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.
