As John Siracusa discussed on this week's ATP[0], it's incredible how much effort Apple puts into this considering the result. Apple built it's own little parallel gaming stack world that works really well on their hardware and the hardware is also amazing for the power envelopes it is wrapped in.
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. And Apple also doesn't know how to keep relationships with the AAA developers, unlike Microsoft and other platform owners.
Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?
I think the on stage demo of the 4 year old Death Stranding running poorly on the newest Macs says it all.
> it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise
I don't think Apple is chasing the "dedicated gaming machine" crowd here. They want casual gamers to be able to load up a couple of games on the machine they're buying for non-gaming reasons. I'm exactly one of those people: I rarely play video games these days but when the pandemic hit I ended up installing Boot Camp to play COD:Warzone with friends. It was great (it performed... okay). I've since upgraded to a Silicon-based Mac so the door has closed on that. This toolkit is the means to reopen it. I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase.
> And Apple also doesn't know how to keep relationships with the AAA developers
The App Store would beg to differ. I agree that historically they haven't been great at relationships with game developers but they're clearly able to maintain relationships with third party developers when they have the incentive.
Mobile gaming and PC gaming are somewhat different markets. In particular, mobile game development companies don't have any choice but to work with Apple and Google, whereas AAA PC gaming companies have another outlet already.
I like Apple and I like their products but I think if you talk to any sizable mobile developer they'd be able to tell you stories about the difficulties of working with Apple.
Most of the "sizable" mobile developers are entangled in the PC/Console game developers if in no other place than on the broad sheet with one generating revenue to pay for the increasingly expensive other. King is a part of Activision Blizzard (and a part of the pending sale to Microsoft). Zynga is a part of Take-Two (Rockstar/2K). Riot is obviously Riot. A half-dozen others are arms of Tencent in one way or another, who in turn is heavily invested in Funcom and Epic and Riot and From Software and less invested but still invested in plenty more like Ubisoft. NetEase is a mobile developer and publisher that also develops (but so far generally doesn't publish) PC and console games and has been buying studios looking to deepen that.
The list goes on; everything videogames is deeply entangled financially. Therefore, the markets must be deeply entangled, too.
Sure. But it’s about the distribution platform, not the game company financials. Selling games that must be distributed on specific app stores is very different than selling games which are distributed through multiple channels; in the former case, your distributor has a much stronger effect on your ability to make money.
I have to wonder if that’s because a lot of the hot mobile gaming companies flew too close to the sun, could not maintain their explosive growth even as they pursued F2P microtransactions hell policies, and ended up getting bought by said PC/console game developers.
My theory reverses your theory's cause and effect: King was a reverse merger that was very nearly a takeover of Activision Blizzard at the time. Zynga was thought to be the same for Take-Two (which at the time was particularly bloodied by bankruptcy-related issues and in a position to be eaten). The EA and Popcap merger is another one that was questionably a reverse merger/near takeover, especially in the way it shook up the executive board at the time. (I forgot about Popcap in the above summary because as a brand to themselves they've quietly sort of disappeared from modern mobile trends, but their logo still often shows up in EA presentations.)
In general, "lowly" mobile gaming still has more active players spending more real-world money at any given time. It's very hard not looking at the bottom lines of some of these companies, especially today's weird Activision Blizzard and not see "the tail wagging the dog" and mobile games effectively sponsoring and/or subsidizing development costs on every other form factor of videogame. The biggest exceptions seem to be Sony and Microsoft themselves, and Microsoft dabbled in mobile gaming over the years, has a big mobile gaming contractor in Arkadium (using the Microsoft brand for Solitaire and Minesweeper, among others, and generating some revenue), and does own one of the largest mobile games of all time (Minecraft) though people often don't think of it as such.
I think it also shows up in executive leadership and how F2P microtransactions hell has been infesting "AAA" and "AA" PC/console development for years now.
From my outside perspective of the industry: "Mobile games" won. PC/console games are the weird, "too expensive" afterthought for most of the videogame industry, subsidized by and beholden to the mobile games. The "gamer culture" that doesn't see most of the mobile games space as interesting or important and doesn't see mobile game players as "gamers" (or worse sees them only as "filthy casuals") is the minority out of touch with market realities.
Admittedly, that's a somewhat extreme perspective and there are plenty of exceptions and gray area and further complications. But whether or not you agree with that perspective, my earlier point remains that overall mobile games and PC/console games are inextricably linked by market forces and treating them as separate markets, and especially treating the mobile games market as somehow inferior, misses a lot of the forest.
(That [currently] Cold War between Apple and Epic has very real stakes, including for PC/consoles, and isn't just a silly "mobile gaming" problem.)
> if you talk to any sizable mobile developer they'd be able to tell you stories about the difficulties of working with Apple
If you're a sizable game developer used to working with Sony or Nintendo, how much harder is it to work with Apple?
For pure mobile devs, how much harder is it to work with Apple vs. Google, and why? If it isn't worth it, why bother? Android seems to have larger market share. How much higher are Apple's platform fees vs. Google's?
My experience is somewhat dated so I can’t say if this is still the truth, but Apple used to refuse to tell the very large company I worked at whether or not their new game would be featured before the featuring page was updated. Getting onto the featured page was critical for initial success. And you just didn’t know what to plan for.
I don't think fees are a viable argument anymore. At least not at face value. Last I looked, Google, Apple and Valve all take 30% cuts. I believe Nintendo does too. Unless there are some backroom sweet heart deals at least with the major studios.
