Wow you guys hate apple more than I do and I really think they’re overpriced but okay hard and software for people with other needs. The apple users I know don’t really think about gaming at all, wondering how many seriously do.
The hatred has nothing to do with the products but the lack of participation in open standards like OpenGL or Vulkan.
Their products are incredibly well made (though I’d fuckin hope so given the pricing) and their software experience (barring the lack of good graphics API support) is quite nice.
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?
Really just repackaged Proton, with some ridiculous install requirements including fucking Homebrew.
It’s not even Alpha level software right now. But, just to argue their side: it is meant as a preview for game developers to package their games with right now, and not the general public.
I guess I don’t really like the idea of a large company using a tool like Homebrew, I feel at that point they should write/include their own package manager.
I might be sounding pedantic, so feel free to ignore me if you’re a Homebrew fan, but it just irks me that the package manager is installed via curl’ing a shell script from their github project, and that the entire repo itself is stored on Github.
Even Microsoft has winget; dunno why a company the size of Apple can’t just roll a proper, secure way to distribute packages.
Also, as far as other package managers go, there’s Macports.
And there’s nothing wrong with this. While I’d love to see companies develop games that run on all of the main three OSes, there is cost involved. And Valve determined that cost to be too high to worry with. This doesn’t mean Macs suck, it just means Macs are not a viable gaming platform for some companies and some games.
Imagine if we saw reason instead of simply adding ourselves to the “Macs suck” bandwagon. What a world that would be – with logic and reason and understanding. Nah, just pissing on things is better.
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.
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.
This is far from a black and white answer. A lot of the first gen steam machine ‘ports’, including those from Valve, Aspyr, Feral and Virtual Programming used source code level wrapper libraries to convert D3D calls to OpenGL. This added a little bit of extra overhead to the port so a lot of these early ports suffered a little slower performance (in my opinion an average of about 15% slower). These ports were compiled from source code so they were still native ports, if a little half-assed for time and manpower’s sake. As time went on Valve and VP’s wrappers improved to the point that you could get 1:1 performance or sometimes much better performance running the port under linux (for example VP’s wrapper would multi-thread the renderer even if the original D3D renderer was singled-threaded). Feral went on to re-code a handful of their later ports from D3D to Vulkan, again, achieving better performance under linux. A few game engines were written with linux in mind from the start, such as The Talos Principle/Serious Sam 3, and those titles, in my opinion, would be best to use to compare the relative performance of the two OS’s at that time.
Nowadays you still have a fair amount of indie titles coming out with native linux support. Not many larger titles in recent years, but you do still get some such as Psychonauts 2 and stuff from Paradox. Proton has gotten so good now that many games will run better on linux from day 1 than on Windows-steal-yo-data-11.
macOS is BSD based, not Linux based. Different graphics underpinnings as well. Apple has released some helper layers to assist in porting, but it’s still no cakewalk.
In the earlier days of OS X this was true. A port from one to the other was somewhat trivial. However, Apple has done Apple things and tried to invent their own gaming library API after killing off OpenGL support on Macs and they’ve probably been up to some other buggery since then as well. Porting to Mac is probably equally as difficult from Windows now as Linux, and Linux has overtaken them on number of people who are playing on Steam.
They still have some pretty old version of OpenGL and Metal was a bit before Vulkan, so it’s sort of a lightning vs USB C situation.
I don’t believe that it was easy. Since it started macOS was based on BSD, not Linux, which is quite different. They also use different types of binaries and the similarities between kernels should end beyond the BSD compatibility layer. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths#FreeBSD_is_Just_macOS_Without_the_Good_Bits
Games have never been “trivial” to port to Mac, why do you think there are so few games that have been ported? Unless you write it for macOS, it’s just not easy or even worth it to port, has been since the Apple II days.
I meant the trivial portion would be porting back and forth between linux and early Mac OSX, making it a two-for-one proposition (though back then a lot of companies still chose not to do the linux port).
OSX was BSD based as well. Mac OS 9 and before were proprietary OSes. I don’t remember what the graphics underpinnings were, but I do know that porting directx to system 8.6 was a gargantuan task and the Mac ports were always 1-2 years behind pc.
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.
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.
Valve has been using MoltenVK to run Dota2 on Mac1. I’m a bit worried that if Valve would cut the funding on MoltenVK2. Furthermore, CS:GO had been an example of a cross-platform example for multiple-player game. Valve’s games may still support Linux/SteamOS, but what if other developers only release their games as win-only in future?
I agree. It's a mistake for Valve to reduce platform support as it becomes a justification for dropping other platforms for other developers as well.
I know that MacOS is a bit of a pain to support right now with how steam and third party applications are treated, but it would be a bigger issue for Apple to drop support if Valve maintained a strong presence on the platform via steam. With the way things are now, Apple might rip the bandaid off and just remove the ability to have third party stores on their computers. This is already what they do with Iphones/Ipads
… it literally contains the Steamworks SDK: github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton which becomes pretty awkward to ship on your own storefront. You’d have to do a good bit of work to make Proton steam-free. No one is going to do that for 2% of the market. Just like arguing you could use Chromium and anyone who wants to make a browser can use it but realistically it creates an ecosystem around Google and for Proton, around Valve.
Don’t forget that the only reason Proton even exists is because they added a version of Steam Play to Linux Steam users.
One dev does it in his spare time. I use it to run games that aren't on Steam like Ubisoft and Blizzard stuff.
But yes, as a software company you'd probably have to pay someone to create and maintain a similar release for your own use - but that's part of being a software company.
Valve single-handedly resurrected the idea of Linux gaming and spent God knows how many millions of dollars making Linux a viable gaming platform after decades of everyone laughing at it and ignoring it. I think your pathetic fridge-magnet wisdom would be better suited for a context that isn't an article about Valve.
Could also be because of the Arm chips which add more burden on the developers who have to account not only for another OS but also for a completely different CPU instruction set.
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.
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