Valve Drops Mac Support for SteamVR Less Than Three Years After WWDC 2017 | Hacker News Reader

Valve Drops Mac Support for SteamVR Less Than Three Years After WWDC 2017

macrumors.com

27 pointstosh9 comments

Gaming on macOS is a joke. They really burned a lot of bridges with developers and customers when they dropped 32-bit support, and refusing to support the next generation graphics API in favor of their own, dumb thing isn't doing them any favors, either. You built this bed, Apple, enjoy laying in it.

Dropping 32 bit support frankly was a good idea and a step in the right direction in not carrying legacy cruft for generations... but Metal just doesn't make much sense. OSX is already a super niche market for gaming anyways and having a completely separate API just didn't garner any favors especially once Vulkan came around.

> Dropping 32 bit support frankly was a good idea

No it wasn't. Apple has the resources to support 32bit apps. Wine is looking at adding support in userspace for mac osx. If it can be supported in userspace they could have added a translation layer themselves if they really couldn't stomach keeping it in the kernel.

They could've just "emulated" it through some VM-like technology. Mac is all no fun and games now, only serious, $5k+ enterprise business...

I have a VR headset, but it hasn't even crossed my mind to check if SteamVR would even work on my Mac.

Apple puts very low-end GPUs in Macs. Most models can't even be upgraded to a GPU that's decent for VR. The base $6000 Mac Pro comes with a $170 GPU! Latest maxed out top-of-the-line MBP has a weaker GPU than the last-gen lower-end GTX 1060.

There was a point where it seemed like Apple was going to throw its support behind eGPUs. Unfortunately it looks like they kinda half-assed it (new OS releases don't even work with modern Nvidia GPUs because Apple won't let them update the drivers)

Mobile GPUs are a sad joke in general. Looking at GPU benchmarking sites shows the Radeon Pro Vega 20 in my MBP as competitive with desktop parts from 2012 or 2013.

I suppose that valve saw a too small userbase for it to be an attractive target for further VR games on macOS? Afaik VR is windows.

I personally applaud Valve for braving to support as much hardware as they do. Even having built their own VR headset, they support a wide variety for their latest software a tacit show of support for the relationship of their customers and the VR ecosystem.

Perhaps this is anticipating Apple's upcoming move to a potentially new micro architecture that's been reported on -- I suppose if Apple thinks they need a software moat, they'll find a place to trench one up.

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