Well I’m not sure I’d draw a meaningful difference between Xbox and PC in this context, but at best you’d then just have two channels: Sony and Microsoft (Xbox/PC) so it’s no different than Apple and Google.
But specifically for computer channels there’s effectively just one: Windows PC.
>This toolkit is the means to reopen it. I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase.
I think there's a segment of Mac users who own Windows machines exclusively for gaming. I think the value in these capabilities isn't that people will buy Apple Silicon machine primarily as gaming machines, I think the value is in enabling someone in the Apple ecosystem who plays games occasionally to opt-out of owning a Windows machine.
Yeah, I would be thrilled if this eventually enabled even 50% of my existing Steam library to work on my M1 Mac. If we get a few new releases to be Mac native, that’s just icing on the cake.
But I don't think those who pulled the trigger on buying a whole PC in addition to Mac just to game are the audience here: those people clearly value PC gaming a lot, spending that kind of money and going through that much trouble having the necessary setup at home, taking space and time to build and maintain. Those who care that much won't be satisfied with the state of Mac gaming and continue owning those PCs.
It's for those who would like to play on Mac but currently don't play at all on anything because games they'd like to play don't work on the only performance computing device they have - that Mac.
The second category of people I'd like to add are those who were really on a fence between getting a Mac and a PC (probably laptop at this point, as laptops are sufficiently similar for such a fence to be realistic, desktop PC and desktop Mac are very different machines in comparison), could have gone either way, but would prefer a Mac slightly, but also wanted to play games - not enough to own 2 computers, but enough to begrudgingly choose a PC over a Mac just for that reason.
Those folks are likely to buy a Mac instead next time they buy a new computer, which is probably going to be years from now, for some - years from the point in time when gaming on Mac because actually accessible and good, not immediately on spot.
Hi, actual mac gamer here, I use Geforce Now to play games.
Got myself a founders edition account and while I would have liked to have access to all my weird little indie games, the major games I play is on it OldWorld, Generation Zero, Stellaris, Timberborn, Elite Dangerous, etc..
Apple is never going to be taken seriously by the PC gaming industry, there is to much old wounds from being burned by Apple. So the next best thing as a MAc Gamer is to go with a streaming game service and run parallells for weird little indie games.
the only reason they are opening up for gaming on the Mac platform now is the Apple Vision system.
There is no VR games for mac, VR Chat is not for mac.
To get Vision any traction they need to have Entertainment on it.
Or Porn. But Apple is staunchly anti-Porn.
But we all know that their new VR movie recording system is going to be used for porn more so than birthday parties.
"I think there's a segment of Mac users who own Windows machines exclusively for gaming. I think the value in these capabilities isn't that people will buy Apple Silicon machine primarily as gaming machines, I think the value is in enabling someone in the Apple ecosystem who plays games occasionally to opt-out of owning a Windows machine."
Although, as a casual gamer, I'd like to be able to run the games that I bought in the Apple App Store on my Mac. (e.g. "DeathSpank", a fun spoof of action RPGs, is 32-bit, so it's now unplayable.)
I've used crossover to play Skyrim on my M1 mac (and they just sent me an email saying Apple leveraged crossover code for their porting toolkit), so there might have been an option prior to this - if the performance is good enough for your game.
If you do want crossover, get a free trial, but wait for a discount. I think they discount around 30-40% near the end of the trial and during special sales.
> I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase.
Coincidentally you are in the market every couple of years for new Apple hardware because of planned obsolescence. Why? Because Apple designs proprietary metal that they are unwilling / unable to support every few years because they instead develop new hardware that completely breaks backwards compatibility. Then release updates to sandbag your older hardware when you still refuse to upgrade.
I just think it's funny that you'll buy three highly proprietary Mac computers every three years but you won't buy one industry standardized PC that does it all and can be upgraded. And Apple banks on you doing that and takes you to the cleaners every chance they can. And you still bag on PC's citing the economical sensibility of Apple.
Every couple of years? My MacBooks typically last a lot longer than that. I know some people do chase the latest releases but in my experience MacBooks remain plenty usable for years after purchase.
I won’t buy an industry standardized PC that can be upgraded because I need a laptop. PC laptops aren’t a whole lot more upgradable than Apple ones, it just comes with the territory.
> And you still bag on PCs
The defensiveness here is unwarranted. At no point did I “bag on” PCs. I simply stated that I am not in the market to buy a standalone PC just for playing games.
I really can’t understand this argument. Apple has the least planned obsolescence of any major manufacturer available.
The only upgradeable laptop you can buy is the Framework, which is more expensive than a baseline MBP. It also didn’t exist until a few years ago, so we don’t know if it has 10 years of longevity. What I do know is that my 2015 MBP still has hours of battery life even after being used daily for many years.
As far as software, 2017 MBPs can download Ventura, which will be supported until 2025, which seems like a long time to me.
The vast majority of PC laptops let you upgrade at least the SSD. Usually the WiFi card is socketed too and can be swapped out. And it's really not THAT hard to find laptops that still have socketed RAM if you care to.
Had you bought a ThinkPad T450 instead of your 2015 MBP, you could have upgraded the RAM, upgraded the SSD with a standard M.2 NVMe drive instead of having to hunt for a compatible one with an adapter (don't worry Apple closed that loophole in 2016, no more upgrades at all), easily replaced the battery if need be and still be running Windows 10 which is supported to at least 2025.
Apple's support is better on iOS devices than the incredibly low bar set by Android, but in the computer space they are incredibly unpredictable (will this model be supported 5 or 10 years? Who knows!) and not particularly good.
