Thus looping back to the start of the story, AS is quite potent and gaming on it is more feasible and we'll see overtime if it's going to stay or not. These devices are not always the cheapest and may cost an arm & leg ), and the majority of buyers are likely owning a macbook (pro) for all their portable computing needs, after that mac mini & iMac. The way I see it "I have a mac and I'd like to game on it, but I'm not buying it for gaming" is the motivation -> a secondary purpose for your device. Now you may be thinking, aren't you hyping it a bit too much? No one's really buying an Apple device for gaming and I'd agree with that. Performance may not always be ideal, but hey that hasn't been the case for most of the time! However, Apple released this tool freely for all Apple developers, which homebrew devs are using it like a proton-layer, familiar for those on linux, allowing you to play most (64-bit) DX11/DX12 without the hassle of going through many loopholes of getting it up an running. Thus bringing a "console-like" developer focus to the platform. Now that's not a lot of course, but in WWDC23 the release of Apple's Game Porting Toolkit, which is a porting tool for developers to ease the time spent on getting a game up and running on MacOS and focus on profiling of cutbacks needed to run the game and spent resources on the porting process alone. In 2023 alone, we've seen the announcement and releases of 13 titles from either small or large gaming studios. However!Īs we're entering the third iteration of apple's ARM processors, there's been quite some change in this space. Thus iPhone has been (and still is) the primary target for any gaming purpose for Apple, especially with the focus on Apple Arcade. In addition the removal of 32-bit support also made quite a large chunk of legacy applications & games incompatible (2019), as not all developers can continuously allocate resources to upkeep the small segment of the gaming demographic and with no bootcamp on ARM silicon, you were left with the small selection of 64-bit games that were left on MacOS when the transition to AS (ARM) started (2020). That process of porting can be cost/work intensive. Metal, which is the proprietary graphics API that apple uses on their OS and mobile devices, also wasn't as ripe for supporting the features developers may require for full compatibility and only few ports (e.g. However you're left at the mercy of the OEM (& apple) providing continuous driver support. Moreover, you'd often be better off playing games through Bootcamp, that allowed you to install windows next to MacOS, which provided not much incentive for developers to release games native on MacOS as you'd have some option. This left your only option to go for a device with a discrete GPUs, which were a lot higher in pricing, making it nonsensical for any secondary gaming purpose. With that switch, the entry level devices (Mac mini & Macbook Air) now have more capable internal GPUs (iGPU) compared to the x86 intel-based devices, whose internal GPUs were not capable of running any of games that were available in that time period. Thus completely unifying a architecture that goes from bottom (iPhone) to top (Mac Pro). With the switch to Apple Silicon (AS), Apple has switched to an ARM architecture for all their laptop, desktop devices. Hi, I'd like to preface that while the use of gaming on a MacOS device is very niche and marginal in the wider gaming space.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |