since that machine was still working quite well. I continued to use the iMac for all of my simple computing, but started gaming again on the PC. Eventually I got back into doing side-projects related to my field of work to expand my skill set, but did that on the PC since most of the software was Windows-only anyway. Now my iMac has experienced a graphics card failure and I find myself unable to justify replacing it with anything currently on offer from Apple, even though I find Windows 10 to be almost unbearable. That's the problem I see with the direction Apple has been going. Over the years I have convinced quite a lot of friends and family to move over to the Apple Ecosystem because they looked to me for advice and I was passionate about Apple's products. I was able to enthusiastically recommend Apple to them knowing that the sacrifices made by me were more unique to my circumstances. Happily, I watched Apple's popularity grow as many others like me were doling out the same advice and praises for Apple. Now we are at a point where Apple is no longer making sincere efforts to support professionals and passionate enthusiasts in the area of personal computing, and are even making decisions that are harmful to the productivity of people in those audiences. I feel that if Apple keeps moving in that direction, they will lose the support of those trend-setters and their mainstream popularity will drop later on as a result.
MP Digital is the most prolific Mac porting house on the MAS, you get a new game almost every week which is great!
I still prefer something simpler.
So my point is, even if there are Mac Pros with SLI Titan X, it still doesn’t mean that game developers will definitely write games for it, because most simply use Windows and you want most people to play your game. and if Apple wants to be more serious about gaming, it should spend sometime to advertising their software & API and hopefully get some on board.
The Mac Pro & Shake point was an example to underline how neglected all of Apple's pro software and hardware is. The iMac Pro is an engineering showpiece rather than a proper pro machine; it's great if you want loads of CPU horsepower but pretty rubbish for anything else. Remember when the Mac Pro came out Schiller said it was "designed so we can easily upgrade it"? Where are those upgrades? The GPUs are socketed but nothing else will fit there because of the stupid shape. Apple seems to think businesses who have deadlines to meet can just play to Apples erratic/non existent release schedule and occasional FCPX-esque software titsup. Customers won't accept "It's not my fault, it's Apple's" as a reason for not having their job ready.
Assuming the early instalments of Black Mesa - it's pretty old and based on the source engine, which can almost run on a calculator. It should run on anything from 2009 onwards. Also, some modern Macs are most definitely "1080 rigs", you realise the 27" iMacs are 2880p.
My point about Black Mesa and rest of the Source games is, even a game that’s old as almost 9 years, it still won’t play natively on a Mac, and even if they do, they’re terrible and sometimes just better to have a Mac running Windows version. It didn’t matter what API they have, people simply cares less about it because most gamers is on Windows. Having a lousy API for supporting half-baked games in my opinion did no better job than just supporting Metal, at least you know the game developers did something just can barely play.