I suspect we might have to agree to disagree here, but the T450 and 2015 MBP make very different tradeoffs. I might be looking at the wrong model, but I see a 1600x900 screen (while my MBP had a 2560x1600 screen), and (admittedly high quality) plastic case vs aluminum. Immediately before the MBP I owned a Dell XPS laptop that stopped charging ~2 years into ownership.
Aren't the processors not upgradeable in either case? I really doubt you could happily use a Haswell i5 processor in 2023 without feeling limited.. even if just because software (the OS, websites, etc.) assume a higher performance floor.
Obviously there's tradeoffs. Your previous post mentioned that a 2017 MBP is still usable on Ventura and supported until 2025, is a 2017 14nm dual core i5 really a huge leap over a 2015 14nm dual core i5? Which would be more usable the one stuck at 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD and a bit faster CPU or the one upgraded with 16GB RAM (~$40), a $70 1TB SSD and a slower CPU?
> Apple built it's own little parallel gaming stack world that works really well on their hardware
I think saying "its own parallel gaming stack" probably gives them too much credit [1]. Yes - they put in significant effort, but their gaming stack is neither "parallel" to the rest of the world, nor "their own" in any real sense. They seem to have adapted the open source efforts of Codeweavers, Valve, Wine and the broader Linux community put in Proton and achieving Windows games compatibility on Linux with Vulkan. Adapting that for Metal is no small feat [2] but an investment a giant like Apple can easily make without much risks. Don't forget that Wine has always been developed for Linux and macOS (and the BSDs) in parallel too - it was right there for the taking.
[1]: I'm assuming this is a quote sourced from someone who just isn't aware of all the effort being made at the Linux side of thing in the last five years.
[2]: At a technical level Metal and Vulkan are actually similar enough, but there's just a lot of surface to cover and edge cases to get right.
Granted, Metal is to a degree useful for the casual iOS games where alone Apple probably makes more money than anyone else in the gaming industry.
>I'm assuming this is a quote sourced from someone who just isn't aware of all the effort being made at the Linux side of thing
The podcaster does acknowledge that as well, I just didn't quote that part. The whole "rant" has about 4 minutes. But thanks for providing context, it is important.
Ah perhaps I interpreted the quote in the wrong way then. At first it read to me as if Apple did their own bespoke compatibility work, but it's a comment about the mostly artificial Apple Silicon GPU / Metal stack that is only available on Apple devices.
Worth noting that Apple poured a lot of resources into making WebGPU happen. WebGPU is, in a great many ways, Metal but cross-platform. The way this pays off is if game developers start targeting WebGPU instead of Vulkan or DX12. That could happen since WebGPU is a meant to be a lot easier to code against than Vulkan. This effort to port DX12 can probably be seen as more of a hedge than anything else. They know that some publishers will stick to what they know for some time, but they wish for it to be easier to see the upside of a cross platform investment by publishers by delivering an easier win. If it doesn’t work perfectly but gets close, that still helps them a lot. Because Metal is no longer some parallel stack they’re promoting and wanting people to build Apple-exclusive games for, it’s a means to an end, and the end is WebGPU and cross-platform.
Does it really work well for other use cases? Obviously you can call it, but typically a web API has many more security issues to handle than a native API, so I'd expect there to be a lot of compromises a game developer wouldn't want to deal with.
Yes. The non-JS interfaces are Dawn (C++) and wgpu (Rust). The Bevy game engine uses wgpu and I think many others will do the same. You can't really generalise from "typical web APIs" in the way that you have.
Personally, I appreciate this effort, not for AAA games, because I never bought a MacBook expecting it to be able to...but for much more casual or lower poly games that are available on Steam for Windows users only, because it's too hard to port. There's tons of sub-AAA games that could easily be ported and enjoyed on a modern M1/M2 Mac.
Speaking only for myself, I use Macs to get work done. The lack of games is actually a plus, as I can get compulsive with games.
It's funny, when people denigrate the worst gaming platform in the world as a "toy computer."
People get Macs, that want to get work done. As noted previously, there's really nothing that can beat a well-built PC gaming rig.
I don't really think Apple has ever cared about the Mac as a gaming platform, and the low-key hype around these technologies shows that. These almost seem like "developer 20% projects," compared to the big stuff, like visionOS.
That said, I think that Apple wants iOS/iPadOS/visionOS to be gaming platforms, so they do dedicate a lot of resources to that.
Many console gamers aren't aware of how [well] games play on PC gaming rigs, or they don't care, and are happy to play games on Switch/PS4/PS5/Xbox.
Apple may very well be targeting mobile and console gamers rather than PC gamers with gaming rigs.
Personally I would definitely enjoy playing on a high-end gaming PC (especially as GPUs become easier to find at MSRP), but I already have a Mac and a PS5.
I wouldn't mind more of my Steam library working on macOS though.
I don’t know, you say that but there are plenty of triple A games in the App Store and Apple did put in the effort into getting their game subscription to work on their desktops.
Let’s be real, we might all be getting more work done as a result but that’s because Apple dropped the ball, hard. They came out with the metal api but refused to support any others, even letting open GL fester. The fact that they couldn’t keep Blizzard of all companies developing games for the mac is all you need to know.
I'm curious if Apple dropped the ball or if there is still something of an anti-gaming culture inside Apple since I know that the company was de facto anti-gaming in the late 90s going forward. In that era they actively killed off relationships with gaming companies, e.g. the game that eventually became Halo was originally a Macintosh exclusive. More recent things like the legal theatrics with Epic Games gives one a picture of a company that is still not necessarily super keen on fully embracing the gaming scene.
