Apple Discusses Push Towards High-End Mac Gaming in New Interview::Inverse’s Raymond Wong today published an in-depth overview of Apple’s increasing push towards high-end gaming on the Mac. The story includes…

  • Sprucie@feddit.uk
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    7 months ago

    I’m curious who the target market for this is. When buying your own system you typically want to get the best performance for your money, and with the Apple tax included you’re always going to be paying a lot more for similar specs to something you can build yourself.

    • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.gg
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      7 months ago

      I think for people who buy pre built gaming PCs the Apple tax might be roughly equivalent… If they also have an iPhone or a MacBook already… It might not be a big jump to go to Mac gaming

    • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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      7 months ago

      You should think of it as an added value for overpriced hardware rather than comparing it to existing gaming hardware. Like most people aren’t building a “gaming PC” exclusively for gaming.

  • JungleJim@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    I know Valve and others have done a lot of the legwork already, so maybe it won’t be so difficult for Apple to catch up, but it feels a little bit like Microsoft’s last attempt at making phones. It’s been a minute since the starting bell, the competition has the software catalog already, and it’ll cost the consumer more.

  • Macaroni_ninja@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    According to a quick google search the PC gaming share of Mac users is something like 1-2% and the compatible games list is mainly indies, but barely any AA or AAA titles.

    If it’s true then imagine the price tags they will put on these machines to make profit.

    • SinningStromgald@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      If it’s true then imagine the price tags they will put on these machines to make profit.

      Any chance to senselessly gouge their consumers is a good one for Apple.

  • Skunk@jlai.lu
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    7 months ago

    I’m not the audience for Mac gaming but I discovered that my “work dedicated” Mac mini M2 pro is an amazing machine for afk flying 14h flights on Xplane12. Specially during summer heat waves where the windows gaming rig is just a huge space heater.

    So yeah I believe the target is people wanting only one rig to do everything but still use MacOS as a daily. Probably those with a MacBookPro M3-something. You could already do it with streaming, now with the M chips you can play AAA locally as well.

  • LainOfTheWired@lemy.lol
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    7 months ago

    Isn’t the problem that they are using ARM hardware. Like sure your x86 emulator can be good, but if you look at something like proton it’s taken years for it to get good. And that’s not even a different CPU architecture. So apple would have to make a wine equivalent, a DKVK, equivalent, and a really great X86 emulator if that’s even possible on current gen hardware.

    Somehow I don’t see them catching up with Linux gaming.

  • dukatos@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    A new technology built into the M3 family of chips is Dynamic Caching, which allows the GPU to allocate memory usage in real time.

    Sells it with 8GB of RAM…

    • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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      7 months ago

      No, Steam works sort of fine on Macs. It’s just that there’s not many new games on Apple these days. I think even native Linux might have more games these days.

      • M500@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s true. But in my mind, Linux gaming is basically perfect.

        Luckily, I’m not into the kind of games that don’t work on Linux.

          • Skunk@jlai.lu
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            7 months ago

            Now I want to see proton on Asahi Linux on a native apple silicon chip.

            I know it’s useless, I still want to try it for my nerd spirit.

            • cevn@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              I tried it. Nothing works because of ARM sadly. I think it is coming close with Box86 but couldn’t get my games to run.

      • bjorney@lemmy.ca
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        7 months ago

        Sort of fine is even an exaggeration. I gifted my GF don’t starve together the other week and steam froze and crashed 3 times just trying to log in. After an hour of trying and failing to get to the library page we just gave up. This is on the current model MBP

      • Merlin404@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I gotcha! Guess i remembered wrong about Macs! I think Linux have a lot of games now with the proton i read around 2900 games that work.

        • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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          7 months ago

          My own experience with Linux and Steam currently (and since roughly beginning of 2023 at least) is that 99% of all games work on Linux/Proton if you enable Proton for everything.

          But it’s probably somewhat dependent on your distro and hardware. I have all AMD and Nobara, and with this combo I haven’t met a game that doesn’t work, at least in a year.

          • KISSmyOS@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            In my experience, distro and hardware hardly matters at all.
            The 99% figure seems to be about right (I have 2 games out of 240 I can’t get to work).
            I have an nvidia card and recently tried out Debian, Opensuse, Slackware and Arch, with equal results.

    • M500@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      I think Apple dropped some stuff that would make it so 32 but apps wouldn’t work and a ton of games are 32 bit apps. But I’m not sure if they actually did that or just talked about it.

      • Skunk@jlai.lu
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        7 months ago

        They did it since at least 2 OS version. It is impossible to run a 32 bit software on latest MacOS unless you keep an older version on dual boot. Or Linux but it is still a dual boot.

        From memory it did not had a huge impact, most 32 bit software or games are old enough that you slowly start to forget about it and just use something else.

        • DJDarren@thelemmy.club
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          7 months ago

          Using Whisky it’s possible to install the Windows version of Steam, after which even 32bit games will run perfectly. I had Portal running on my M2 Air.

          It’s just so clunky to have to jump through those hoops.

  • chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    The only way I can see mass adoption of Macs as gaming hardware is if Apple takes the walled garden approach to gaming a forces a tiered system so that Macbook A will run games with a developer preset for that particular Macbook series. Then they have the same for desktops. I can’t see Apple letting consumers take control of the visual settings in any significant way, because they would have to hire a full time staff just to deal with all of the Mac users that call in wondering why the latest EA game runs like ass on their new $5000 Mac. They’d be better off taking the Nintendo approach with curated games developed with Macs and certain settings in mind, and if they are going that far, they may as well buy a few studios for exclusives (which will inevitably get cracked and distributed to PC).

    • bamboo@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      It would be extremely difficult to get an arm mac binary to run on windows. Not impossible, but much, much more engineering than bypassing DRM. You’d need reverse wine, which the Darling project could possibly be, but after years of work barely supports GUI applications.