This could be great news for the Mac gamers among us! Could the new Mac Studio be a viable gaming rig? Time will tell - I actually have one on order myself and will report back with benchmarks once I’m up and running!
My guess is that if games where completely native, performance would be good enough that mac gaming would be realistic. Not the cheapest $ per fps, but good enough that if you want a mac for other reasons, you can game as well.
Right now with rosetta/cpu bottlenecks I think gaming is not in a good shape, and most games that are available today and next few years won’t be native. My hope is that generational increases in performance reach a point where new heavy games work flawlessly, and older rosetta games work good too, because of overpowered cpu taking care of the rosetta overhead.
Just an example, even native mac games are very slow because of rosetta/cpu, like frostpunk.
Yea, I think that’s pretty indisputable. My sense is a native Apple Silicon + Metal binary would be highly competitive with a higher end Windows machine, but Rosetta + WINE only gets you so far. Hopefully, the fact that every Mac now for sale has a GPU ranging from decent to beefy will make macOS worth targeting for developers.
I think the recent game porting toolkit might make it more desirable too. But I have a theory that the reason there’s no games on mac is not that the port itself is hard, but that they don’t want to keep testers/qa/support indefinitely for yet another platform.
You might make a port work with a few weeks of a dev team, but then have to pay qa for years to make sure every update to the game or OS does not break something, and to keep supporting new GPUs.
Maybe Apple needs to offer some kind of cheap outsourced testing, so companies can just pay apple less than what a full qa employee would charge them, and get someone with insider info about apple itself.
And they also need to change their philosphy of “if it breaks and the devs don’t fix it we move on”, like they did with 32 bit apps. Apps are either updated or forgotten because new features are necessary, but games can remain still and be perfectly good.