Halo was introduced by Steve Jobs at MacWorld as an upcoming Mac game. It was always called Halo.
“This is not QuickTime. Everything you’re about to see is being rendered in real time on a Macintosh using OpenGL.” [1]
Then Microsoft bought Bungie and made Halo an Xbox-exclusive launch title. [2]
> de facto anti-gaming in the late 90s going forward
In 1997, the Power Mac 6500 shipped with MechWarrior 2 and Descent 2.
Between 1999 and 2005, Bugdom, Nanosaur, Cro-Mag Rally and Otto Matic by Pangea as well as Deimos Rising shipped as built-in platform games on various iMacs and iBooks, the G4 Cube, and the eMac. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 came with one model of eMac. Nanosaur 2 and Marble Blast were bundled with later iMacs, iBooks, eMacs and the Mac mini. [3]
Oh, I'm so very sorry! I think there was a misunderstanding. I was actually talking about the development of the game and not its public announcement!
Here is the relevant part of the Wikipedia article:
"Days before the Macworld announcement, Blam! still had no permanent title; possible names included The Santa Machine, Solipsis, The Crystal Palace, Hard Vacuum, Star Maker, and Star Shield.[38] Bungie hired a branding firm that came up with the name Covenant, but Bungie artist Paul Russell suggested alternatives, including Halo. Though some did not like the name—likening it to something religious, or a women's shampoo—designer Marcus Lehto said, "it described enough about what our intent was for this universe in a way that created this sense of mystery."[28] On July 21, 1999, during the Macworld Conference & Expo, Jobs announced that Halo would be released for MacOS and Windows simultaneously.[36]"
> In that era they actively killed off relationships with gaming companies, e.g. the game that eventually became Halo was originally a Macintosh exclusive.
That was Microsoft's doing, not Apple's. Microsoft scooped up Bungie to make Halo an Xbox exclusive (at least initially). This purportedly angered Steve Jobs, who probably wasn't too into gaming himself but understood the appeal it might have to consumers.
That isn't the version of history I remember reading about Bungie, but I suppose there are probably differing viewpoints about it. In any case, I do know that John Carmack has said that Steve Jobs told him back then that he should stop working on games and work on operating systems instead, and that he generally did not like them.
> there are plenty of triple A games in the App Store
Mobile AAA games in the iOS App Store, or desktop AAA games in the Mac App Store? There are some AAAs that work on a desktop Mac (e.g. Resident Evil Village), but it's not the norm at all. As for mobile ... modern mobile games can die in a fire for all I care (as they're 95% gacha nonsense).
Ok, uninstall Steam then, I guess? Games do currently exist on Mac, both in the App store and on Steam. It's just that there's a big swath of games that haven't been ported to Apple Silicon in particular, due to difficulty. I grew up playing games on the Mac, so I'm not sure what your point is.
So why the challenging and abrasive approach? Did what I write offend you? I certainly didn’t mean to, and apologize for my tone.
I have no interest in picking fights online, especially in a professional venue, where folks that could have a significant impact on my career are watching how I interact with others.
Well HN has the ability to create arbitrary screen names to create pseudo anonymity. So there's that.
I guess what appears to be abrasive is just lacking tone. It's just me being mildly exasperated for effect. My point is to stress that the Mac has always been a general purpose computing device. Jobs may have chosen to optimize the Mac for productivity in the 90s, and that probably stemmed from the niches that were available to Apple in the Windows-dominated 90s and 00s (that he learned from running NeXT).
The lack of upgradeable components also held the Mac back in graphics technology which precluded it from premium games market. But the M1/M2 chips are game changers. But since they're newish and the Windows market is so established and ARM chips are different from traditional x86 based chips, it's tough to get devs to port for Mac. If they can provide tooling that automates it, it's a great win for Apple.
Unfortunately, that "pseudo" is rapidly dwindling. I know that there are already AI "decloakers," that look at writing style, and do a damn good job of finding folks, based on that.
I was a UseNet troll, back in my day. It was not my proudest moment.
One of the reasons that I deliberately make myself known, is that it forces me to watch my words, just like IRL.
My career is done. I am retired (not by choice), and continue to work, but at what I want, and the way that I want to do it. Basically, a dream come true. I am not particularly worried about upsetting folks for my career, but I also feel I have a great deal of atonement due, because of my past behavior.
I like the Apple ecosystem. I've been using it to be highly productive since 1986, and have been playing games on it forever. I remember Pathways Into Darkness[0], thirty years ago, which I thought was awesome.
That is interesting - I bought KOTOR 2 a couple years ago for my kid and ended up having to get a refund it because it didn't run at all (on intel). It just wedged when I clicked play. No response from Aspyr, so I'd assumed they abandoned their older games.
> It's funny, when people denigrate the worst gaming platform in the world as a "toy computer."
Unless you're developing iOS apps or MacOS apps, it's pretty terrible as a work platform too. I guess iWork is OK, but no one uses it, so it's not helpful for collaboration. Maybe people use it for media production? Doesn't the big rendering still happen on Linux though, and hasn't windows caught up?
Having said that, Mac laptops made passable web browser + video phone + dumb terminal in the intel days, and now they're excellent at those things and added "virtualization host" to that list.
I guess I've always thought of them more like glorified vt100s than like computers. They're certainly market leaders for that use case, though WSL is helping windows catch up.
