Is Apple finally taking gaming on macOS seriously?

[saturnotaku]

In my opinion, the most interesting news to come out of this year's WWDC was the introduction of its new Game Porting Toolkit, which includes a Proton-like testing environment to see if it's feasible for developers to bring their titles to macOS and specifically Apple Silicon. It's based on technology from Codeweavers' Crossover application, and the initial results look very promising. While performance leaves something to be desired, previously unplayable games like Elden Ring and Cyberpunk 2077 could now run. If this tech catches on, I will almost certainly switch back to macOS for full-time laptop use while keeping my desktop PC for more serious gaming.

 

 

 

[Aaron44126]

Saw this.  Intrigued.  But right now, the offering from Apple is pitched as being for developers or publishers, not users, to evaluate how their games might run on macOS and help with a port.  It is still up to the publisher to leverage this and push out a Mac version of their app.  This as opposed to say the Steam/Proton situation on Linux where end users can just download any Windows game in the Steam store, without the developer/publisher necessarily taking any action to make it available on Linux, and it will "probably work".

 

Now, since maybe someone will slap together a solution to "easily" allow users to fire up any old Windows game using this framework (more like Lutris on Linux) and that would be pretty cool.

 

I think I saw mentioned that Apple contributed some of their work back to Wine so it should help other products (like CrossOver) that use that stack.

[saturnotaku]

6 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

Saw this.  Intrigued.  But right now, the offering from Apple is pitched as being for developers or publishers, not users, to evaluate how their games might run on macOS and help with a port.  It is still up to the publisher to leverage this and push out a Mac version of their app.  This as opposed to say the Steam/Proton situation on Linux where end users can just download any Windows game in the Steam store, without the developer/publisher necessarily taking any action to make it available on Linux, and it will "probably work"

 

You are correct about that, but the fact that such a tool is being made available at all is a major step forward given Apple's overall indifference toward serious gaming after the failure of the Pippin.

 

Also, never forget that Halo was going to be a Mac exclusive prior to Bungie's acquisition by Microsoft.

[saturnotaku]

 

Again, it's impressive to see these games running at all on macOS, let alone through two translation layers. I suppose the real question now is how much effort will it really take for a developer to port their game to Apple silicon? I could see CDPR making an attempt with Cyberpunk, though they may balk at having to put it on the App Store.

[Aaron44126]

3 hours ago, saturnotaku said:

I could see CDPR making an attempt with Cyberpunk, though they may balk at having to put it on the App Store.

 

...Is there some rule that you have to put games on the app store if they are converted with this toolkit?

There are lots of Mac programs & games distributed outside of the app store.  They could just distribute through Steam like they do with the Windows version.

[saturnotaku]

1 hour ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

...Is there some rule that you have to put games on the app store if they are converted with this toolkit?

There are lots of Mac programs & games distributed outside of the app store.  They could just distribute through Steam like they do with the Windows version.

 

That's probably true unless the developer entered into some sort of exclusivity agreement with Apple as Capcom appears to have done because the macOS port of Resident Evil Village isn't available outside the App Store. No Man's Sky is on Steam, though.

[Sandy Bridge]

I think it's fair to say that Apple is taking gaming on macOS more seriously than they did previously, whether that meets the standard of "seriously" remains TBD.

 

But after so many years of neglecting gaming (have they released an OpenGL version from the 21st century yet?  joking!  but only half-joking), I'm split between, "maybe they're realizing that this is limiting their market share" and "do they actually care enough to follow up with everything else they'd need to compete with Windows (and these days, Linux) on gaming?"

 

The "while performance leaves something to be desired" hints at why I'm not sure that the "seriously" threshold has been reached.  Not just that there may yet be optimizations yet to be made in the Game Porting Toolkit, but that Apple has gone all-in on Apple Silicon, without dGPU options.  The standard M2 chip is about the same as a Radeon RX 6400, AMD's lowest-end dGPU, the M2 Pro is a bit below the RX 6600 (but for $2500; you can get 6500 XT performance for $2000).

