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Comment by senttoschool | Hacker News Reader

>Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?

iOS gaming is the biggest and most profitable in the world. In fact, iOS is bigger than PS5, Xbox, and PC gaming.

iOS uses Metal. Apple Silicon is mostly just a scaled up iPhone SoC. Macs basically get most things funded by iOS.

The Game Porting Toolkit is the first Mac-only gaming tool Apple made in a long time. It shows that Apple wants AAA games on Macs.

>But then Apple doesn't ship devices with actually powerful GPUs, so it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise.

But Apple does ship powerful GPUs. In fact, the M2 Max is probably the most or second most powerful GPU on laptops. But games aren't optimized for Metal nor ARM, so they run slower than Nvidia laptop GPUs.

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> It shows that Apple wants AAA games on Macs.

Why do you think that ? I am asking as someone who is working in gamedev.

Game industry got burned by some big company recently when multi year efforts were spent porting 3d stacks and the target platform got axed.

>Why do you think that ? I am asking as someone who is working in gamedev.

They built Game Porting Toolkit.

The toolkit is not part of Apple platform apparently. It is a development tool that can be used to evaluate porting no more no less. I see no changes in the platform itself.

Including things in the platform is a double-edged sword; the platform has different compatibility policy from windows, and old games typically do not get updated with mandated platform changes (such as a requirement for 64-bit).

Swift developer were upset by concurrency because the language’s deep integration with the platform meant the best features were (for a while) only accessible for apps targeting the latest platform versions exclusively.

Some hypothetical reasons:

1. Playing games is one of the reasons to prefer a Windows laptop instead of a Mac. 2. The AR/VR headsets will need games to be successful, so they need to be more attractive to the gaming industry. 3. iPads are more powerful now. They support game controllers very well, and you can plug it into a big screen to play. However, most of the iPad games (except Divinity Original Sin 2) are scaled versions of iPhone games... game studios are not interested in porting games to the iPad.

While the porting kit announcement is about Macs, I think that the strategy is to make the whole Apple Silicon platform attractive for gaming.

Pretty spot on and exactly what I would have wrote.

Microtransaction ridden mobile gacha games where Apple takes 30% aren't exactly the target when you translate D3D12 to Metal for your desktop platform where Apple takes nothing. In practice, it is doomed to be a solution that plays the games you bought on steam 5 years ago, or run games like cyberpunk on medium 900p on your multiple-thousand dollar machine.

Apple gaming will not take off until game devs target Apple's devices, and Apple burned those bridges a long time ago.

> But Apple does ship powerful GPUs. In fact, the M2 Max is probably the most or second most powerful GPU on laptops. But games aren't optimized for Metal nor ARM, so they run slower than Nvidia laptop GPUs.

The most powerful iGPU likely. It still won't come anywhere close to high-end dedicated laptop GPUs in the vast majority of benchmarks regardless of how much optimization you throw at it - that's just falling for marketing / hype.

>The most powerful iGPU likely. It still won't come anywhere close to high-end dedicated laptop GPUs in the vast majority of benchmarks regardless of how much optimization you throw at it - that's just falling for marketing / hype.

In applications that actually use Metal natively, Apple Silicon GPUs do compare favorably to Nvidia laptop GPUs while using drastically less power.

So no. It isn't just hype/marketing.

Even if you look at the raw technical specs of the M2 Max GPU, it's comparable to Nvidia laptop GPUs - with the exception of ray tracing.

>In applications that actually use Metal natively, Apple Silicon GPUs do compare favorably to Nvidia laptop GPUs while using drastically less power.

Is that really the case? I'm not being facetious here, I'd really like to see more useful datapoints. There aren't many benchmark comparisons out there that strive for actual useful comparison, especially outside synthetic stuff with questionable applicability like 3dMark.

And for the "drastically less power" claim...it really doesn't help that most benchmarks are with decked-out "Gamer" machines using the highest available TDP configuration, despite most GPUs having their sweet spot significantly below - especially Ada Lovelace seem to scale down really well (from what I've gathered, still 60-70% performance at 60W compared to 150W with 4080 Mobile, for example).

>Even if you look at the raw technical specs of the M2 Max GPU, it's comparable to Nvidia laptop GPUs - with the exception of ray tracing.

The specs put it roughly between GA106-GA104/AD107-AD106 respectively, and I'd expect it to land there in the general, adequately optimized case.

> Is that really the case? I'm not being facetious here, I'd really like to see more useful datapoints. There aren't many benchmark comparisons out there that strive for actual useful comparison, especially outside synthetic stuff with questionable applicability like 3dMark.

Yeah, on synthetic benchmarks a higher-end MacBook Pro GPU compares favorably with recent Nvidia laptop cards (say, 4070 or so). But in games that drops off dramatically ... more like a 3050 or 3060 at best.

M2 Max is very impressive given its power consumption, but it's not powerfull as in RTX 30 or 40 powerfull.

> iOS gaming is the biggest and most profitable in the world. In fact, iOS is bigger than PS5, Xbox, and PC gaming.

Cos of micro transactions. Apple doesn’t stand to profit from other peoples games like Diablo 4 as it’s not the gate keeper for transactions.

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