I mean, you're kind of dead wrong? I've been using Macs for almost two decades at this point as a developer, and it's never kept me from getting work done. These days it's great having a powerful Mac, with the ability to use local machine learning models with relatively large amounts of VRAM (more than any consumer GPU, though inference won't be as fast as recent Nvidia cards). It's great at video editing, too.
Well, I write MacOS/iOS/WatchOS/iPadOS/visionOS stuff, so I'm dependent on it.
Like most tools, we get used to our main one, and can sometimes get a bit "sneery" about alternate ones.
The Mac is a particularly rich target, because the "snootiness" is actually a deliberate brand ploy by Apple, and pretty much "leads with the chin," so we have that.
I've never been "snooty" about Apple, but it's been my platform for over 30 years, so I'm used to it, and I get a lot done with my Mac.
Microsoft Office has always been sub-par on Mac, and I haven't worked at a company that uses it for collaboration for over a decade. (Sure, there's the occasional person that actually needs VB macros under Excel, or prefers powerpoint, but there's no reason for me to run it.)
I know you can use them for media production. Looking around, it sounds like they still own the low-end with iMovie, but it gets questionable as hardware requirements increase. I guess it's a viable platform for that.
I know a lot of CAD software is missing MacOS ports, so they seem to have lost that market.
Anyway, I'll continue to think of my laptop as a dumb terminal with a good hypervisor bolted on the side.
I know of quite a large company - the second largest employer in the US that have thousands of Macs and come with Office. Do you really think that no one has been using Office for Mac and Microsoft has been selling it for 35 years?
It is hard to switch away from mainframes too, but I haven’t heard of a company that was founded in the last ten years that is a Microsoft Office shop.
Most places I have worked don’t use office suites. Instead of formatting stuff for 8.5x11” PDFs or printouts, things go into wikis/gdocs/etc, markdown files in git, python or splunk dashboards or whatever instead of excel; stuff is shared on slack, not office/google drive, etc, etc.
Sure, you can get access to an office suite at these companies, but people certainly raise an eyebrow when emailed a docx or told to click this office online link to run word in their browser.
In the link you pasted, the studies are limiting the market in strange ways. Like what is a “workstream collaboration tool” (teams, and whatever google workspaces is. I’ve never used either, despite using google docs periodically).
So, if the question is “which wordperfect clone is winning”, then word is a plausible answer. If the question is “what percentage of all documents are created in each tool”, there’s no way office (excluding outlook) + gdocs + iwork sum up to a majority at most companies.
> Most places I have worked don’t use office suites. Instead of formatting stuff for 8.5x11” PDFs or printouts, things go into wikis/gdocs/etc, markdown files in git, python or splunk dashboards or whatever instead of excel; stuff is shared on slack, not office/google drive, etc, etc.
Yes because most of corporate America is doing work in Markdown.
Have you ever thought that your workplace may not be representative of the wider world?
> the question is “what percentage of all documents are created in each tool”, there’s no way office (excluding outlook) + gdocs + iwork sum up to a majority at most companies.
In my university, only non computer science students used macs. At my work, I wasn't given a choice and was given a macbook because "we all use macbooks" which really just meant "we all work on the terminal", which mac is not good at, not anymore when we have WSL to compare it against.
These GPUs aren’t too bad. Theoretically, M2 Max peaks at 14.4 teraflops, and 400 GB/s memory bandwidth. M2 Ultra is too new, but Apple says it’s GPU is 30% faster (probably 18.7 teraflops then?), and that it has 800 GB/s memory bandwidth.
The numbers for M2 Ultra are comparable to some powerful GPUs. The theoretical TFlops number is close to Radeon 6900 XT and GeForce 3070, theoretical memory bandwidth is close to Radeon 7900 XT and GeForce 4080.
However, good point on the pricing. Apparently, Mac Pro starts at $7k, which is way too expensive for most gamers.
Apple's best GPU is close to a mid-range previous gen nvidia GPU?
I'm sure it'll run a 4 year old game on medium settings great! But that's kind of the point, that it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry.
Who's supposed to be impressed by getting middling performance on Death Stranding 4 years after it came out? Literal definition of "also ran".
That's neat and impressive, but that's all they have. They don't have a high end. For $3000 you can get a top end gaming PC. There's no amount of money you can spend on a Mac to equal that.
I think you're missing the point that parent (and Siracusa) made - Apple invests a signficant into the software and graphics stack, only to fumble it at the last minute by not having high-end graphics hardware, and caring enough to court "triple A" game developers to their platforms, despite them creating and maintaining Metal and this 20k-line WINE patch.
There's this weird mismatch of Apple dedicating a non-trival amount of time in their keynote to "Mac Gaming" as if it's supposed to be impressive to finally play a 4 year old game on a Mac because they don't ship high-end graphics devices.
Apple silicon wins on performance per watt but not in performance outright and suddenly everyone cares about power consumption. Whichever spec everyone's favorite fruit company excels at gets put on a pedestal.
The PC industry is no longer driven by desktops; laptops have taken over long ago. There is a gaming PC crowd, but that is a small captured audience who wants performance, wattage be damned.
Apple is selling around 80% laptops versus desktops, and the rest of the industry is something like 77%. The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race doesn't mean it should automatically be entered into the desktop GPU race, where it is not winning.
I would take a guess that Apple is shipping (far) more TFlops of GPU power than Nvidia or anyone else in the mobile GPU market. Few people are buying laptops with 80-150w TDP GPUs, as those start to stretch the definition of both 'laptop' and 'battery powered'. Big gaming laptops with an hour of battery life are more akin to the luggables of yore.
