Marvin

danox said:

the only thing in the gaming world that’s worth buying is the Unreal Gaming Engine but I don’t think Sweeney would ever sell it to anyone let alone Apple.

Apples largest acquisition is still only $3 billion dollars after 25 years. I don’t think they will be buying any large scale tech gaming company unless it’s the Unreal Gaming Engine.

Unreal engine is a bit overrated. Overall, it's not a great engine and is very bloated, it just has the best rendering engine and this advantage will be diminished over time the more that hardware can handle path-tracing.

Here's the difference with standard rendering and path-tracing shown with Nvidia's path-tracing renderer being retro-fitted to old games:



Building a fast, high quality real-time renderer is very difficult and only the biggest companies have managed to build them.

Path-tracing is the ultimate goal as it simulates real lighting but it needs around 30TFLOPs of raw computing power (iPhone is around 2TFLOPs). Unreal engine has been able to get near this quality with much lower performance requirements by using a custom advanced lighting and shading system.

AI upscaling and frame-generation have reduced the requirement because they can fill in the data so it can work with around 10TFLOPs (M1 Max).

If Apple had a hardware path-tracing system that could accelerate this across their whole product line and it could be integrated into any engine, that would be appealing for developers but the main thing they could do would be to build an open-source cross-platform rendering library.

A rendering library could be built by any big company - EA, Microsoft etc - and wouldn't necessarily have to be open-source. This could be integrated into a huge number of engines or used directly. Then porting wouldn't matter so much because even if a game had to be run through a compatibility layer, that layer just has to translate the code and not the rendering. The renderer can be native and that's where all the performance is needed.

Big developers would benefit from this because they don't have to tie their huge game franchises to a 3rd party engine. Smaller engine devs like Godot would get a high quality renderer and could focus on building tools and could then compete with Unity and Epic.

They can brand it like they do Metal. Other engines are Decima, Frostbite, RE Engine, IdTech, Snowdrop, Anvil, CryEngine. This would be related solely to rendering so like Apple Radiance rendering library. On each platform, it manages a rendering context, handles geometry, shaders and lighting passes via an API and would be compatible with any language: Java, Python, Javascript/Typescript, C++, Swift, C#, Lua. It wouldn't manage the scene (ideally this would be standard like USD), physics, animations etc. it would only render a scene in a compatible format.

This would be more scalable across different types of games. Balatro is a card game that became very popular and the engine it uses has to take care of the cross-platform rendering:

https://github.com/love2d/love
https://github.com/love2d/love/tree/main/src/libraries

With a rendering library taken care of, 3rd parties just handle the tools and the game devs can build most of these:

https://github.com/love2d/love/tree/main/src/modules

This would be useful for more than games, the renderer can be used for any app like video editing apps for motion graphics, for image tools like Photoshop or Substance. With path-tracing it can have offline rendering capability.

What would be needed for the rendering library to be adopted is to be able to get near path-tracing quality on mobile. Lumen does it by approximating the scene geometry to compute lighting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZFBUhusQn4&t=119s

They have to implement this in software, Apple controls their own hardware so they can put a hardware solution for this into their silicon. If they only had the desktop platform then it wouldn't be adopted enough to justify dedicated hardware but the iPhone is a huge gaming platform and needs the performance.

Apple publishing games would be good too because they would see the pipeline requirements but they could do it a few ways. They can buy some studios and let them operate independently or they could commission games from big studios. A game costs around $100m and takes 3+ years to make. They can commission 5-10 exclusive games using their own rendering engine, publish them and split the profits with the studios. If a game studio doesn't deliver, they don't commission more games from them.

s.metcalf said:

jfreedle2 said:

Side loading is moronic and stupid, and only an idiot would suggest it. I feel sorry that some idiot is attempting to “require” it. 

You’re aware that it’s entirely optional and no one could force you to install anything outside the confines (and presumed safety) of Apple’s walled garden…right???

Also, the Mac platform permits so-called side-loading and has always done so.  I’ll bet the majority of people install the majority of their apps (not including those pre-installed or included with the OS) from the web and not the Mac App Store.  And if they ever stopped allowing this it would instantly kill the Mac platform!

Yes they are different platforms, but the same principle applies.  An iPhone or iPad is just a smaller computer.  Just admit what this is really about and that is Apple protecting its cut on software sales, not user safety.

This logic would apply to every electronics device - smart TV, games console, smartwatch - but people don't complain about not being able to install 3rd party apps on those products because people accept that electronics devices are designed with different levels of capability.

Even Epic who started this whole thing has no problem with games consoles being locked down and charging commission on their exclusive stores. The crux of their argument is that smartphones are general purpose devices but they aren't and it wouldn't even matter if they were. The manufacturer should be able to design a product how they want and if people don't like that choice, they buy a different product.

Desktops were designed as creator/productive platforms. This requires being able to develop software and inherently requires fewer restrictions.

Smartphones were designed as consumption platforms, mobile web mainly. They are large scale and have way more personal data than any other device - photos, banking info, biometrics, two-factor authentication, personal messaging - so security comes well above flexibility. They also have a limited UI. If a desktop had malware, it's possible to boot in safe mode and browse the filesystem and processes to remove it. If a smartphone gets malware, there's no UI to get rid of it efficiently.

