I just wonder what the impact of "the latest COD / sports games are available and run performantly on 100% of the off-to-college Mac laptops" would be. Don't have to pack and take your Xbox, just the controller to pair to your Mac and you're off to the races.
Apple and Gaming
- Thread starter jeanlain
- Start date
That's more or less already there (with Game Pass/Geforce Now).
Does this disregard the effect of Steam on Apple game sales? Like, I bought BG3 on Steam even though I’ve only played it on the Mac and the Steam Deck. A bunch of games I play on my Mac I bought via Steam. I am not buying a Mac game through the App Store if I can get the same game via Steam for obvious reasons (Steam gives me options the App Store doesn’t). I already bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam. Unless they mandate that the Apple version must be purchased via the App Store, I will be happy to play my Steam version on Mac once it releases… even if I have to pay some amount of money to enable Mac support.
i’ve never looked at it this way before. I’ve already bought the M4 Ultra MBP and am looking to build a gaming PC around a 5070ti (once my Nvidia plug hooks me up with one). I assuredly will bear this in mind in a couple of years when I look to upgrade again assuming no valid movement on Mac gaming occurs in the meantime.
I think this is where you and I probably differ the most, because I think that degree of support would change everything. I don’t think a culture of gaming matters all that much for any one platform as opposed to simple game availability. There are a huge number of Mac users who play games, they just do it on something other than their Mac. For some of them it’s a worthwhile expense, and you’ll probably never get them to use their Mac as their main gaming platform. But that’s like saying that just because there’s still a market for interchangeable lens cameras the iPhone isn’t a viable device for photography. For most people their phone camera can take the picture they want, which is all they need.
Which is why my stance is that Mac gaming isn’t stunted by a lack of culture. It’s not that people are deliberately choosing to play games on something else. It’s that the Mac doesn’t have the games they want, and that problem has been going on for long enough that they’ve shifted their gaming to another dedicated device (at whatever additional expense). Take away that limitation (as if it were anything like that easy) and most people, more than enough to sustain a viable market as an additional target platform, will be more than happy to save the money and use their Mac.
I will point out that we have no idea how the Mac versions of these games sold. The data we have about their sales (which is admittedly dismal) is from the iPhone (and presumably iPad). The source is a third party analytics service that as best I can tell doesn’t have the same services on the Mac.
This. Not all who game identify as part of "gamer culture" (however one defines that – it's broad and diverse). More people game as a hobby than game as a lifestyle, and the former will game on whatever device is convenient and offers the desired selection.
The Steam Hardware survey shows Mac OS representing 1.4% of devices so you can do a kind of 'dumb' extrapolation from there, but in all likelihood far, far lower than that.
I refuse to install Steam on my AS Macs. I haven't needed Rosetta so far, and I'm not going to have it just for Steam. It's been what, 5 years? Come the off on Valve, get your act together.
Can’t help but wonder whether it’s Valve that needs to get its act together for Apple or Apple that needs to get its act together for Valve. Specifically with respect to Steam.
Apple’s push with gaming-friendly hardware and APIs could be a perfect match for Steam. Recall that during Intel days a great deal of Mac “ports” were shimmed versions of PC binaries.
I think the question becomes: is Apple interested in Mac gaming primarily as means of increasing the appeal of its hardware, or must Apple also be at the center of all gaming commerce on its platforms?
Best case: tech like Metal upscaling and Game Porting Toolkit (possibly as part of an expanded Proton) anchor a new push by Valve recommitting to the Mac. Yes, wish-casting perhaps.
Worst case: Apple further digs-in against third-party stores, Valve insists on owning more of its platform (OS, hardware), and the two companies can no longer envision cooperating despite areas of competition.
Steam on AS Mac and Vision could be a huge boon to gaming on these platforms. Steam on iPhone and iPad could be a huge boon to Steam, and a cudgel against Epic.
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Yes? Both? Apple clearly sees maintaining its App Store hegemony (or acting like it has one, if we're talking about the Mac) as key to its Services economy. Once Apple loses the ~$20B in Google payments, I think that will only increase. While the main reason why Apple might want to attract game developers to the Mac is to burnish the Mac's reputation as a gaming platform, giving it more carrots to pull people to the Mac App Store with exclusives / timed exclusives is something I'm sure Apple would welcome.
