> If so this will be a smooth transition.
That is extremely unlikely.
Anything involving gaming is unlikely to run at even 50% of it's performance.
It is going to be an extremely, extremely rough transition.
That is extremely unlikely.
Anything involving gaming is unlikely to run at even 50% of it's performance.
It is going to be an extremely, extremely rough transition.
I use Logic to make music. Many of te plugins run on one core, and can take up 100% of it. If performance via emulation is around 50%, that means a lot of drop-outs in the sound, and basically an unworkable situation. Been there, seen it, don't want to go throug it again.
The bigger plugin makers will probably port their products, but it's going to cost the user; the smaller ones may simply give up macOS completely.
On the other hand DAWs are more complete in the box now than ever so this is probably less of an obstacle to switching from the users' point of view than it would have been 5 years ago.
asm: AVX2 version of saoCuStatsE3, (136881c -> 45126c)
~/x265> find source -name '*.cpp' | xargs cat | wc -l
95358
~/x265> find source -name '*.asm' | xargs cat | wc -l
168690
~/x265> find source/common/arm -name '*.S' | xargs cat | wc -l
11014
I've been involved in more than one platform transition, and there are always problems. Plugins are complex.
The writing has been on the wall though - Catalina with all its dropped frameworks & notarization already pushed some developers to give up on the Mac (or tell their customers to just stay on Mojave). Loads of Waves users were unhappy having to upgrade to v11 for Catalina support, and won't be happy paying yet again for Mac ARM support.
Come join us on the dark side. Plenty of us music people already switched from Mac to Windows. Even Linux audio seems to have come a long way, with Bitwig, Reaper, Renoise all supporting Linux now, and even plugin devs like u-he.
Other recent more desktop like games are probably using a big game engine like Unity/Unreal with Metal support and probably also only need a recompile. And older games which are less likely to be recompiled can likely run perfectly fine even at 50% performance on a new ARM MacBook which is very likely way faster than the latest non pro intel MacBooks.
Lol. That isn't true, in any way. There is virtually no commonality.
> Other recent more desktop like games are probably using a big game engine like Unity/Unreal with Metal support and probably also only need a recompile.
Do you really think that's how game engine support works? Heck, if that was remotely the case why does Metal get so little support with titles even on x86?
> And older games which are less likely to be recompiled can likely run perfectly fine even at 50% performance on a new ARM MacBook which is very likely way faster than the latest non pro intel MacBooks.
Any game with graphics performance is not going to run at 50% performance through an emulator. If it's done very well it might run at 20%, much more likely 10%. A "way" faster ARM MacBook isn't going to run five times faster than the Intel equivalent. Different thermal windows aren't magic. A 10% performance improvement is unlikely.
There is a huge gap in gameplay, complexity and whatnot between desktop/laptop/console games to those in phones.
Apple's consideration about gaming will be "we have this massive catalogue of titles customers can play already here that we've been marketing, investing in, and pushing for years (and which get us a nice 30% cut of profits...)"
> huge gap in gameplay, complexity and whatnot between desktop/laptop/console games to those in phones
I made no judgement on that, simply that Apple's rationale for gaming is going to be based on the millions of ARM optimised titles they already have ready for the jump.
The mobile gaming market is a lot bigger than the desktop gaming market for Apple - expecting that to not have an out-weighted influence on their decision making is absurd.
The answer is that they're not the right types of title for the Mac demographic, and that the business model isn't there to justify the porting costs (and moving to ARM does very little reduce those, which are mostly UX related).
There are games that run on OS X , but even for me as a relatively hardcore OS X type, I go sit down at my Windows 10 desktop machine when I want to game.
Many users live mostly in the browser, anyways. Photos, Pages, Numbers and Keynote will be native. If they convince Dropbox and Microsoft to have native apps, support iOS apps better than they do now (that should cover casual gaming), and make it cheaper than the ‘equivalent’ x64 one, I think they would have a product.