Hacker News Reader

Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

Why does no one bother talking about eGPU behaviour with mac native games? Believe it or not, there are a few.

I'm starting to get "this will stop working soon" messages on a lot of my Mac games. I assume because of the 32bit deprecation. Expecting to lose 50-75% of my library soonish, maybe more. Of the ~60% of my total library that worked on Mac to begin with.

MacOS was surprisingly good as a gaming OS, so far as game selection, but it's about to go back to the "we have... Breakout! and, uh, Super Breakout!" olden days, it seems.

While there are definitely games that will be lost when deprecating 32bit, I think it's harsh to say that we are going back to the olden days.

If you look at the top sellers on Steam that have Mac support you'll see a very large library of great games that I don't think anyone would have guessed would be supported on Mac 5-10 years ago.

https://store.steampowered.com/macos#p=0&tab=TopSellers

If anything I think Mac support for games is on the rise and will only continue to grow.

How many of them are 64-bit ready? How many that aren't are likely to ever get recompiled for 64-bit? I'd bet that pretty much nothing but games currently getting regular updates are going to make the jump.

Virtually of them are 64-bit ready. In fact they require a 64-bit OS, also on Windows. "Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system"

Just wait for when Apple removes OpenGL. Probably 90% or more of existing games will break unless their middleware can be recompiled for 64bit+metal.

Maybe something like lutris will emerge on Mac.

The middleware that matters has supported Metal for about two years now.

Removing OpenGL isn't far away, as one of WWDC 2019 talks was exactly how to migrate to Metal from OpenGL, while all Apple frameworks now use Metal by default, although some of them still offer the old OpenGL support as fallback.

Something else worth mentioning is how most major game engines and several game vendors have had native Metal support for some time now.

This mostly benefits new games. If you want to update to (for example) Metal-compatible Unity, that probably means updating to the latest release, and bumping forward from 2017 Unity to 2019 Unity often breaks games. It's a common problem for indie developers who have to upgrade every few years since Apple loves breaking old games.

Middleware might have Metal support but not be used by the game nor tested. And not everyone is going to redo testing and QA on niche backend.

iOS gaming is bigger than desktop Linux....

and smaller than other platforms for the users of such middleware - and due to physical and power differences isn't usually running the same game but a modified one. A lot of porting to Mac depended on OpenGL being an API that you could start debugging on other platforms as well.

Especially in certain genres. For example, in "builder"/4X games, Civ 6, Tropico 6, Hearts of Iron IV, Cities: Skylines, Don't Starve, and Parkitect all have native Mac versions, and that's a substantial chunk out of the Steam top selling charts for the Simulation tag.

Factorio is on the Mac and now I can't get any work done.

I just upgraded from a 2014 MBPr to a 2019 MBP. I didn't pay for the GPU before, and playing Civ V hurt. Civ VI was impossible. This time, I got the Vega 20, and I am not disappointed. Both games run great.

Was playing Dota 2 with egpu rx580 for a year now. Works really nice on macOS

Probably because it's the wrong tool for the job. If you want to play games, a Mac is easily one of the worst ways to do that.

The eGPU method of bolting functionality onto a platform which doesn't want it is only neat on a technical level at best. It is essentially the world's biggest dongle.

Not if you're bored to tears of AAA games. Plenty of nice indies available cross platform. And for benchmarking etc I see Aspyr has ported a Battlefield of Honor of Duty title...

Does proton work on mac? I have been using it on linux for loads of AAA games like skyrim and age of empires and it has worked almost perfect.

I said they're boring, I didn't complain that I can't play them :)

MacOS support was removed back in 2018.

Heh, isn’t that a tiny bit black and white? I manage to enjoy games on macos anyway. :)

For me, it's a dongle that does exactly what I want: max graphics power at home for games, less weight and better battery life when out and about for writing and light browsing.

The only reason I don't have an eGPU yet is that most of the market still seems to be making weird compromise-driven design decisions, like sharing a single Thunderbolt controller between the card and any added USB ports.

Won’t disagree with the “wrong tool” characterization, but there are many situations where using the right tool (a dedicated windows pc or game console) comes with many other problematic side effects.

I do all of my gaming on a Mac with an eGPU and find it convenient and practical for my needs. It is much better (for my use case and constraints) than my previous solutions of hackintoshes, dedicated windows PCs.

A dedicated windows pc is a pain. I have separate windows installs but rebooting to win to play a game is also a huge disruption since all my other stuff is on Mac OS.

Thus, I've ignored games that don't run on Mac OS for a while. In spite of buying one or three on sales.

I actually feel bad about never finishing Witcher 3... ;)

Have you tried running a Windows VM under macOS with the GPU passed through?

I don't think there's any way to do this on macOS right now.

Oof - I left it unfinished for more than a year. Finally got around to picking it up a little, maybe a month ago, and got completely hooked until I finished it + DLCs. It was a true gaming delight - the DLCs are amazing as well, and, as a whole, it's easily the best game of all times for me - and I believe I played almost every significant RPG ever...I found it so much more worth my time than movies or playing anything else.

It really is an exceptional game. It took me three years to finish it. It almost felt that I avoided playing it sometimes incase it ended.

Now we’ve the Netflix series to look forward to and Cyberpunk 2077 from CDPR.

I'm playing through Witcher 3 for the second time... on a PS4 Pro. For $400, it's an AWESOME and HASSLE-FREE gaming experience. (Based on my experience, and what I've heard announced, the PS5 will be a day-1 purchase for me.)

Sure, it won't look QUITE as nice as running on the $8,500 rig my son now uses for Fortnite and Minecraft, but it still looks GOOD. AND you don't get surprised by Windows 10 random breakages and forced updates. AND you don't have to put up with needing to register accounts to download your mouse, keyboard, and video drivers.

Whatever bad things can be said about gaming on a Mac, I'm DONE with gaming on Windows. No mods? Whatever. No problems.

8500 for minecraft? I play that on my 13" mbpro with the integrated graphics decelerator...

The original purchaser paid that. Lightning hit it. I replaced the mobo, and 3 of the 4 hard drives. I've had it for 10 years, upgraded to an SSD, and upgraded the video card 3 times. I played on it for years. It's now my kid's box. My point is that this all Windows is useful for, for me, now.

> The eGPU method of bolting functionality onto a platform which doesn't want it is only neat on a technical level at best.

It's neat on every level. To quote the article:

> "…you are now able to take a top-of-the-line gaming GPU, seat it inside an external box, plug that box into your computer, and—using a single high-bandwidth cable—push the necessary instructions to render 4K games at 60 frames per second on the card before (over the very same cable!) pushing those frames back to your notebook's built-in monitor without introducing any perceptible latency."

I know God intended for us to use PCI cards by opening up cases and inserting them into slots on a motherboard, but it's incredibly cool to be able to just plug one in like a USB device.

It is even cooler when one considers how much those eGPU enclosures cost, never mind lack of nVidia support on those.

But "just plugging in one USB device" wasn't even what happened in this post. The amount of steps described inside literally were 10x what it takes to just build a PC, boot it, install games and play ️

Huh? There were two steps to get macOS working.

  1) Put GPU in enclosure
  2) Plug Thunderbolt 3 cable into enclosure and MBP

Perhaps you’re referring to the novel written on how to make BootCamp Windows work with the eGPU?

...all of which is because the drivers/config are proprietary

If you wanted to play games on a macbook it probably makes more sense to stream them from a desktop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com