For the rest of us, yes, the Mac becoming more of a first class citizen on Steam would benefit gaming on the Mac far more, particularly the more that publishers could be encouraged to support cross-platform play for multiplayer, and buy-once-play-anywhere platform support. If I have to buy my games on Steam and the Mac App Store, guess which one I'm never going to use.
That feels like a pretty weird massively imbalanced request just to get the basic store app ported to run natively.
Users: "Can you just please port the Steam app to Arm?"
Valve: "Sure thing! Just waiting on them to flesh out their Windows gaming translation/compatibility framework for us."
While we'd all love some form of Proton and all, at least get the damn store app running natively.
We'll get a "new" Steam app powered by Wine and Rosetta. But no Proton.
A native Steam storefront is secondary. I want an Apple Silicon-friendly Steam catalog.
Well yeah I think everyone would, just referring to the bit you quoted:
If Valve can't even be bothered to do that, near the minimum amount of support possible, it's hard to imagine what level of Apple bending backwards Valve would want to get a Mac Proton going.
Made in Hurry
Ars Praefectus
I am building myself a budget gamer system this coming week due to that, i am just waiting for the parts to arrive.
The Steam app is an Electron app, which should support building for Apple Silicon out of the box. The lack of support is a choice by Valve. That’ll only change when Apple drops Rosetta 2 (just like they only released a 64-bit client when Apple dropped 32-bit support; note how Windows still has only a 32-bit client available).
There are games that support Apple Silicon natively, but it’s not obvious from the UI. There are also games listed as incompatible that are actually compatible (64-bit), and there are supposedly compatible games that are actually 32-bit. I really wish Valve could muster at least half an ass for their Mac support. They have the games’ binaries. Why can’t that drive what shows in the listing for platform support?
I've been playing BloonsTD6 on my MBA and have been having a pretty good time with it. One huge irritation is that it's not a grid for placement. Are there any other Mac App Store available tower defense games like Bloons that do have the grid? Not as much of a fan of Kingdom Rush style where you have to move a hero around, more into the tower management aspect.
Not shure what you mean with placement grids, but the TD I enjoyed most, ever, is Infinitode:
https://infinitode.prineside.com/
I have a decent M1 MBP I use almost exclusively for Logic, and an old but used-to-be nice pc for gaming. I'd love to only "need" one...fairly sure none or very few of the games I play are on Mac. Other than heavily-modded Minecraft, and my only experience with that on Mac was awful. To be fair, it was on my older Intel Mac, kinda wonder how my M1 would fare, if the mods would even work (java so I'd think so??)
I tend to buy games well after their heyday and enjoy mods, otherwise I'd just stick with a console (I've had xboxes and a switch as it is).
I tend to buy games well after their heyday and enjoy mods, otherwise I'd just stick with a console (I've had xboxes and a switch as it is).
I was hoping Cyberpunk would relelase before the Studio so we could see what machine would be needed to run it well. If it's only the Ultra which will, that would be a little ridiculous, even given the ludicrous 40 and 50 series GPU prices.
At minimum I'd assume it'll run better than through emulation/translation. Plenty of videos on YouTube of people testing the Windows version on everything from the base M1 MBA (8GB!) to the latest M4s. Haven't looked how stuff is on the latest software but the M1 was barely/debatably playable and everything is predictably better from there.
Turn the settings down and Cyberpunk will run at a stable 30 FPS on a Steam Deck. I suspect the minimum specs on the Mac will be surprisingly low. But the real question is what it will take to get a higher end experience. The announcement included that the Mac version will support full path tracing, so what are you looking at to hit that level? M4 Pro? Max? M3 Ultra? And what’s the story with frame generation, given that MetalFX still doesn’t officially support that feature?
If it's not part of MetalFX I'd guess they're just using FSR frame generation.
I know MetalFX uses the FSR algorithm, but is there a Mac implementation of FSR that’s not running on MetalFX?
