L4sBotApple might reveal a proper gaming product at its October event
narc0tic_birdIf 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.
ThatOneDudeFromOhioTo 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.
I hate this myth. If you want to put 1GB of stuff in ram, it will take up 1GB of space. I don’t understand why people keep trying to justify the 8GB as “oh but it’s somehow different” and handwaving it away.
Not only is it not different, it’s shared between the cpu and the gpu, so if anything there’s less effective total space when you’re doing graphics stuff like games as there’s no dedicated VRAM.
Yes, swap is very fast between memory and storage, and that does make it feel faster when you overflow out of the ram capacity, but that’s nothing to do with the cpu architecture. Any cpu can connect to very fast storage.
Right, but the latency of the swap is much quicker. So in essence you can squeeze more out of 8GB when optimized properly. Obviously memory is memory, but how that memory can be used is one of the keys to the M architecture.
𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠That won’t matter much though. For productivity that setup will work quite well, but for gaming where you need data from memory ASAP and consistently fast, even those SSD swaps will cause jittering, especially if it’s also shared with the GPU.
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.
PlexSheepDevs also need to consider if they want to port stuff to a different architecture.
GhostalmediaSeems 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.
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.
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.
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, but Metal isn’t 100% feature-compatible with Vulkan.