Good enough to be used for gaming? Really want Apple to get into that because dealing with Windows sucks.
The GPUs in previous M chips aren’t beating AMD or NVidia’s top offerings on anything except VRAM but you can definitely play games with them. Apple has released their Game Porting Toolkit a couple years ago which is basically like Wine/Proton in Linux and if you’re comfortable with Wine and approximately what a Steam Deck can run then that’s about what you can expect to run on a newer Mac.
Installing Steam or GOG Galaxy with something like Whiskey.app (which leverages the game porting toolkit) opens up a large number of games on macOS. Games that need Windows root kits are probably a pain point, and you’re probably not going to push all those video setting sliders to the far right for Ultra graphics on a 4K screen, but there’s a lot of games that are very playable on macOS and M chips.
Steam Deck-level performance is quite fine, I mainly just want to replay the older FromSoft games and my favorite indies every now and then.
First and foremost, it's just worth checking if your game has a native port: https://store.steampowered.com/macos People might be surprised what's already available.
With Wine syscall and Rosetta x86 code translation, issues do pop up from time to time though, like games that have cutscenes that are encoded as Windows Media Player specific formats, or any other media codecs which aren't immediately available since it's not like games advertise those technology requirements anywhere and you may encounter video stuttering or artifacts since the hardware is obviously dramatically different than what the game developers were originally developing against and there's things happening in the background that an x86 Windows system never does. This isn't stuff that's overly Mac specific since it usually impacts Linux equally but it's a hurdle to jump that you don't have to deal with in native Windows. Like I said, playing Windows games outside of Windows is just a different set of pain points and you have to be able to tolerate it. Some people think it's worth it and some people would rather have higher game availability and keep the pain of Windows. Kudos to Valve with creating a linux based handheld and the Wine and Proton projects for improving this situation dramatically though.
Besides the Game Porting Toolkit (which was originally intended for game developers to create native application bundles that could be put on the App Store), there's also Crossover for Mac that does their own work towards resolving a lot of these issues and they have a compatibility list you can view on their site: https://www.codeweavers.com/ and alternatively, some games run acceptably inside virtualization if you're willing to still deal with Windows in a sandboxed way. Parallels is able to run many games with better compatibility since you're actually running Windows, though last I checked DX12 was a problem.
Maybe with future TB5 support they will include that feature.
Unless you're running bootcamp you're extremely limited by driver support.
Apple has quite impressive hardware (though their GPUs are still not close to high-end discrete GPUs), but they're also fast enough. The problem now is that Apple systematically does not have a culture that respects gaming or is interested in courting gamers. Games also rely on OS stability, but Apple has famously short and severe deprecation periods.
They ocassionally make pushes in that direction, but I think they lack the will to make a concerted effort, and I also think they lack the restraint to not try and force everything through their own payment processors and distribution systems causing sour relations with developers.
https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/news/50947/just-announced-cyber...
Is it just some weird cultural thing? Or is there some kind of genuine technical reason for it, like it would involve some kind of tradeoffs around security or limiting architecture changes or something?
Especially with the M-series chips, it feels like they had the opportunity to make a major gaming push and bring publishers on board... but just nothing, at least with AAA games. They're content with cartoony content in Apple Arcade solely on mobile.
Mac gaming is a nice-to-have; it's possible, there's tools, there's Steam for Mac there's toolkits to port PC games to Mac, there's a games category in the Mac app store, but it isn't a major point in their marketing / development.
But don't claim that Apple doesn't take gaming seriously, gaming for them it's a market worth tens of billions, they're embroiled in a huge lawsuit with Epic about it, etc. Finally, AAA games get ported to mobile as well and once again earn hundreds of millions in revenue (e.g. CoD mobile).
It just feels like they came along so late to really trying that it’s going to be a minute for things to actually happen.
I would love to buy the new Mac Mini and sit it under my TV as a mini console. But it just feels like we’re not quite there yet for that purpose, even though the horse power is there.
In terms of gaming that's only on PC and consoles, I didn't understand Apple's blazé attitude until I discovered this eye-opening fact: there are around 300 million people who are PC and console gamers, and that number is NOT growing. It's stagnant.
Turns out Apple is uninterested by a stagnant market, and dedicates all its gaming effort where growth is: mobile.
I think so. I think no one in apple management has ever played computer games for fun so they simply do not understand what customers would want.
They aren't really the ones that have to.
Gaming platforms don't just arise organically. They require partnership between platform and publishers, organized by the platform and with financial investment by the platform.
glances at the Steam Machine
And how long do they have to fail at that before trying a new approach?
They just don't care about desktop gaming, which is somewhat understandable. While the m-series chips have a GPU, it's about as performant for games as a dedicated GPU from 10-14 years ago (It only needs a fraction of the electricity though, but very few desktop gamers care about that).
The games you can play have to run at silly low resolution (fullHD at most) and rarely even reach 60fps.
They do take gambling seriously.
Why is the Apple TV only focused on passive entertainment?
It is isn't it.
https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/234969/apple-arca...
I get it, you want to leave windows by way of mac. But your options are to either bite the bullet and expend a tiny bit of your professional skill on setting up a machine with linux, or stay on windows for the foreseeable future.
That said, expectations should be kept at a realistic level. Even if the M4 has the fastest embedded GPU (it probably does), it's still an embedded GPU. They aren't going to be topping any absolute performance charts.