 

The M2 Ultra really does have specs that can give high-end GPUs a run for their money, but on a $7000 machine it ought to.

 

So I think it's more, "Apple doesn't want someone who would otherwise pay the Apple Tax to not do so because of gaming", than "Apple is taking gaming seriously".  Gamers tend to be value-focused, and you can get a PC with an RX 6600 easily for half of what Apple charges for the same level of performance; I got mine for a third of what Apple charges.  If you're going to pay $2500 for a gaming laptop, and buy a PC, the performance is going to leave very little to be desired.

[Aaron44126]

I’m sort of confused about the target audience and purpose for Apple Game Porting Toolkit.

 

It might leave “some performance to be desired” but think about what it is doing. Converting x86 to ARM, and converting DX11/12 to Metal, obviously there is going to be significant overhead. And it works. They fact that it makes games playable at all is pretty amazing. They slapped this together in a seemingly short time and it is something that the CrossOver/Wine/MoltenVK/etc guys have been working on for a few years with limited success. So, clearly they have put in some substantial effort.

 

But for what? Not for ordinary users to play Windows versions of games. It is officially so that game devs can “test” how their games “might” work on macOS. But that only sort of makes sense, because obviously they will work “worse” under AGPT than they would native. And devs can’t even use it to ship games (running in the “emulator”), according to the license terms, they would still have to proceed with a full port. I guess it they also have tools to convert shaders to Metal which could speed that up.

 

So, yeah. Will Apple eventually open this up more in some way? Especially after seeing what the community reaction is like? I think they’d really prefer people to be using optimized game ports, so I don’t know.

 

Anyway, not complaining too much. It opens up a whole new set of games to macOS users even if that was not Apple’s intent.

[Spiritsong]

Well, today Apple had their iPhone and iWatch event, and we are starting to see that they (Apple) is definitely serious enough to say "can we have a 1 size fits all approach in their Apple Game Porting Toolkit. I mean they ran some pretty modern games (but they didn't show Death Stranding, or did they?) in iPhone, unless I got the tidbit wrong.

That might turn some heads, and in that case Nintendo and Steam will have some serious competition. Well, good for consumers, I guess.

[Aaron44126]

58 minutes ago, Spiritsong said:

Well, today Apple had their iPhone and iWatch event, and we are starting to see that they (Apple) is definitely serious enough to say "can we have a 1 size fits all approach in their Apple Game Porting Toolkit. I mean they ran some pretty modern games (but they didn't show Death Stranding, or did they?) in iPhone, unless I got the tidbit wrong.

That might turn some heads, and in that case Nintendo and Steam will have some serious competition. Well, good for consumers, I guess.

 

I didn't see Death Stranding, but they did show some other current/modern console games like a pair of recent Resident Evil releases.

 

I think they are getting to the point where the technology is there...  It is now a matter of convincing game publishers that the market is there to justify spending resources to port their games to Apple platforms.

 

......I also remain a bit unclear about what their plans are for Game Porting Toolkit (GPTK).  It was pitched as a developer tool only to basically evaluate games on macOS, but developers are not allowed to use it to ship a game, they must complete a port to macOS/Metal.  As such, GPTK was released with a restrictive license, basically allowing you to download it freely but not use it in any shipping products.  Like I said before, it seems like they put a lot of work and polish into this thing and it seems weird if that is all they intended to use it for.  It didn't stop other folks from getting to work and quickly figuring out ways to use it to run pretty much any Windows game on macOS, and tools like CXPatcher or Whisky make feasible for non-techy people to get it up and running.

 

Anyway.  With the most recent beta "1.0.4" released a couple of weeks ago, Apple has silently changed the license for GPTK to allow redistribution of the D3DMetal library.  They are still not allowing it in commercial products, but Wine packagers can now include it.  The tools I mentioned above are now bundling D3DMetal directly so it even easier to get Windows games up and running on macOS and they are including everything you need in one package; you no longer need to go and fetch the GPTK package from Apple's dev site.

