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Comment by mjamesaustin | Hacker News Reader

They reference future models having enough performance to be serious gaming machines, but in my experience the main reason Macs lose out on games is because Apple stops supporting older technologies very quickly, and many games rely on those. A good example is the recent end of 32-bit support, which removed about half my Steam library.

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The games also need to be ported to metal and optimized for apple hardware, which just isn’t worth it. This was especially true when only high end macs had decent gpu’s. Now that even the mini and air have a gpu that can actually play a modern game the economics may change.

I have had good luck with dosbox games though. Many games on gog run fine on mac.

> The games also need to be ported to metal and optimized for apple hardware, which just isn’t worth it.

The Macs now have the same GPU and Graphics API that developers already have to target for iOS devices, where there is a significant market share and amount of revenue in play.

However, the types of games that work well on iOS typically aren't the ones people want to play on "serious gaming machines".

(There are exceptions.)

That doesn't matter at all from the point of view of "is there enough revenue in play that we should port our game engine to iOS and the Mac".

Not all of them. The AAA titles will need this, but there are a lot of games on the market built with Unity and have pretty basic graphics and will run fine on low-end laptops.

All major game engines and VFX packages, already support Metal.

Really wish Mac would support Vulkan. It kinda works with the moltenvk vulkan to metal translation layer but it’s not ideal.

It really doesn’t make sense for MacOS (or iOS) to directly support Vulkan. A particular OS release would implement a limited range Vulkan versions (probably just one) which would always be out-of-date.

Apple would not be able evolve the OS, silicon and Vulkan API in unison (like they do with Metal) because they don’t control the API.

In the end it would be a poor experience for end users.

It would be nice if they supported open source efforts though.

(MS doesn’t maintain the Vulkan API in windows, do they? Similar issues would apply.)

Why exactly? Somehow AMD and Nvidia manage to keep up with the Vulkan releases on multiple platforms with their drivers for their hardware. Should be easier when you control the whole stack.

I don't think they update Metal in past OS releases either. You're lucky to get bug fixes.

> The games also need to be ported to metal and optimized for apple hardware

The games or the game engines?

If Apple gave a bunch of money to port Unreal, Unit, etc, would that help the situation?

They both already run on Metal

Unless they want to make macs 3x thicker and throw out battery life it won't happen. People already don't want to develop games for linux, even with the same hardware as on PC, much less try to port to apples special APU's.

The power and size required for "serious gaming" GPU's on mobile is far too significant to fit into a mac size at this time. The term "gaming laptop" is a meme - by the time you've spent $2000 on a gaming laptop you've just bought a jet engine the shape of a brick that does half the work of a desktop at double the price and is terrible for productivity outside of specific use cases. (Like presenting 3d renders or something)

I suppose you could do it if apple were to support proton, and if amd/Nvidia were to standardize their external GPU implementations such that you can just plug in your egpu and have at it. But afaik they're very expensive and use case fitted.

Apple could do very, very, very well if they targeted the nintendo switch level of 'serious' gaming. And there are many very good games for that segment. They also have all the kids already with iPads & Roblox. There are way more iPads & macbooks out there than there are nintendo switches, and if apple actually made a set of dedicated serious gaming hardware & efforts for the platform they would wipe nintendo on the floor.

TBH the macbook air would make a better switch than the switch as far as multiplayer portability goes. The switch screen is too small to play something like smash bros on it with friends, and the 'travel dock' solutions are too clunky IMO.

> There are way more iPads & macbooks out there than there are nintendo switches, and if apple actually made a set of dedicated serious gaming hardware & efforts for the platform they would wipe nintendo on the floor.

I really doubt it, Apple's model of constant updates requiring constant developer upkeep is incompatible with single purchase games. Only exploitative games as a service with recurring revenue can thrive on a model of endless upkeep. Its a big reason (besides Nintendo's first party quality, an attribute Apple has not demonstrated it is capable of) why the App store is defined by low quality p2w service games.

Your view of gaming laptops is a couple of years out of date. There are plenty of capable gaming laptops now with slim profiles and while battery life is still not their forte, that's only when they are actually gaming which isn't usually something you engage in without at least being relatively close to an outlet.

This used to be true but it doesn't reflect reality. Yes if you want to play the latest and greatest games at 4k you do need a gaming laptop. But a lot of games coming out nowadays work pretty good on even Intel iGPUs at full hd medium graphics.

I'd wager you could easily game on an M1 if the game has support and you are willing to make some graphics concessions.

Its overkill for microsoft word, but its right in line with workstation applications - engineering,programming,content creation, etc all need beefy CPUs and GPUs. They're not really niche. Workstation laptops do sell quite a bit. Gaming laptops overlap with them.

On the other end - that's why it can do hardware that has this kind of battery life - it can freely drop older technologies and aggressively optimize for specific hardware.

My 2019 Intel MacBook Pro can run AAA games really well via Bootcamp. My Bootcamp partition runs windows faster and more stable than any of my windows machines.

Very quickly being a 10+ year period after 64bit was made standard. MacOS was never good for gaming, no point keeping dead tech on life support for literally decades if it isn't bringing much value.

The future of gaming on mac will probably be Apple Arcade and streaming services.

> A good example is the recent end of 32-bit support, which removed about half my Steam library.

But isn't that good thing for game companies? They don't have to compete with those old games anymore.

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