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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

This is a related tangent, but I haven't seen this addressed anywhere else yet so might as well ask it here. What does Apple silicon mean for the future of gaming on Apple hardware? With the death of bootcamp and the apparent difficulty with emulation, is the only hope for individual developers to update to native support like Blizzard is doing here? And what does the future of GPUs look like? Are there expected to be dedicated GPUs on future Macbook Pros, Mac Pros, and iMacs or are they all expected to be SOCs going forward?

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For Unreal and Unity-based games at least, ARM MacOS will be more or less just another compile target. For less-popular licensed engines or in-house ones, MacOS was never all that popular to begin with, so I think Apple Silicon may actually not represent that big of a change for Mac gaming.

As another comment mentions, there is the iOS to MacOS pipeline, but given that a large proportion of these are already Unity-based, the fact that MacOS now shares an architecture with iOS may prove largely incidental.

Gaming on the Mac was basically dead and will be revived with Apple Silicon, I believe. Even the MacBook Air now has enough power to run modern games smoothly, and more powerful models are to follow. A considerable amount of iOS games are suddenly playable on the new Macs, too. And yes, native support for Apple Silicon and Metal is clearly the way forward.

I just ran Kerbal Space Program on the Air, in addition to being smooth and having no discernible lag. Htop says it's only using half of one core.. and the laptop isn't even heating up.

This is the dream laptop. It's the one product that is 5 years ahead of everyone else, like the iPhone 4.

I don't believe the main problem with gaming on mac was the architecture or their anaemic graphic cards but rather their non-standard mac-only graphics API (metal), their deprecation of OpenGL, spotty support of Vulkan (if any) and removal of 32-bit support (for older games). The first three are not really a problem for big engine makers, as they can afford to implement additional backends but it is an issue for smaller studios and indie makers. 32-bit support is probably going to be less important (unless Rosetta can also translate x86 only code). It's good that they packed a decent graphics subsystem in their new chips but that's only part of the solution.

I believe their main concern is to bring iOS games to macOS rather than bring new games into the platform. Let's be realists here, iOS games bring in the cash. If they can run it in another form factor with potentially better graphics then even more money in the long run.

Metal doesn't get enough hate for how awful and idiosyncratic it is. If you want to remain cross platform and support Metal you're so severely restricted that the best you can hope for is to just special case a bunch of features for non-Apple machines and not support them at all on Mac. It really feels like Apple wanted to kill gaming on Macs entirely. I understand that they want to maintain control over their own graphics stack, but for this to work the stack has to be better than the competition and that's not the case here at all.

Could you go into more detail about how it's idiosyncratic? I'd love to find more information on what it does wrong vs something like vulkan.

For some indication, check out a lot of issue threads for WebGPU (the Rust cross platform graphics library). Many, many features need to be restricted or put behind feature flags due to either lack of Metal support, or Metal having bizarre restrictions compared to other platforms. As a random example, border color is limited to 2 or 3 colors for Metal, and has no restrictions at all for anything else. There are also entire features (like geometry shaders) missing from Metal; for many common usecases you can replicate the functionality with something else, but usually not in a way that easily translates to any of the other APIs (and pretty much nobody on Earth writes games just targeting Macs).

Hence, the easiest thing to do for most games is to just drop Mac support and not worry about it. IMO that's the biggest reason by far why people stopped bothering to port new games to Mac; between not updating OpenGL past 4.1 at best and Metal being so idiosyncratic, it's just not worth it, and since people have learned gaming on Macs sucks (largely because of the outdated and idiosyncratic APIs), most people who want to play games on a Mac have just been installing Windows anyway.

This is all not even to mention that Mac laptops tend to have far too high a resolution for the onboard GPU to perform well for any but the most rudimentary games; hopefully this has been addressed with the M1 batch having a much more powerful GPU. But the issues with Metal remain and will continue to remain until Apple either fixes Metal to make it a more Vulkan-like target, or adds really good Vulkan support.

Unsure but league plays at like 100 FPS through Rosetta - better than intel igpu.

I would expect they'll have an X version chip or future that are even more competitive with discrete laptop GPUs

League of Legends is not a demanding game. It will run at 120fps on a GTX 960 on max settings 1080p. (The 960 is about 1/4 as powerful as the current flagships according to passmark.)

We're talking about a laptop, and it sounds like you're talking about desktop GPUs, unless you meant GTX 960M.

My point is that a very old discrete GPU is capable of running League at very high settings, and therefore that the new M1 chip's capability to run League well doesn't prove much.

In a more relevant benchmark, it looks like the M1 is about 30% better than the GTX 1050 Ti, which was released in Oct 2016. So it's maybe two to three years behind the state of the art in low-power discrete GPUs? I wouldn't be worried about my discrete GPU business if I were AMD or Nvidia, at least not yet.

But the M1 chip isn't competing with discrete graphics, at least yet. The M1 is replacing integrated graphics in these machines. Integrated graphics also trail discrete graphics by years so it isn't really a knock on the M1 that it does too.

That leaves two primary questions. Does the integrated graphics of the M1 beat integrated graphics of Intel and AMD? What does Apple plan to do to compete with discrete graphics in their higher end hardware and will that be a more powerful SOC, discrete graphics hardware from Apple, or something more traditional from AMD?

> But the M1 chip isn't competing with discrete graphics, at least yet.

I understand that. I was responding to a comment that referenced a near future in which the Apple chips would compete with discrete graphics. Observing the distance they have to go is relevant to that speculation.

I'm just not sure the distance between integrated and discrete graphics performance is a better indicator of Apple's hardware capabilities than the differences between Apple, Intel, and AMD integrated graphics. It is a safe assumption that Apple isn't going to release an identical M1 as a competitor for discrete graphics. So why compare this to something in a different product class rather than judge it on how well it achieves the purpose it is designed to achieve?