 

Why did Apple make this license change?  They clearly would prefer that game publishers make proper full Mac ports, but it seems sort of like a "wink-wink here you go" towards the crowd that is trying to just get Windows builds of games to run on macOS.

 

They've also been notably improving performance with each release.  Elden Ring FPS has almost doubled between the original June release of GPTK and the most recent beta.  (I saw people struggling to get it above mid-30s FPS and now it can run at a pretty constant 60 FPS, 1080p with medium settings on a M2 Max.)

 

Also noteworthy is that the guy in Apple who is driving GPTK is Nat Brown, who used to work for Valve.

[Csupati]

My friend has able to test a M2 ultra  , in geek bench and wildlife the m2 MBP has better performace then my clevo with i9 amd 2080. So i will keep my eyes on this thread. Its interesting how a 60w chip can outperform an i9 and 2080 .

Single core geek 2813 multi core 14889 wildlife extreme 19905

I9 9900 (130w) single core 1702 multi core 7702  wildlife 19740 points. 

[saturnotaku]

I think all it will take is one major publisher to commit to a couple reasonably high-profile releases on macOS then we'll see the flood gates open. Ubisoft would be a good contender, though since they probably lost their shirts betting on Stadia, they're probably a bit more gunshy to commit any serious resources to Apple. This would never happen, but Apple should purchase a few studios to release some in-house games. Could you imagine them acquiring 343 Studios and putting Halo back on the Mac (I know Halo is Microsoft's property, but I think they could work something out).

[Aaron44126]

Back earlier in September, CrossOver 23.5 beta was "announced" (to beta testers only).  CrossOver has integrated GPTK/D3DMetal into their product.  It will be much more capable than before when it comes to playing DirectX 11 & 12 games.  While there are many options to get GPTK working without CrossOver, CrossOver 23.5 is the only solution that allows using GPTK with Wine 8.  All other solutions use Wine 7.

 

———

 

Today, we have the release of macOS 14 "Sonoma".

(I was hoping for updates to GPTK and/or CrossOver to go along with it, but that does not appear to have happened ... yet.)

[Edit] - There is a CrossOver 23.5 release candidate today, still available for beta program members only.

 

.....I'm going to wait a little while before upgrading my system, targeting mid-November, just to allow time for the bugs to shake out, apps to be updated, and community knowledge to build up.  But, I'm very interested in trying some more complex Windows games on this system.

 

4 hours ago, saturnotaku said:

I think all it will take is one major publisher to commit to a couple reasonably high-profile releases on macOS then we'll see the flood gates open. Ubisoft would be a good contender, though since they probably lost their shirts betting on Stadia, they're probably a bit more gunshy to commit any serious resources to Apple. This would never happen, but Apple should purchase a few studios to release some in-house games. Could you imagine them acquiring 343 Studios and putting Halo back on the Mac (I know Halo is Microsoft's property, but I think they could work something out).

 

For the near-term at least, I think emulation and translation is the only real way to go if you want access to a broad library of games on macOS.  I've gotta believe that Apple understands this as well, even if they aren't saying so publicly; why else would they have dumped so much effort into GPTK and then changed the license to allow CrossOver to use it ...?

 

In addition to GPTK, I'm following the MoltenVK enhancement roadmap.  There are a few interesting items on the list, including the ones about shader conversion (which builds on recent work Apple did also attached to GPTK) and the one on pipeline caching.  If implemented, these would help bring modern console emulators more up to par with their Windows versions, and it would also make it more feasible to get the Proton stack up and going properly on macOS, giving an option to run newer Windows games other than D3DMetal.

[Aaron44126]

One day later...

