this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023

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Apple might reveal a proper gaming product at its October event (www.techradar.com)

submitted 10 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Apple might reveal a proper gaming product at its October event::I'll take one gaming MacBook please, Apple!

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[–] narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 25 points 10 months ago (5 children)

If they want to be serious about this, they need games. Not only a handful that they proudly announce at the September event every year, but most/all major AAA titles from day one.

Then, if they want to reach as many people as possible, they need to offer an affordable product that has enough power to properly play games. Sure, it's nice that the MacBook Air can do some light gaming and it's quite impressive for a device without a fan. But the GPU of the base M2 doesn't really cut it for triple A titles, and 8 GB of RAM in the base configuration won't motivate developers to port their games over, especially as it's both system and graphics memory. Developers already complain about the Xbox Series S, and it comes with 10 GB.

So I highly doubt we'll see more than the usual MacBook Pros with M3 Pro/Max, that sure can do some gaming, but are also $2,000+ devices.

[–] refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They could piggyback off of the work Valve has been doing with Proton and WINE, but that would mean the Apple needs to implement Vulkan support, because translating Vulkan to Metal isn't a perfect solution. I don't see Apple embracing Vulkan any time soon; they have a really bad case of "not invented here" syndrome.

They already have Rosetta 2 for x86 emulation, so that part is taken care of already.

[–] Patch@feddit.uk 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I don't know about Proton, but Crossover for Mac still exists, and according to the programme database on their website seems to have a decent hit rate for games.

Crossover is made by Codeweavers, who are the main contractor for Proton and the biggest contributor to Wine.

[–] refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

WINE isn't the limiting factor here. Most games rely on either DirectX, OpenGL, or Vulkan, none of which Apple supports.

On Linux, we have translation layers for DirectX in the form of DXVK and VKD3D, and native driver support for both OpenGL and Vulkan.

Apple has to rely on translating Vulkan to Metal with tools like MoltenVK, but Metal isn't 100% feature-compatible with Vulkan.

[–] PlexSheep@feddit.de 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Devs also need to consider if they want to port stuff to a different architecture.

[–] Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

It all boils down to whether or not porting to the platform is going to make you a buck.

Apple is now basically telling devs, don’t port to the Mac, port and build for iPhone 15 hardware and up. It’s not going to run Cyberpunk max out, but it’s beefier than a Switch, connects to displays and PS / Xbox controllers out of the box, and iOS has an installed base that dwarfs consoles.

And if you port to the iPhone, moving that game to other Apple silicon devices is easy.

[–] Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Seems like the play is to leverage the iPhone to get console quality games on Apple’s hardware.

The AppStore is a cash cow, and the gaming category is, by far, the biggest part of the App Store. Last time I heard from some colleagues there, that category of the store has like 5x the staff as the other categories.

They have the traffic and reach, they just need hardware that can run better games on a mobile hardware. And it looks like that’s the play they’re trying to make with the iPhone 15 and tools to demo port performance.

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I’m about to show you why Apple is the most valued company in the world. Here we have Internet Guy explaining everything Apple needs to do to be serious about gaming. It’s fairly PC / console based perspective and leans very hard on AAA titles. Okay. Got it. That’s a point of view.

Meanwhile, Apple is already earning more money on gaming than Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, or Activision - combined (source). Apple doesn’t care at. all. about what Internet Guy has to say, doesn’t care if anyone says it’s “just” mobile games, or “just” because of the iPhone. They laugh all the way to the bank and back again. They aren’t Internet Guy’s favorite and never will be, but they win the revenue game and gaming is just one tiny part of what they do. This is why they’ve become so insanely rich. They’re very very successful at the business they’re in and don’t GAF about anyone else’s perceptions.

So…let’s maybe say they are already serious and might become even more serious with upcoming products.

[–] narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago

The article (and me) is obviously talking about triple A/"console quality" games. I'm well aware that they make a lot of money selling in-app purchases in repetitive puzzle games.

[+] ThatOneDudeFromOhio@lemmy.world -10 points 10 months ago (3 children)

To be fair the 8GB of RAM works a lot differently compared to x86 architecture. You can squeeze a lot more out of SOC 8GB. Unless they announce something amazing tonight, I’ll be sticking with my M1 16GB Mini.

[–] aluminium@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

No it doesn't. Apple just leverages their very fast SSDs as a substitute when RAM runs low.

[–] narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 4 points 10 months ago

There are some advantages to Apple's RAM setup, but that mainly comes down to latency and bandwidth to some extent. Then they can do things on the OS level like memory compression and clever swapping, but as far as I can tell they don't do anything super special.

8 GB is definitely fine for light multitasking with office, mail and browser apps, but big triple A titles are a different beast. There is no magic that Apple can use to make a scene require less (V)RAM. All textures, models etc. in the scene need to be in memory. A texture doesn't magically take less memory on Apple Silicon than on a PlayStation 5.

Current games on (Windows) PCs are sometimes struggling with an 8 GB GPU, and with the 8 GB Apple Silicon Macs, these 8 GB are the whole system RAM. There is an OS with services and other apps running, so at best the game gets 7 GB of memory (probably less, even when most of the rest is swapped out) for both game logic and as video memory. Developers won't downgrade/"optimize" their games for this target, especially since the marketshare is minuscule.

So I stand by what I said: if Apple is serious about gaming, they need to upgrade the base spec of all models from 8 to 16 GB. Right now upgrading from 8 to 16 GB costs about as much as an Xbox Series S. Imagine you want to play games on your Mac once they finally come out in somewhat relevant quantities only to realize that you got the 8 GB base model that struggles with most games, and you can't upgrade it. They need to make every Mac as compatible as possible with these games, as their marketshare is too low as it is.

[–] noxy@yiffit.net 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I will never trust Apple to keep games playable in the long term. Back on iOS I kept a folder of apps, which I named "Incompatible", to put apps in after iOS updates broke them.

That folder only grew, never shrank. And most were games I had paid for.

[–] sic_semper_tyrannis@feddit.ch 2 points 10 months ago

There were also emulators that worked (GBA4iOS) and others that they would purposely make not work with every iOS update

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

Lol yeah sure they will

[–] kittenzrulz123@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

Thats great, but can it play Doom

[–] msage@programming.dev 2 points 10 months ago

Can. It. Play. Frogger!

[–] XTornado@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

After demo of games on the iPhone last presentation... Showing ray tracing and game ports and stuff like that I suspected it wouldn't be far fetched... they might attempt to take more of that market.

My idea was more in a console I mean they seem to have good enough hardware already, they can piggyback on the apple TV stuff for the device and of course their existing store... Oh and they have their own VR/AR glasses coming let's not forget...

I mean not trying it would be dumb.