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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Apple's continued focus on gaming image quality is weird (ray tracing?), since despite Apple Arcade the mobile market still is still dominated by freemium games with simple graphics / lower graphical requirements.

There are precisely two freemium games that take advantage of the power of the Apple Silicon chips: Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, which were coincidently the two released games highlighted. (it may be interesting to see what Ubisoft and Capcom put out but the I suspect they'll price their games too high)

It bodes well for a M3 Pro chip for the next MacBook Pros, though.

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> Apple's continued focus on gaming image quality is weird (ray tracing?), since despite Apple Arcade the mobile market still is still dominated by freemium games with simple graphics / lower graphical requirements.

They use the same GPU core design from handheld to desktop, so the improvement will apply everywhere as chips are updated.

I think their strategy is that iOS makes too much money for gaming companies to ignore, which means those companies are going to have an easy time reworking iOS games to target a mouse/keyboard/gamepad UI on Macs, since the two existing platforms (and even their upcoming AR/VR platform) have common APIs and CPU/GPU cores.

It also can improve DX and make for easier ports downstream. If the new Assassin's Creed uses some ray tracing on their console version, they use the same technique on the iPhone.

The M3 chip is rumored to also use the 3nm process, so that's expected.

It's a way to increase profits in an area of R&D that's required for the AR side of things.

Gaming is an easily marketable profit funnel that directly relates with all the necessary advancements needed to pursue the Vision Pro/Visual Compute/LLM side of things. In my opinion, anyway.

Perhaps the improvements also benefit their AR/VR products? Could be a longer term play at hand.

This was my first thought too, Apple always plays the long game and that's why people keep saying "no innovation" after every single keynote :D

Stuff that was added today will pay of in 3-4 years after it has trickled down to enough users. Like the spatial camera, now it's a curiosity on the top-end model, but in 5 years it might be a standard feature in phones with great synergy with the Apple Vision non-pro model they just happen to release when there are enough devices to produce content for it.

The second you can have competing app stores I see Steam opening shop and mobile gaming blowing up.

Interesting to think about how many pieces are almost in place for this. The two big players in game engines have had a huge iOS presence for years, just for a different segment of the gaming market; PC game developers have had a few years now to optimize titles for the constraints of the Steam Deck; Apple's game porting toolkit was just announced this past WWDC…

If Valve gets the opportunity to gain a foothold on iOS, the landscape could change very quickly.

Yep, overnight, indie games will have a new platform with millions of users hungry for content. I see SO many people on trains killing time playing mobile "games". I can imagine local multiplayer gaming becoming a thing.

Sometimes directions that don't make sense from a technical or market point of view are made with something much further in the future in mind. This could be the case here.

VisionPro

I guess they need such hardware for the Apple Vision Pro, and are working with several heavily NDA-ed companies to get software out that uses it when that launches.

This is like Spatial Audio. So many things have been built and rolled out in support of Vision Pro. Obviously it'll be the A17 there too.

Hint: the raytracing GPU engines rely on general purpose GPU compute.

It does raytracing because it has raw power. What you use this power for is another story. It can easily augment the neural engine for example.

> Apple's continued focus on gaming image quality is weird (ray tracing?)

Guessing it’s important for an eventual vision pro integration

candy crush with ray tracing :)

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