CrossOver 23.5 is out!  With D3DMetal integrated, tons more games now work.

https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/9/27/crossover-235-is-a-real-game-changer

[saturnotaku]

With M3 and the announcement of hardware RT and dynamic caching (which as I'm understanding it is basically a hardware scheduler), it looks like Mac gaming could get another shot in the arm, no pun intended. Not long before the keynote, I had purchased an M1 MacBook Air for $750, but I'm going to return it and go all in on a 14-inch M3 Pro. I was originally going to go for the base 11 CPU/14 GPU/512 GB version, but since I want to play around with the GPT and VMs, I'm getting the 12 CPU/18 GPU/1 TB model for the extra graphics and storage headroom. Best Buy is giving TotalTech members $100 off the top, and since any Apple product you buy gets AppleCare+ at no additional charge, the $179 membership fee more or less pays for itself with this one purchase, at least for the first year.

[Aaron44126]

 

50 minutes ago, saturnotaku said:

With M3 and the announcement of hardware RT and dynamic caching

 

I was paying attention as well...

 

Hardware accelerated ray tracing is cool, but it remains to be seen how it will perform compared to competitors.  (That Myst demo that they showed looked like it was running at 10 FPS.)

Mesh shaders are sort of niche right now but will probably be more and more common in high-end games soon, so good to have that out there.

AV1 hardware video decode?  About time.

 

I'm a little bit bummed since I purchased my system just a few months ago and there is already an upgrade out!  I sort of figured it would be another 3-6 months, and they'd do base M3 first with Pro/Max following some time later.  I wonder if they're going to try to settle into a yearly cycle for "M" series chips and MacBook Pros...  They already have that going for "A" series chips (iPhone CPUs); M3 is clearly related to A17, sharing all of the same new GPU features.

 

But, meh, new features aside, the CPU performance and GPU performance improvements don't seem to be that substantial compared to M2.  It is an iterative improvement.  (They kept making verbal comparison to M1 rather than M2 during the presentation, though they would show M2 numbers on the screen.)  They did bump it to 128GB RAM at the top, but I don't really need that much RAM.  I do really like the "space black" color, though.

 

I'm generally disappointed that there is no SSD option higher than 8TB (which has been the max in a MacBook Pro since 2019).  16 TB might be asking too much still, but they could probably cram in 10 or 12 TB.  Also disappointing that the RAM and storage "upgrade" prices did not drop at all compared to M2 systems.  Those SSDs don't need to cost that much.

 

I played with the order configurator and there are some odd things in there with regards to RAM.  18GB and 36GB RAM options instead of 16GB and 32GB for M3 Pro (192-bit memory bus?).  If you get the low-end M3 Max, you can pick between 36GB and 96GB but nothing in between?  Too little, or too much?  And the 96GB option goes away if you pick the high-end M3 Max, you have to pick between 64GB and 128GB.

 

I also wonder if Apple will support for ray tracing in DX12 games to D3DMetal in the near future.  No word on that yet.

[saturnotaku]

22 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

 I was paying attention as well...

 

The memory thing with the M3 is weird indeed. The prevailing theory is that it has something to do with Apple using three memory chips on those models. You probably also noticed that bandwidth has been reduced to 150 GB/s versus the M2's 200. That's probably another reason why in the presentation they seemed loathe to make a lot of comparisons to the most recent silicon with more than a couple mentions about M1 and Intel. I expect Apple to continue talking about the benefits of moving to M3 over Intel if/when the rest of the product stack gets upgraded as the big-wigs are likely tired of having resources dedicated to x86 compatibility on the software front. It may also be possible that the Air, Mini, Studio, and Pro skip M3 in favor of M4 next year. The last Intel Macs will turn five next year so I wouldn't be surprised to see OS 15 be the final one to support that "legacy" hardware. 

 

As far as RT support, who knows what may be possible, but it would be pretty amusing if we could see, say RTX 3050 mobile-level performance from Apple Silicon running through multiple translation layers.