> I'm just not sure the distance between integrated and discrete graphics performance is a better indicator of Apple's hardware capabilities

It's not a better indicator in any way, except in terms of being more relevant to the comment I was responding to at the top of the thread, which contemplated the possibility that Apple's chips would become competitive with discrete graphics cards in the foreseeable future.

That's pretty impressive, for mobile hardware. Did you test that yourself?

No I've been watching YouTube reviews all day. At 2500x1600 it was going 55-70 FPS.

Esports games are not intensive but the igpu appears to be better than intel Xe- so it's a straight upgrade in terms of YoY upgrades if they stuck with intel CPUs.

The only question mark is how they'll approach dGPU and eGPU performance levels.

Might start to make sense to do "upscaled iOS ports". iOS is lucrative enough that many developers will support it anyway. Adding mouse+keyboard support and gamepad support isn't insane and I believe Apple Arcade games require gamepad support. You won't get the highest end AAA games, but those games usually aren't coming to Mac anyway

>You won't get the highest end AAA games, but those games usually aren't coming to Mac anyway

But even if they didn't come to Mac they were always available through bootcamp or emulation. Is it simply not an option on this new hardware? That seems like an important step back.

I never found Bootcamp nor Parallels/emulation to sufficiently play a modern video game. A $3k mac always underperformed a $500 desktop windows PC in my experience

What does that mean? Bootcamp is just running windows on the machine. You're gaming on an Intel cpu and an AMD gpu. That doesn't change because Apple installed another OS on the system.

Sufficient or not is a weird way to put it.

The GPUs that Apple typically uses are far outclassed by what's available for Windows.

I mean that mac hardware is terrible for video games in general, and that at some $1.5-$3k avg price tag, "Macs" (in the hardware sense) are almost always outclassed by PCs (in the hardware sense) that are less than half their cost.

The OP commented games were "always available through bootcamp or emulation", which is true of a Windows-only game running on your Mac hardware via Bootbamp/Parallels... my point is, Macs provide a sub-par, no good, very little fun experience for anything but the simplest of games.

And before I sound like a typical PC bro, this line of thinking is coming from someone who has exclusively owned about a dozen Macs starting with the iBook Clamshell, and only recently built my first gaming PC during COVID. I'd never try to play a game on a Mac again lol

I suppose that would depend on what you put inside that $3k mac. It's very easy to slap a price tag on something 'wrong' and then complain it doesn't do the right thing ;-)

A PC with $4k worth of PCIe storage but no video output or networking would be very expensive but not very good at games.

A Mac with a reasonable video card (say, an RX580 or better) and a general i5-level CPU would run Windows and most games just fine. Won't be a 144Hz 4k party, but 1440/1080 for recent games on decent settings and at least 60FPS will work. But that's not a lot of difference to any other computer...

Difference would be what you start off with. If you buy any $1000 laptop that only has a CPU-integrated GPU but does have Thunderbolt 3, you can add an eGPU for that GPU power that you need and you'd be good to go.

If you buy a cheaper laptop that happens to have some sort of 1050 in it, it would be cheaper, but it probably won't have Thunderbolt 3 and then you'd be stuck with a GPU that will be a bottleneck faster than your CPU.

The biggest problem I'd see is that most Macs don't come with dedicate GPUs, and when they do it's a midrange AMD or workstation type GPU, neither of which are great for games (regardless of what computer you stick those in). The higher tier AMD GPUs did come to later Macs, but at that point (the 5000 series) it wasn't really all that good. Too bad with the 6000 series we don't know if Apple will even add any third party GPU anymore. Also too bad that they got in a fight with nvidia over their crap QA years ago and never got back together. Could have been great...

If you watch the WWDC keynote that’s literally what they are doing. You can write one set of code that adapts to iPhone/iPad/Mac and use the native sizes and tools for both.

It's gonna be the nVidia GeForce Now train that's currently pulling out of the station.

> What does Apple silicon mean for the future of gaming on Apple hardware?

It is definitely the death of gaming as we know it on PCs.

Blizzard didn't bother porting Overwatch to macOS, their latest engine, and even that game was released in 2016. They ported to the PS4. It's just too small of a market.

Nintendo Switch level games should port fine, many are developed on cross platform engines like Unity that already support Metal on iOS. However Switch games sell for $50+, already higher than PC or macOS titles, so it's usually pretty bad economics - you'd rather the user buy on their Switch than their Mac.

Curious why you think it's the death of pc gaming, unless you just mean Mac gaming

He means to say 'death of PC gaming on a Mac' because some people forget that all computers that are stand-alone for a person to use are "Personal Computers" (and not mainframes which is what the distinction is for).

Some people forget the "I am a PC, I am a Mac" ads.

> some people forget that all computers that are stand-alone for a person to use are "Personal Computers"

If you call a Mac a PC, you'll only confuse your interlocutor. No-one ever refers to Macs as "PC", except to point out that "Macs are 'Personal Computers'".

Over here, we just call them all 'computers'.

"PC" comes from the "IBM PC" which was the first MS/Intel computer. Then clones arrived, also called "IBM PC Compatible" because they were compatible with the IBM PC. Then we ended up calling them simply PC, and that was in comparison to Macs, but also Atari, Amiga, Amstrad etc. computers.

I suspect it was sarcasm. Overwatch is Blizzard's new flagship, and the first game by them to not run on Mac (Hearthstone did). They'll Soon (tm) release Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2, so we'll have to see what they're going to support with that.

Apple should just support valve with proton(wine). This would enable 90% of all Windows games on the Mac.

CrossOver runs on macOS just fine, including Apple Silicon macs.

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