Hacker News Reader

Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

I think you'd be surprised. I just checked, and my desktop gaming GPU is only 31% faster than that nvidia, and I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro M2 Max.

I bought the laptop and the video card because they are quiet and their price/performance is better than the high end stuff anyway.

I just tried running steam on the macbook, and was very disappointed. My Linux gaming desktop will live on for another few years, I guess.

edit: I think I got the GPU in ~ 2019, though it was released in 2015.

View on HN

Rosetta translation + D3D12OnMetal (which developers aren't allowed to use to publish their games, so you'll have to do it on your own and work with a subpar version) will happily eat that 30% difference. Not to mention the massive changes that drivers bring, where Apple will never either want or be able to do as much work as Nvidia does.

The 30% faster hardware is running Linux. The main reason I'm disappointed with steam on MacOS is that only a third of my library works at all, and that the stuff that does run is hit or miss, performance wise (especially the indie / casual games, which this hardware should laugh at).

Also, another 25% of my library actually was ported to MacOS, but it is 32 bit only, so it won't run on an M2. (Also, typing that sentence was painful.)

I guess if I want to run the vast majority of the MacOS software that I have ever purchased on an M2, my best bet is to install Asahi, and use the Windows ports under proton. Lame.

Steam has mislabeled many of the older Mac games as being incompatible. Several of them will work just fine. It's worth double checking on one of the Mac gaming wikis if you want a particular game.

Have no idea why the mislabeling happened. Maybe Steam is working solely off dates despite many games being 64 bit before the 32 bit cutoff.

> I just tried running steam on the macbook, and was very disappointed. My Linux gaming desktop will live on for another few years, I guess.

I'd like to see more Steam games that work on the Mac. Perhaps this could help.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com