 

[Aaron44126]

46 minutes ago, saturnotaku said:

It may also be possible that the Air, Mini, Studio, and Pro skip M3 in favor of M4 next year.

 

I'm fully expecting at least MacBook Air to be refreshed with M3 in the early part of next year, that's a popular system and I think they'd want to keep it current.  But, it's not uncommon for them to skip an upgrade for some lines (see: iMac skipping M2).  Also, it is seeming like M4 will just be a smaller refinement over M3, and M5 is the next "big" one (already been in development for some months), so you may well be right here.

[saturnotaku]

2 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

I'm fully expecting at least MacBook Air to be refreshed with M3 in the early part of next year, that's a popular system and I think they'd want to keep it current.  But, it's not uncommon for them to skip an upgrade for some lines (see: iMac skipping M2).  Also, it is seeming like M4 will just be a smaller refinement over M3, and M5 is the next "big" one (already been in development for some months), so you may well be right here.

 

The MBA 15 was released less than 6 months ago, and I get the impression that it's been an out-of-the-park home run for Apple among both consumers and businesses. It wouldn't make a ton of sense for them to refresh it so soon.

[Aaron44126]

21 hours ago, saturnotaku said:

It wouldn't make a ton of sense for them to refresh it so soon.

 

True, but I would have said something similar for the 14"/16" M2 MacBook Pros, which lived on the market for less than 10 months.

 

Really they wouldn't have to do much besides swap in a new logic board with the new chip and leave the rest of the design the same.  I don't think it is that big of a lift.  (But Apple does what Apple does.)

[Bullit]

M3 should be rendering in Blender at level of a 3070-3080 when Blender 4.0 will be released at end of the year. 

 

One of great advantage of Apple is that VRAM is basically a non issue with unified memory. The miserable levels of VRAM that Nvidia puts on their cards will bite them heavily. 

[saturnotaku]

3 hours ago, Bullit said:

One of great advantage of Apple is that VRAM is basically a non issue with unified memory. The miserable levels of VRAM that Nvidia puts on their cards will bite them heavily. 

 

Dynamic caching should make the M3 even better. Well, maybe not "better," but perhaps more versatile?

[kojack]

On 11/7/2023 at 5:40 AM, Bullit said:

M3 should be rendering in Blender at level of a 3070-3080 when Blender 4.0 will be released at end of the year. 

 

One of great advantage of Apple is that VRAM is basically a non issue with unified memory. The miserable levels of VRAM that Nvidia puts on their cards will bite them heavily. 

How so? my 2070 super has 8gb of ram for itself. How is having 8gb JUST for video and say having 16gb unified better?  ram is ram. Apple crows about how their ram works like double the amount of ram on a windows/linux based PC (which it does not btw).  I have 128gb of ram on my board, plus 8gb extra, and when doing certain things I can use both my 2070 super and UHD on my chip at once. You are falling for the Apple marketing spin. 

[Etern4l]

@Bullit Err, what’s the bandwidth of the unified memory, compared to the combined bandwidth of a 3080  VRAM and say DDR5 4800 system RAM.

[Aaron44126]

6 hours ago, kojack said:

How so? my 2070 super has 8gb of ram for itself. How is having 8gb JUST for video and say having 16gb unified better?  ram is ram. Apple crows about how their ram works like double the amount of ram on a windows/linux based PC (which it does not btw).  I have 128gb of ram on my board, plus 8gb extra, and when doing certain things I can use both my 2070 super and UHD on my chip at once. You are falling for the Apple marketing spin. 

First off, Apple’s recent RAM claims of things like 8gb being like a 16gb Windows laptop are indeed ridiculous.

 

But don’t underestimate the potential of the unified memory. It allows for absurd GPU/VRAM utilization on high-end systems that you can’t get on a laptop otherwise. Unusual GPU workloads like simulations, AI model build, or crypto mining could benefit from having 10’s of GBs available to the GPU.