That's fair. Nvidia has issues scaling their full systems down to laptop spec, and Apple almost has the opposite problem. They're both impressive in their own right, but right now Nvidia has both the performance and performance-per-watt crown in this space. The disparity in 3D applications (like gaming and Blender[0]) so ugly it's not even close.
And in all fairness - Apple's products might not need more GPU power. Cyberpunk and Elden Ring appear to be CPU-bottlenecked, if people are comfortable upscaling they could get a pretty comfortable Retina experience. The 2D optimization and media accelerators are a good focus for mobile hardware. For more demanding applications though, it looks like Apple's current approach is not scaling well.
Yeah I'm really curious what Apple's next-gen GPU (with raytracing and a bunch of other stuff) brings to fix some of these shortcomings. It was supposed to show up on last year's iPhone 14 followed presumably by inclusion in the M-series, and the 3nm process was supposed to be shipping this year, but everything got set back a year. In Mac-land the M2 wound up just being an overclocked M1, so we're left waiting for M3 to bring us a more competitive GPU.
The other half of the story is a lot of software (inc Blender, looking at these crazy results) just isn't well optimized and Apple is still struggling to win over developers in certain sectors of the market. Nvidia's decade+ investment in the software side has paid off so incredibly well for them, it's basically made the company.
shockingly, I think there might be more than one person on the internet and these people might have varying opinions
but yea you can say the same thing about tons of brands. Last summer all the AMD fans were talking about 1€/kWh electricity and saying they were going to buy whatever dGPU was most efficient... when that turned out to be Ada by a country mile, everybody pivoted to whining about price and bought RDNA2 GPUs with half of the perf/w.
During RDNA2 everyone insisted that a 10% perf/w advantage for AMD was a buying point, back during the Vega years they insisted that a 2x perf/w disadvantage didn't matter. Rinse and repeat.
I generally think power matters when it rises to the level of a tangible difference... 200W difference between 4070 and 6950XT means the latter is really a non-starter even if it's 10% faster (at a 5% higher price), especially considering the big-picture featureset (DLSS improves both perf and perf/w). And really it matters more in laptops. You're right that Mac Studio/Mac Pro are not really a place where it hugely matters, but, in a laptop, the next-best thing would be a Ryzen 6800U which is about GTX 1630 performance, so 3060 performance in the same envelope is a big step upwards!
And really this "big differences matter, small ones don't" applies to most stuff in general. 5% this way or the other, who cares. That kind of thing is often less important than general UX/quality/features, I'll take a laptop that's 5% slower but way longer battery life or better screen/trackpad/whatever. When things start rising to the level of 25% or 30% difference in some spec, or in price... yeah that's immediately noticeable.
But yea I generally agree that desktops like Studio or outright workstations like Mac Pro are dGPU territory and people are generally not looking for a super efficient iGPU with 3060 performance. On the other hand, being able to talk to 192GB of VRAM is definitely novel, especially with large AI models being the talk of the town this year (and accessible to even the most casual of artists/developers), and the unified APU approach with uniform memory/zero-paging has other advantages for development too. AMD had a lot of this stuff hammered out 10 years ago, supposedly, and then... just never did anything with it, other than sell it to consoles. It's great for PS5 and Xbox, why can't I buy a PC laptop with 96GB of unified/uniform memory with 3060-level performance in a 25W envelope?
Really I think a lot of the people who have bought Macbooks recently are not "traditional" apple customers. The MBP and even MBA are legitimately really nice laptops with a good screen, good keyboard, good trackpad, good sound, etc. I have said before that I really think a lot of MBP customers would be interested in a "Macbook Tough" toughbook if they ever did that, although of course that's the most un-Jony Ives product possible.
There is a clear demand for a high-quality AMD-based non-GPU ultrabook using a 6800U or 7040U or whatever. Framework is the first company to even try, and they're using crappy 13" hardware on the upcoming AMD model while the market clearly wants more like a 15" or 16" (and their 16" will not have AMD boards). Why didn't anybody else do it first? Apple is catching on because they're filling a market niche that everyone else is ignoring, and they're not even really exactly filling it squarely, they just happen to be vaguely closer than the rest of the market.
And now that the nerd crowd has the hardware... the software is following. It's the same reason that CUDA has taken off while AMD's GPGPU programme has spun its wheels for 15 years, and the same reason AMD has good Linux drivers now. Give the nerds the hardware and innovation will follow - when they tinker they'll be tinkering with your platform.
Big missed opportunity for AMD, yet again. Or Intel, but, they're so far behind on APUs/integration that I think disappointment is basically the baseline expectation at this point. AMD had all the pieces, and yet again just chose not to do anything with them.
The most popular GPUs in use TODAY are 1650, 1060, 3060, 2060.
If Apple can get the M2 Macbook Air to run like one of these, it essentially makes the most popular laptop also the equivalent to the most popular gaming rig.
Two days ago we could speculate that maybe the $6000+ Mac Pro would bring better graphics performance, but now we know it's a $7000 Mac Studio with PCIe slots. And as far as we know you can't put a GPU in those slots.
Not that it would've been in my price range anyway, but it could've indicated that thunderbolt eGPU support would make a return.
Lack of that is a weird omission if Apple is trying to act like they have a gaming platform.
However, I imagine that they'd still like to sell more games in the Mac App Store (in addition to iOS ports, iPad games that can run on Apple Silicon, and Apple Arcade subscriptions) and this might help.
It might also make it easier to port games to Apple Arcade.