I haven't done much gaming in a while but there was a tower defense game on Mac and iOS called Jelly Defense that I used to like playing.
Time for your periodic AAA gaming update. The big release this week is Assassin’s Creed Shadows. This one is particularly noteworthy because it’s a major AAA game launching day-and-date on the Mac with all other platforms. That’s not unheard of, Civilization VII recently did the same, but it’s still the exception and far from the norm. The bad news is performance is not very good, struggling to hit 30 FPS at reasonable resolution and graphics settings even on Max chips. It’s also the first of the recent wave of AAA games to require more than just an M1 to run, with the minimum required system being either an M1 Max or M2 Pro. On top of that this game is very heavy on [mandatory] ray tracing, using a software solution for M1 and M2 chips, so those are particularly hard hit. Finally plenty of people are reporting that optimization does seem to be an issue here, as performance doesn’t scale up nearly as well as you’d expect with turning the settings down.
Admittedly this seems to be an issue with the port since on the PC side it’s not much better even with an RTX 50-series GPU and a powerful CPU (people with a 5070 are needing to use DLSS to hit 1080p). It’s clear Ubisoft put far more effort into the console versions of this one. Despite being roughly as powerful as an M4, the Xbox Series S runs the game smoothly at higher equivalent settings, and the higher end consoles are able to disable ray tracing entirely and hit a fairly consistent 60 FPS. It’s unclear how much effort Ubisoft will put into fixing the Mac/PC versions, but history isn’t optimistic. If you have a choice go with the consoles, especially if you have a PS5 Pro (which can do 60 FPS with ray tracing).
Also of note this week is the remake of Resident Evil 3. The port runs as well as you’d expect: this is the fifth Resident Evil game Capcom has released for the Mac and they clearly have the RE Engine [aside: the “RE” in RE Engine doesn’t actually stand for Resident Evil, which is why I don’t abbreviate the game’s name] running smoothly on Apple’s hardware, although the lack of ray tracing in any of Capcom’s releases remains odd. Regardless, this is a game that originally released on the PS4/XB1, so even a base M1 does just fine but higher end systems scale nicely in both settings and performance.
More importantly, this is also the last of the currently released RE Engine Resident Evil games, so we’re out of catalog options for Capcom to turn to. I assume the inevitable Resident Evil 9 and Code Veronica’s Remakes will launch on the Mac, and a day-and-date with the PC release wouldn’t surprise me, but I will yet again ask where Capcom’s other RE Engine games are? Is Capcom as a whole supporting the Mac, or is Resident Evil simply a passion project for someone at Apple or the Resident Evil team? I’ve mentioned this game time and time again, but Monster Hunter Wilds released last month and lived up to expectations, moving 8 million copes across PC and console in just three days and peaked at nearly 1.4 million concurrent players on Steam. It’s another RE Engine game so the port shouldn’t have been inordinately difficult and as a day-and-date release of a game that was a guaranteed hit I find it hard to believe it wouldn’t have outsold a 5-year-old remake of Resident Evil 3. That Capcom chose RE3 over MH Wilds remains baffling to me.
Admittedly this seems to be an issue with the port since on the PC side it’s not much better even with an RTX 50-series GPU and a powerful CPU (people with a 5070 are needing to use DLSS to hit 1080p). It’s clear Ubisoft put far more effort into the console versions of this one. Despite being roughly as powerful as an M4, the Xbox Series S runs the game smoothly at higher equivalent settings, and the higher end consoles are able to disable ray tracing entirely and hit a fairly consistent 60 FPS. It’s unclear how much effort Ubisoft will put into fixing the Mac/PC versions, but history isn’t optimistic. If you have a choice go with the consoles, especially if you have a PS5 Pro (which can do 60 FPS with ray tracing).
Also of note this week is the remake of Resident Evil 3. The port runs as well as you’d expect: this is the fifth Resident Evil game Capcom has released for the Mac and they clearly have the RE Engine [aside: the “RE” in RE Engine doesn’t actually stand for Resident Evil, which is why I don’t abbreviate the game’s name] running smoothly on Apple’s hardware, although the lack of ray tracing in any of Capcom’s releases remains odd. Regardless, this is a game that originally released on the PS4/XB1, so even a base M1 does just fine but higher end systems scale nicely in both settings and performance.
