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