This is wildly false, see https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/143ugg4/comment/j... as a real world example of a gaming PC you can buy right now for $2,600 which is the top of the crop and an absolutely wild gaming machine that's vastly better at gaming than $5,000 M2 Ultra Mac Studio even if the comparisons are done only in games that actually work and work well on the Mac.
If you were after a comparable experience with the fastest Macs on Earth you could configure a PC that's another $1,000 cheaper than that ($1,600).
Actually you can get NVidia's top consumer GPU today, the RTX 4090, for $1500-1600. Go back one generation and you can get a RTX 3090 for $750 which still packs a punch.
So it's quite possible to build a well-performing gaming PC for sub-$2000 with RTX 3090 which is still significantly more performant than Apple's latest Mac, in terms of GPU throughput.
I snapped myself a gaming PC for $1300 at last year's Thanksgiving sales, came with a AMD Ryzen, RTX 3080 (10 GB VRAM model) and 32 GB DDR4 RAM, no way I could have gotten a Mac with that performance for anything close in terms of price.
Yea, that’s true as of today in the US. There’s no way you could get such a deal where I live (Norway) due to our weak currency, and it used to be the other way around just a few years ago
Great, you can keep playing your old ass game at low frame rates. Enjoy your power savings... the game still runs like crap and the GPU still isn't that great.
Game enthusiasts can be so weird. Do y'all even have fun playing games, or do you just keep buying hardware and optimizing settings until they run at 120fps, declare victory, and move on to the next AAA game?
I don't think I have worried about game frame rate since the days of Quake 1. I set my graphics settings to "Medium" and then spend the rest of my time actually enjoying my old ass games.
Its exactly why PC/console gamers (generally, not talking about GP) make terrible customers and Apple is right to not play with fire by courting them too closely - they're loud, cheap, immature, mercurial, and demanding, and being associated with them is probably a net negative for brand. Let them stew in forums arguing over red vs green, tinkering with and breaking the warranty of their PC parts, being disloyal to the brand they loved 5 minutes ago, etc.
Better strategy is to make sure the door isn't closed on gaming for those that want to use their expensive Macs to occasionally play (protect the downside), rather than swing the door open enthusiastically for gamers to rush in.
Re: worrying about fun vs tinkering, I'm reminded of the 4 quadrants of hobbies. What we see on forums are generally gamers interested in gear & discussing, not 'doing the hobby'. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html
Yes, gamers have standards and thats why GPU performance on the PC does not suck and why it is relatively affordable. A tough market to be in for sure, everyone wishes they could just be Apple.
In many genres of game, frame rate makes a huge difference in the ability to control the game and catch what's happening. Framerate is probably the worst thing you could have picked to mock when you're making an argument about enjoyment. Especially when citing an FPS.
The M2 Max is closer to the 3060 than it is to the 3060 Ti, let alone 3070. And those numbers are quite possibly overly optimistic; workloads essentially never reach peak tflop, and I would not be surprised if practical workloads are better matched to nvidia's architecture than apple's, if only through sheer industry momentum (But that could go either way).
While the perf/watt is impressive, apple is also using 4 times the number of transistors on TSMC's latest process - and the comparison here is samsungs 8nm, I believe. It's not really all that impressive that that huge silicon investment has some results...
It's a tantalizing hint at what might be possible, but as it stands, I'm not really all that impressed, personally.
I didn't say 3070, that was from the parent "who is impressed by 3070 performance [in a 25W envelope]"? And the answer is a lot of people.
I actually added the 3060 bit myself lol, because yeah, that seems to be more like where it actually lands, more like desktop 3060.
edit: also desktop vs mobile is a factor here too... mobile 3070 is not the same thing as desktop 3070, and coming in at desktop 3070 would actually be fairly impressive. Mobile 3060, much less so.
Sure, no quibbles on that front. Comparisons like this are always best taken with a lot of salt anyhow; they're so different. And it's not like tflops are the great predictor of gaming performance.
Positively: as a device, having such a solid iGPU is pretty much exactly what I've always wanted in this kind of device. Having performance that's PS5 ballpark clearly is enough for a hell of a lot of things. Who really wants something much faster at the cost of much worse battery life?
But the air of incredibly ground-breaking technical greatness that apple manages to weave around its silicon seems a tad overdone. Given the amount of silicon, the process node, and the target tuning - this kind of result seems competitive with rather than outclassing their rivals.
I feel like you've got a chip on your shoulder about this for some reason
I've got a gaming desktop and also a MacBook Pro. If the next time I go on a trip, I'm able to play some games in my hotel room on (gasp) medium settings, with a device I already own, that I probably was already going to bring with me, that's a positive thing!
I also have a gaming desktop and a Macbook Pro, but I wish I didn't have to have a gaming desktop because I much prefer Macs and MacOS and I wish Apple was interested in competing. Then, they dedicate a segment to 'gaming on mac' to brag about porting a 4 year old game to the Mac.
>it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry
Apple seems to be doing okay. I mean, a magnitude more people game on iPhones than game on PCs.
Apple is trying to support ancillary gaming for users who chose their platform for other reasons. That's it. They aren't targeting the 1200 watt, 12-fan 4090 PCMR sorts. And that's okay.
Do they need to most powerfull gaming hardware? Maybe just the fact that it might get reasonable to play most games on a macbook is enough to get people who also want to game to buy a macbook instead of a windows laptop. And maybe this is enough to get developers to consider mac.
They do not need to compete with nvidea for the top of the line
Yeah, high end enthusiast hardware is in fact pretty niche, and I say this as someone with a 5950X/3080Ti tower. The vast majority of people playing games are doing so on pretty old/average hardware, a bar which is met and exceeded by several M-series Macs.