More importantly, this is also the last of the currently released RE Engine Resident Evil games, so we’re out of catalog options for Capcom to turn to. I assume the inevitable Resident Evil 9 and Code Veronica’s Remakes will launch on the Mac, and a day-and-date with the PC release wouldn’t surprise me, but I will yet again ask where Capcom’s other RE Engine games are? Is Capcom as a whole supporting the Mac, or is Resident Evil simply a passion project for someone at Apple or the Resident Evil team? I’ve mentioned this game time and time again, but Monster Hunter Wilds released last month and lived up to expectations, moving 8 million copes across PC and console in just three days and peaked at nearly 1.4 million concurrent players on Steam. It’s another RE Engine game so the port shouldn’t have been inordinately difficult and as a day-and-date release of a game that was a guaranteed hit I find it hard to believe it wouldn’t have outsold a 5-year-old remake of Resident Evil 3. That Capcom chose RE3 over MH Wilds remains baffling to me.
Of note, Control Ultimate Edition comes to the Mac on the 28th. The game has recently been updated to support HDR and resolutions >4k.
I've played it a little on my 16-core M4 Max Studio and performance has seemed fine to me even with all the non-resolution settings set to their max. At 2560x1440, it sticks around 25 fps. Full 5K drops it down to 15 which is too low.
FWIW, It runs surprisinging well on my Steam Deck using XeSS.
Huh, interesting. Doing a search it looks like Ubisoft actually put together a custom graphics mode for the Deck that actually goes below the lowest PC setting and instead gets a lot closer to the Xbox Series S (in particular disabling all ray tracing except at the hideout, but there are other cutbacks as well) but at a drastically reduced resolution. By doing that they’ve managed to get it running at a pretty consistent 30 FPS even though the Deck actually doesn’t meet the minimum PC requirements. Kudos to Ubisoft for making it work; hopefully they’ll open those options up to the PC/Mac version.
There's definitely problems with the engine. I experimented a little bit with just minimum/maximum settings since around half the graphics settings require a restart. Also my old 5k number was with upscaling enabled so it's lower now.
5k max: 10 fps
5k min: 15 fps
1440p max: 25 fps
1440p min: 40 fps
1080p max: 40 fps
1080p min: 50 fps
There's lower resolutions too and ones between those. Performance at the lower resolutions is actually kinda screwy e.g. 720p seemed to perform worse than 1080p. I also would have expected there to be bigger differences between min and max settings.
5k max: 10 fps
5k min: 15 fps
1440p max: 25 fps
1440p min: 40 fps
1080p max: 40 fps
1080p min: 50 fps
There's lower resolutions too and ones between those. Performance at the lower resolutions is actually kinda screwy e.g. 720p seemed to perform worse than 1080p. I also would have expected there to be bigger differences between min and max settings.
Ubisoft opted for simultaneous releases on many platforms, and possibly decided that performance on macOS was good enough for the initial release. I expect performance to increase with updates.
Nice to see my lowly Steam deck play the same as a 16-core M4 Max Studio. 
This tells more about the level of optimisation of the game and its settings than about the capabilities of these two machines.
I would definitely drop $70 or whatever to play Wilds on my Mac. Knowing it's an RE Engine game, I'm a more than a bit miffed they whiffed on it. I really hope it's an oversight they get around to fixing. I have no plans to build a gaming PC or buy a PS5 in the foreseeable future, but I've got a baller Mac I'd definitely play the shit out of it on, especially since it has cross-play and I could play with my kid on her Windows streaming rig. (I can't play World with her because she has it on Steam and I have it on PS4. We do play Rise sometimes when I can pry her off Wilds and convince her to get her Switch out.)
I mean, if I had to choose between a Steam Deck and a Mac just for gaming, regardless of the cost, it's always going to be a Steam Deck...it's not even close, regardless of how much more powerful the Mac is.