There's nothing wrong with making 3rd party stores an optional extra that is off by default for security but all it takes is for big companies to push users to need 3rd party stores for their apps and then the scam stores will pop up and people will start installing banking apps that mimic the official ones. Oh it doesn't happen on a large scale on Android people will say. Mainly because people have been conditioned to avoid using 3rd party stores for security reasons. There's not much point in having 3rd party stores when people are told, even by the FBI, to avoid using them:

https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2020/PSA200610

"The FBI recommends only obtaining smartphone apps from trusted sources like official app stores or directly from bank websites."

This whole movement for 3rd party stores hasn't come from consumers but from Apple's biggest competitors who don't like the fact they don't control the platform and don't have the ability to set the rules of the platform like abusing their customers with shady business practises.

9secondkox2 said:

Super bummed we don’t get to see the m4 ultra show what it can do vs Nvidia 5090. 

The 5090 raw performance has actually been quite disappointing. They were marketing 70% increase in performance but the actual results haven't been that much. Here the 5090 is just 35% faster than the 4090:

https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=OPTIX&compute_type=CUDA&compute_type=HIP&compute_type=METAL&compute_type=ONEAPI&group_by=device_name&blender_version=4.3.0

The M4 Max is on page 2 with 5093 and M3 Max just below at 4130.

The Ultra is around 90% faster than Max so M3 Ultra should be 7847 (equivalent to Nvidia 4080) and M4 Ultra would have been 9676 (equivalent to Nvidia 4090), about a 25% difference.

Although M3 Ultra loses out a bit on raw performance vs the 5090, it has more memory. Most people will get the 16GB Nvidia model, some will get 32GB. Neither are good for AI. M3 Ultra allows for 512GB. It also won't melt a hole in the desk when it's running at full speed:

https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/asus-rtx-5090-burned-out

DAalseth said:

If you keep your eye on the profit, you're going to skimp on the product. But if you focus on making really great products, then the profits will follow.

Steve Jobs

I have increasingly been feeling that Apple under Tim Cook has forgotten this. 

This statement means if a company focuses on profit, they cut component costs to get better margins or a lower price for higher volume and end up making a poor quality product that customers aren't happy with.

Instead, if a company makes a good quality product, customers will want to pay more for it.

Tim Cook knows exactly what he's doing and Apple under Steve Jobs never shipped cheap products or parts.

Having higher margins allows retailers to apply steeper discounts and still make a profit and they can absorb currency differences globally. Apple's net margins are 25%, this isn't excessive.

Some of the higher upgrades are really expensive but the entry upgrades for most buyers aren't too bad.

A config for the Air that would work for most people would be the 32GB/1TB model. This is $1999. Apple could charge $400 for the upgrades instead of $800 so that the price is $1599. But $400 extra for a laptop that people buy once every few years isn't that much extra and by not charging that, Apple loses out on $400 x 6 million units = $2.4b / year that is purely profit.

Businesses all wish they could make more from their products and if PC manufacturers could convince customers to pay that much, they'd price them like that too but they make cheap quality products that nobody is willing to pay more for.

AppleInsider said:

Most games launch as console or PC exclusives and only reach the Mac long after their initial debut. Ubisoft, meanwhile, has expressed significant interest in the Mac platform, with executive producer Marc-Alexis Cote saying that it's "been a longtime dream to bring the game to Mac."

Ubisoft was able to leverage many Apple-exclusive features, including Metal 3, unified memory, and hardware-based ray tracing, which is available on Macs with M3 or M4 chips. The game's dynamic biomes, lighting, and weather conditions allow for an incredibly detailed in-game environment, which will be available on Macs and iPads with an M-series Apple Silicon chip.

"Seeing those millions of lines of code work natively on a Mac was a feeling that's hard to describe," said the game's executive producer. "When you look at the game's performance, the curve Apple is on with successive improvements to the M-series chips year after year, and the way the game looks on an HDR screen, you're like, 'Is this real?'"

Assassin's Creed Shadows also strives for historical accuracy by attempting to mimic 16th-century Japan down to the smallest detail, such as the exact shades of varnish found on wooden structures of the time. There's also a heavy focus on immersion, as the game itself is available in Japanese as well as English.

Cote ultimately believes that "the future is bright for gaming" on the Mac platform, indicating that we'll likely see additional Ubisoft games on Apple devices in the future. As Mac hardware continues to improve with each iteration, gamers will gain access to even more detailed games, hopefully without delays. 

Apple could ensure future games are always released on Mac on day one by buying the company. Ubisoft is the size of EA and currently valued at $1.5b (EA by comparison is $34b), they could probably buy Ubisoft out for under $5b:

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UBI.PA/

Their running costs are around $1.5b per year with around 20 studios. They've made a lot of games:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubisoft_games:_2010%E2%80%932019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubisoft_games:_2020%E2%80%93present

To cover operating costs, they'd still have to publish cross-platform but there's room for timed exclusives and spin-off exclusives for iOS/Mac.

They could run it the way Microsoft runs their internal XBox game studios with an independent CEO, similar to how Claris is setup as an Apple subsidiary with a CEO:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claris

They could also license out the studio's game engines to rival Epic's Unreal Engine, which also ensures more games are Mac compatible.

If it doesn't work out, they would just make the company publicly-owned again or sell them to another buyer.

Ubisoft also owns the streaming rights for Call of Duty and Activision games as part of the anti-trust deal Microsoft made to buy Activision:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/13/23915780/ubisoft-activision-blizzard-microsoft-cloud-gaming-rights-deal-explained

Apple could have a streaming system as part of Apple Arcade that would allow streaming games like World of Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, Overwatch, Call of Duty to all their devices.