High-end hardware is niche, but the state of AAA game performance these days ... ugh. I can't even get a stable 60fps on Jedi Survivor with my 5800x/3080 Ti rig, even with lower settings. How bad is it on something like a 1060?
I paid a ton of money for my top of the line M2 Max because I build large rust systems that are high bandwidth and low latency and it’s as good as it gets for that. I also like to play games, but I don’t need the cutting edge. I would rather eat glass than buy a windows bing advertisement device and find another footprint in my home to install it just so I can get a higher frame rate than my eye can see. In fact, my strategy for gaming over the last 20 years has been to buy games 3 years old and devices that run them at their top end. No bugs, tons of reviews to guide my purchases, tons of mods, full DLC sets, always on sale. As long as I don’t sit around feeling envy looking at what’s cutting edge, following the 3 year wave front gives me precisely the experience folks had 3 years ago - but better. I’ll have their current experience in 3 years, so long as I don’t die, without all the bleeding edge problems.
So, great. Apple lets me stay away from bard directed bing advertising and OS level spy ware on my desktop, simplify my computing footprint in my household, and provides me games from a few years ago. Seems like a win win.
Source: I am someone who paid significantly more money for a Max M2 Max
No corporation gets to take a moral high ground being amoral entities. But windows is pervasively spammy now - the start menu hosting ads was bad enough, but now it’s the task bar too. I’m trying to remember when I saw a cross sell in apples stuff - my memory is only when I’m in something like the TV app or the wallet, or some place where the cross sell is contextually relevant.
The more Microsoft and Google tilt towards becoming persistent privacy threats and advertising companies, the more apple will see it as a differentiator as a hardware company with software services to be the opposite. I’m good with that dynamic, but I think it’s useful to acknowledge that’s the case. Pretending windows isn’t a persistent adware spyware bundle doesn’t help the situation.
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.
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.
The latest consoles are also running mid range cards from a few years ago and are doing just fine. They are running games at medium at lower FPS/resolution than PC so games will mostly continue to target and work well on medium hardware. High end PC gaming is the exception, not the norm.
The Mac audience is not trivial and has deep pockets so as long as porting games is fairly easy the it's an obvious choice.
Sure? It's definitely never going to deliver you anything other than a gaming/video experience though. It also doesn't come with a battery or a display in case we're doing an apples to apples comparison of the Xbox Series S with an M1 MacBook Pro.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?
I imagine Apple may be testing the waters. They're a trillion-dollar company, with many customers who play games, and they want to see if they can expand Mac gaming beyond iOS ports.
Consider that there are a large number of games which could run fine on this sort of technology (including much of my Steam game library that currently only runs on Windows) as well as existing macOS ports whose performance can be improved.
For example Final Fantasy XIV already runs on a Crossover/WINE type middleware layer, but at about half the frame rate of the Windows version on comparable hardware. Metal conversion is likely to greatly improve the frame rate, improving the experience for FFXIV players on macOS. If it helps Square Enix deliver a better FFXIV experience on Mac, perhaps they will be more likely to consider Mac ports of some newer games that are currently slated for Windows or consoles.
Moreover it's worth noting that Apple did claim that the M1 had comparable raw GPU performance to the PS5 (and Macs also use fast flash storage like the PS5.) So as the M-series evolves (and the PS5 ages) it may become more feasible to port PS5 games to Mac with decent performance. Solid ports of console games could greatly improve the Mac gaming landscape.
Also we don't know Apple's product plans. It's likely that they have some GPU improvements in the works. Unified memory architecture may also pay off as more games adopt ray-tracing and procedural textures and geometry.
Don't you think that Apple could tackle the performance issues in GPUs in the following years?
The core issue here, business wise, is the price tag. People of all social classes use gaming consoles and it is difficult to think Apple can be relevant in this market even if they tackle all other issues.
Nevermind the low end (it will always be an uphill battle to compete with the consoles on price), the issue is that Apple doesn't even cater to the high end.
Google has twice tried and failed to make Vulkan a thing - first on Android, where nobody cares to target it, even on the Quest, and the GPUs suck anyway; and second on Stadia, which besides the up front product development cost, it was 3-20x worse performance compared to DirectX for the games that were ports anyway.
But I'd rather have Vulkan around and succeed, even if it sucks today. Because having only DirectX, or only DirectX and middlewares for the Switch, iOS and PlayStation, is worse.
> 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.
It is still expensive to have to use Windows just so you can game. Or put all the effort into dual booting Linux.
Most people just use a Macbook and then get an Xbox/Ps5/Switch/Quest2.
For games I can't use on those you can get Shadow PC which let's you play any Windows game ever using better GPUs than I could afford (or more accurately would care to spend) otherwise.
The high-end gaming market is infintessimal when compared to the casual gaming market. Apple knows this and they are perfectly positioned for high-quality casual games.
I think this is an example of how ideas about what people really consider important are skewed by marketing. The gaming market is HUGE. How big is the premium, chasing-that-last-quarter-percent-by-spending-twice-the-money market comparatively?
I thought this was very insightful on his part - yeah this all sounds great, but so what? The Mac Pro is an empty box besides for Apple Silicon and a few fans. What are you going to put in there exactly?
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. And Apple also doesn't know how to keep relationships with the AAA developers, unlike Microsoft and other platform owners.
Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival?
I think the on stage demo of the 4 year old Death Stranding running poorly on the newest Macs says it all.
[0] https://atp.fm/538 @1:42:20