Actually, they kinda do take responsibility for mac gaming. They helped develop https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK which basically runs Vulkan on Metal. The Linux version uses Vulkan, so in theory it shouldn't be too hard to port, they just didn't.
That’s funny because my son compared CS2 on my MacBook Pro vs his RTX 3060 PC build we put together last winter and he said how much more responsive the game felt on the Mac.
That it works is one thing. That it always works as expected is another. Apple doesn’t want to take responsibility for that, and neither does Valve, when there’s not enough paying customers on that platform. It is what it is. Now the Proton layer is one thing, because Valve is selling Steam Decks. They will want that to become a big thing. They’ll go back to selling Steam Boxes (the living room console thing).
We were discussing who supports the product. But interestingly CodeWeavers is responsible for over two-thirds of all commits to Wine, and the company also employs Wine’s primary maintainer, Alexandre Julliard, as its CTO.
They ship an outdated and unreliable implementation 😅 There are things that use it, but my understanding is you couldn’t use it in the same way you can on other platforms.
Steve Jobs quite openly hated the idea of anyone gaming on a Mac because he felt like it made their products seem more childish or something. It seems like either nobody at Apple has managed to dig that particular brainworm out yet or have just decided that printing iPhone money makes all other concerns irrelevant.
As a user of an ecosystem that I care about, I totally do not. Why should the health of an ecosystem be dictated by my usage patterns or that of people that I know? Bit self-centered, also?
Also, today’s Apple fans and their “Apple-no-gaming” fiction are too quick to “forget” Bungie and how upset Steve Jobs was when Halo became Microsoft-exclusive. arstechnica.com/…/jobs-turned-down-bungie-at-firs…
Will there be any new Macs really? Isnt everything just some iPhone/ipad with iOS soonish? I doubt macs have any relevance in the future - just like last time when there was no Steve Jobs around. I mean there arent really any apps even for their watch… So why bother? Maybe they can just usw some cloudgaming …Apple ppl love paying and subscriptions.
Not sure what you’re talking about, a whole lot of people use MacBooks, I don’t think their market share dropped significantly. Desktop Macs, sure maybe but I think even that won’t completely die out.
You got a desktop or MacBook? Macbook pro is pretty nice but i dont see a future for osx or desktop. And while i agree some real professionals might keep using it for another decade but the vast majority of Adobe professionals will be replaced by other tech like AI or nuke artists etc
I got a MacBook Pro M2. It’s a good piece of hardware, MacOS was kinda annoying at first since it’s my first MacBook but I got the hang of it and it’s basically a normal desktop environment to me right now and I can’t see that changing significantly in the near future, I don’t think AI is gonna move that fast as to completely eliminate the need for typical PC desktop environments.
I stopped using it over ten years ago and dont look back at crap like quarkxpress or the finder. Only contact with osx i have now is old people with macbooks that have troubles with user permissions and Safari. Desktop PC can strive but i doubt mac desktop or osx will be part of that.
Maybe. But who needs it? I say nobody. The poor Photoshop and illu guys are already getting replaced. There is no need for osx so there is no need for desktop Macs and macbooks will run IOS and be nothing but a superpowerd ipad. Innovation with Apple is zero - they the money to do a new chip but nobody devs anymore for the iwatch since the idea how Apple wants to make business is pretty dated.
Meta app on iwatch …lol. 90s are calling and they want Apple back in the grave i hear. Or maybe Bill Gates can help them AGAIN?
Millions of developers of numerous technologies use Macs. To say macs won’t have relevance in the future is clearly uninformed. As a gaming platform, sure, Macs leave plenty to be desired, but as development computers, they work extremely well, if overpriced.
They’re also the standard in some industries, inc. design and video production. At least where I’m at. Hate the OS with a passion but not having a mixed OS workplace sucks.
That is the past. I know Photoshop ppl are getting laid off everywhere and replaced by nuke,ai and so on.Does Apple even do new desktop Workstations? Is that coke can still a thing?
Good. I hope more developers follow suit cause maybe it might finally convince Apple to start selling PCs with proper GPUs in them again. It won’t happen, but I can dream.
In terms of numbers (according to the Steamwide statistics, which may be different than CS:GO), MacOS isn’t that far behind Linux in terms of usage. I get that Valve is pushing Linux and all, but this a bit scummy (saying this as a Linux user)…
Unless there is more Politics involved. My understanding (and I may be wrong) is that developing software for Apple is basically a quagmire of regulations, proprietary lockout and big pits you need to pour money into.
Also, strictly reading help.steampowered.com/en/…/73EF-08A3-0935-6369 they didn’t say that they were discontinuing it BECAUSE of lack of playerbase, but that they didn’t expect it to have much impact due to the small playerbase. Low player count is probably one reason, but I suspect there might be more factors in play.
EDIT: I know the article does mention the API issues, but I’m just a bit annoyed that they decided to title it the way they did for clickbait.
For games, a big one is that none of the common APIs are supported, apple just supports Metal and nothing else. There are compatibility layers, but it's a hurdle.
Apple just shoots itself in the foot with proprietary APIs that nobody else supports. Why should Valve write an additional translation layer for an OS that’s less used than Linux? macOS was always bad for gaming, it merely got worse.
