Comment by azalemeth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by azalemeth | Hacker News Reader

I really wish Apple would just sort out their graphics APIs. Proton & wine makes gaming on linux genuinely surprisingly performant: I have enjoyed several AAA games (and am continuing to do so). I really don't know why they do not like Vulkan or don't want to provide a compatibility layer for it. One of the games mentioned is Fallout New Vegas, which apparently gets 15 FPS outdoors, at the lowest graphics quality settings, in a game >10 years old. I've literally just finished that on my linux box, under proton, with the gog copy installing brilliantly under lutris and with a 3rd party higher-resolution texture pack. Apple are really shooting themselves in the foot.

Also, from the article on a call of duty online game:

> Everything felt smooth, works flawlessly in highest settings available, but only few minutes until your account get banned :( SoC power consumption is around 3.5W

I'm not surprised that perhaps many devs naïvely assumed that if you're not running x64, you're a "cheater" [or in a VM, which apparently is often also "cheating"...sigh]. I'd be interested to know how many of the god-awful DRM schemes that BigGames like to run (like Denuvo) take to being emulated in crossover-or-wine-running-under-rosetta. I bet they don't like it!

Well, Apple did sort out their graphics APIs ;)

If anybody (e.g. Valve or Apple) would see the Mac as a viable gaming platform, they would offer an API wrapper solution like Proton (which would emulate DirectX and Win32 APIs on top of macOS APIs). But it's already starting at the hardware, embedded Intel GPUs don't cut it for gaming.

But the 3D API is just one tiny piece when porting games to other platforms, and the importance of cross-platform 3D-APIs is overrated. Game consoles always had their own non-standard 3D-APIs, and this didn't hinder games being created or ported. And OpenGL only was a cross-platform API in theory, in practice every OpenGL implementation had its own peformance and compatibility quirks, and Vulkan apparently isn't much different.

But the root cause is not a technological problem, there simply are not enough people interested in gaming on macOS. If there would be a market, games would come to macOS, with or without Apple's involvement.

> Game consoles always had their own non-standard 3D-APIs, and this didn't hinder games being created or ported.

It did, which is why both Sony and Nintendo made their hardware and API's less special in recent years. (Which doesn't mean they are not special, but less so.).

I mean as far as I now both Playstation 4+ as well as the Switch do support Vulcan. Which is one (of multiple) reasons why so many games where ported to the Switch. (The other, maybe bigger, reason was that Nintendos polices got much better.)

I seriously doubt that Vulkan plays any significant role in getting games onto the PS4 or Switch, simply because there are not many games running exclusively on top of Vulkan. On PC by far most games are rendering through D3D11 and D3D12, with the bulk still using D3D11 because Windows7 is still a thing. In general you use the API that's "most native" on a platform because that usually gets you the best performance and driver quality.

I'm happy to be proven wrong though.

I partially agree with you, the problem is not technical, although using the most famous and portable APIs definitely helps gaming companies porting and making their games available for MacOS or iOS.

But i guess the main 2 problems are:

1) Not enough Mac users which would be significant for a AAA gaming company to port their games on day 1 and get profit.

2) Apple has not taken yet gaming seriously, maybe because they have not seen a viable business model for gaming. I guess here this could change as Apple is slowly putting their feet on it with Apple Arcade (which is definitely not going to bring hardcode gamers), making iOS a good gaming platform (device stability, good GPUs and good support for 3rd party controllers) now its the first time most popular Macs are getting a good GPU. Perhaps also this is one of the reasons why they are blocking Cloud gaming.

> although using the most famous and portable APIs

That would be D3D11 (most famous/used at least) ;) Metal is actually quite similar to D3D11 (or rather a hypothetical D3D11 successor if Mantle wouldn't have happened, which in turn heavily influenced D3D12 and Vulkan). If you have a D3D11 backend in your engine, a Metal backend is fairly easy to derive from this.

> 1) Not enough Mac users which would be significant for a AAA gaming company to port their games on day 1 and get profit.

I am a huge apple portable fan Macs, iPhones, iPads etc. However like a lot of people who casually play video games I also have a Switch and a PC with a nice RTX 2070.

Apple is dead last on my chain of gaming machines. A lot of people I know with Macs also have a console or PC that serves as the gaming machine(s).

I'm probably wrong, but I also imagine there's a good amount of that just use Bootcamp with Windows. Which adds to the Windows players stats over macOS, yeah?

I wonder if M1 could possibly change this since (atm) you can't bootcamp Windows. Not only that, but the m1 iGPU seem way more capable on entry level Macs over Intel's iGPU.

> Game consoles always had their own non-standard 3D-APIs, and this didn't hinder games being created or ported.

Game consoles offered developers benefits in return for that, though. Both technical, deeper hardware integration and finer control, and non-technical, a very large market & various financing offerings (for exclusives in particular)

Apple offers nothing here by contrast. Metal is a fine API on its own merits, but it's not offering the game developer anything but more work at the end of the day. And the market size is a joke for MacOS & games that would compete with consoles.

> But it's already starting at the hardware, embedded Intel GPUs don't cut it for gaming.

Macbooks have had above average GPUs for a long, long time. It hasn't helped with MacOS gaming so far, why would you expect it to now?

> Macbooks have had above average GPUs for a long, long time.

As far as I'm aware by far most portable Macs are equipped with pretty terrible integrated Intel GPUs. What's "above average" there?

The base option on the 16" macbook pro is a AMD Radeon Pro 5300M. Discrete GPUs on the 15" has been standard for I believe many years now. I don't know what the sales breakdown is between the 15" MBP and the 13" & Air, though.

It doesn't help either that the old adage for people looking to game on their mac was to use bootcamp to install windows and forget about running the mac version of the game unless it was 10 years old. The most hard core and devote of mac gamers aren't even using mac OS.

I really don't know why they do not like Vulkan or don't want to provide a compatibility layer for it.

Metal was released before Vulkan existed, and Khronos already has a compatibility layer available (https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK) - I don’t think graphics APIs are the issue here.

Note that Fallout:NV is running via CrossOver, a (commercial) Wine version. This means it runs Intel-Windows binaries via Rosetta on the Mac.

I might be too optimistic but I'm hopeful that Steam can figure out a way to provide Proton-like compatibility to Macs going forward and/or that CrossOver will help here.

It certainly would be a lucrative market for Steam that just opened up. Most games w/ high performance requirements were not playable on entry-level Macs up until now.

They don't like it because allowing users to run in a VM would be amazing for cheaters. A VM provides direct memory access to the game frmo outside the VM and a trivial way to create a new computer if you are banned.

Does apple really care about cheaters in desktop games? That’s something for a games publisher or studio to care about. Especially in paid games cheaters would make apple money because they’d need to purchase new accounts to keep playing.

Apple doesn't care at all, game companies care so they block VMs.

I played through New Vegas on a Mac last year using Porting Kit, so that's an Apple Silicon issue not a Mac or graphics API issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com