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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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 A particular OS release would implement a limited range Vulkan versions (probably just one) which would always be out-of-date.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

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