The key to making gaming on macs great... you mean having games?

I'm not saying it's a desert... but no one is calling it a tropical paradise either.

Surely, what they need is an upgraded and more expensive VR headset.

Apple is constantly trying to shun gamedevs away from its platform, then from time to time they'll be like "why won't people make games for macs?" and do something like this to try to get them back, but shortly after it'll go right back to screwing devs all over again.

How are the screwing with gamedevs? I don't generally follow anything apple-related stuff

Xcode absolutely sucks, only supporting Metal instead of something cross platform like vulkan doesn't help. Like they have their game porting toolkit but making a full native game is pain and suffering. Also cross compilation isn't real half the time.

Edit: there are vulkan wrappers like MoltenVK so it's not too awful to port. It's just a build flag and am extra library.

The Mac is a gaming tundra. Habitable, but not very.

Unfortunately for Apple, right now gaming on Linux is a better experience than gaming on Mac, which is really saying something. One has to wonder why Apple doesn't take a page from Valve's book and develop a compatibility layer for macOS like Valve's Proton platform, which has brought hundreds of Windows games to Linux.

I guess PC Gamer hasn't heard of Crossover or Whisky, both of which bring that functionality to Mac.

I think one of the largest issues with Mac gaming is the cost is higher if you only care about gaming. Why would you spend more to play on Mac when you could get the same performance for much cheaper. Right now the only market is single computer users that chose Mac first for other reasons that do not have a console for gaming.

As usual, if you want to make something for Mac, Apple requires you to make it FOR Mac, with several little things on top of just being able to run the game. And you need to pay Apple for the privilege of making something for their platform too.

Then there's also all several tech stacks that they outright forbid even if it could run just fine. And many security layers you need to navigate and document in order to not got some random API call blocked that ends up breaking your whole code (something that you can't even test properly because the blocks occur randomly and only when the game is downloaded from their [mandatory?] app store).

Most devs work with windows as their target platform and depending on their tech stack, supporting Linux might be as simple as running a separate build script (nowadays not even that as users can just figure out for themselves how to run the windows version of the game). Testing your game on your own mac (for a limited time) might be just as easy, but Apple adds so many extra layers to the process of releasing a game for their platform that in general it's just not worth it.

There's a bunch of people out there desperate for anything to play, but the best option for making your game run on macs these days is to add it to some service like GeForce Now.

I had heard that the juice simply isn't worth the squeeze. IIRC PirateSoftware said like 2% of his sales came from Mac and it was all of the rigamarole you mentioned to get it working there.

Lol x 900

Last I heard about Mac gaming, games had to support Apple's proprietary Metal graphics API, so a game can't run on anything else.

Apple are trying to throw their weight around and forcing developers to go Mac exclusive like they do with iThings, but Mac users are such a tiny segment nobody bothers.

Do MacBooks even have dedicated GPUs to play high end games? Or is the hardware powerful enough without one, but the games just need to be rewritten from scratch?

I used to love Macs back in the early 2000s but I'm so out of touch now.

Yeah, and don't they make you do development on a Mac too? Or am I thinking of something else...

Apple Game Porting Toolkit 2 kind of makes it clear Apple aren’t trying to force developers to make native games; taking a similar approach to Steam and Proton (Game Porting Toolkit is based on CodeWeavers’ CrossOver, the same developers working on Proton with Valve).

MacBooks do not. I think the Mac Pro tower supports AMD dGPUs, but for nearly their entire computer line you’re working with integrated graphics. I will say, their high end Apple Silicon chips have some decent graphical capabilities that are comparable to APUs you would find in something like a Steam Deck or Xbox/PS5, so it’s not a total wash. I’ll see if I can find some M series graphics benchmarks now.

Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but looking at this, it looks to me that the best Apple Silicon results for this specific benchmark put their best processors at about the same level as a 3070 or so.

I develop software for macOS but am not a game dev. I guess one thing that comes up with my friends who are is that Apple has a proprietary graphics framework called metal that's historically not been easy to adapt to something more cross-platform like vulkan. There has been some progress on that front in terms of them providing some much-requested apis to give better feature parity with third parties, but I don't know where things stand today?

They have powerful iGPUs; something similar to Strix Halo. I am not a Mac user, but in my understanding the top end SKU have iGPUs comparable to high end dGPUs (with respect to synthetic performance, actual gaming performance tends to lag heavily).

That too, but you can get around it somewhat using vms or building a hackintosh but afaik the latest version of macos doesn't run on Intel macs so that's largely on the way out.

Makes me wonder with the resident evil village and assassins creed iOS ports if they're planning on the next Apple TV to be gaming focused. Haven't they also been investing in METAL with developers?....

This game launcher here puts another piece into place

With Microsoft on it's fucking way out from the console business, it would make sense to have another company fill it's place .... although I'm hoping that's Valve with a proton powered PC in a console like form factor