Your understanding is not quite correct. The regulations are for App Store apps only, which wouldn’t affect CS2, and even if they did, they are not much different from other platforms’ store regulations (no strong adult content, no gambling aides, no games that encourage you to damage peoples’ hardware, you can’t make games that would put private citizens’ safety at risk, etc.). And the only money you have to pay is for a developer subscription, which gets you code signatures & anti-malware validation.
Valve’s statement adds that players using DirectX 9, 32-bit operating systems or macOS “represented less than one percent of active CS:GO players”. Dumping these platforms makes sense from that perspective, but it’s a bitter pill to swallow for the Macintoshers amongst us or those who, for whatever reason, play on very old PCs.
Does Asahi have full support for the GPU yet? Would Proton work on a non-x86-x64 architecture? Last time I tried it (around 6 months back, been a minute) it worked great for anything that didn’t need acceleration but I didn’t think it could handle much more.
If it’s any consolation, the Windows version runs on macOS Sonoma, but you need to use Whisky to install Windows Steam & launch it from there. Also, you need to adjust some graphics settings that can only be adjusted using the command line, or the frame rate will be unplayably bad.
I feared that CS2 would use some kernel-level anti-cheat solution, which would prevent it from running on macOS, but it doesn’t.
Apple doesn’t ship consumer systems with dedicated GPUs in them and they’re on their own custom silicon now. Developing cross platform games for them must be a major PITA.
The GPUs aren’t really a problem; the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra chips are much more powerful than Intel’s integrated GPUs, are very competitive with other mobile GPUs, and are competitive with all but the high end of desktop GPUs. The main thing holding them back is they consume less electricity, which is important in a laptop, but is not necessarily important in a desktop PC.
The problem is, game developers tend to pick the platforms that will make them the most money, and Microsoft has held an uncontested monopoly on the PC OS market for more than thirty years now. They have held onto their monopoly for so long because they have the high ground on GPUs (Apple has a grudge against Nvidia that probably won’t go away until Tim Cook retires), and they also hold a number of popular games that are exclusive to Windows (Call of Duty, FIFA, Madden, Final Fantasy, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, Diablo, Far Cry) whereas Apple’s highest profile exclusive macOS game at the moment is Hello Kitty.
It seems like each time Apple makes gains in the PC market (iPod/iPhone halo effect, keeping controversial UI changes to a minimum), Microsoft gains one and a half times that.
I’m all for games being as cross-platform as possible, but considering how Apple doesn’t offer apps such as iMessage, Facetime, etc. on other platforms, I’m less sympathetic to them for this.
Apple users chose a famously closed ecosystem, so they shouldn’t be surprised when some things aren’t available to them.
The issue here is that Counter Strike Global Offensive did have official Mac support. Then when CS2 came out, Valve replaced the CSGO client with CS2, rather than making it a new client, and then announced they’re cutting Mac support. There is still a weird way to launch GO, but good luck finding players to play against now. It was pretty shitty of them to not leave GO as its own client or to not continue supporting Mac. This isn’t quite a case of a new game not having Mac support, what happened from Mac users’ point of view is their counter strike game updated and now they can’t play it anymore.
I don’t like this decision, since I know the lack of support for different platforms than Windows as someone playing on Linux. Valve invests into proton and thus game support on Steam Deck and ChromeOS, so I’d have thought they’d make sure CS runs on macOS too.
Big difference I see from Linux and Windows is that they are OS that can be installed on different devices. MacOS is not the case, and even trying to get Linux to be stable and reliable on Apple hardware after the move to their own CPUs is a project in itself with Asahi Linux.
So I can see the lack of interest with how MacOS is a very restrictive Mac hardware only type experience for most people with how getting a hackintosh working is rather involved.
I’d have thought the pain point would have been the processor architecture (ARM64) rather than operating system - MacOS still supports AMD64 using a compatibility layer but it would probably be quite a drawback to game performance.
Not really, unless the game code was written in X86-64 assembly language, does low-level VM allocation for some reason, or otherwise has special dependencies on Intel CPU-isms. With a few exceptions, C/C++/Objective-C code written for X86-64 can be easily recompiled for ARM64.
The PowerPC to X86 transition was much rougher, because of the byte order change + PPC allowing integer division by zero while X86 disallowed it.
What’s your experience here? I’m interested to hear about projects that you have done this for.
The source engine has code that’s over 20 years old. A monolithic project like a game engine, which is statically and dynamically linked with god knows how many libraries they don’t even have code for, let alone permission, to compile in a different architecture, is not gonna be an easy thing to do.
I’ve brought various apps, bundles, and frameworks from PowerPC to Intel to 64-bit to ARM ever since macOS 10.0 first launched. Usually the most difficult parts were:
During the PPC to Intel transition, converting code that expected all data to be big-endian over to handling little-endian data, and catching integer division by zero before sending such operations to the CPU
During the 64-bit transition, switching from all the APIs Apple removed over to newer APIs, if not already done, and converting all code that expected integers and pointers to be 32-bit over to 64-bit
During the ARM transition, converting code that abused variadic functions to code that used them properly, and converting all code that expected long doubles to be 128-bit over to 64-bit (I know some developers were burned by the VM page size change, but that didn’t affect anything I did)
But yeah, usually the most difficult part of the transition is managing the dependencies. Whenever Apple transitions CPU architectures, if your app depends on a closed-source third-party library or kernel extension made by developers that went out of business years ago, you’re more or less screwed unless you can find or build a replacement.
macrumors.com
Aktywne