50 pointsby kristianp8 hours ago14 comments
  • SXX5 hours ago
    Apple could easily make gaming on Mac feasible by contributing to Proton, Wine, DXVK and officially supporting Vulkan at least through translation layer.

    Or just partner with Valve to do exactly this for their platform.

    Instead they choose to build another proprietary solution nobody gonna use and that will die as soon as they lose interest.

    • zer0zzz5 hours ago
      I agree with you on wine, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are doing this quietly (landing patches to make Wine better on Mac), but for the purposes of making directx shaders perform better I fail to see why it matters if they support dx to metal conversion or if they support vulkan (for the goals of making games run better for their customers)?
      • SXX5 hours ago

          > landing patches to make Wine better on Mac
        
        AFAIK they dont contribute back to Wine. There some chance they quietly pay to CodeWeavers, but likely this wouldnt be kept secret.

          > I fail to see why it matters if they support dx to metal conversion or if they support vulkan
        
        It matters because if Apple embraced Vulkan it would give more market share to one standard API for non-Windows platforms.

        Their strategy trying to push proprietary solutions simply doesnt work when their OS have 2% of PC gaming market share.

        Apple announced game porting toolkit 3 years ago and no one uses it. Well, unless Apple fund ports as PR stunts.

        At the same time Valve released Steam Deck 4 years ago and by now nearly all Windows games are playable on Linux.

      • inatreecrown24 hours ago
        I wish this were/is true, that Apple supports Wine development. But as far as we know, a year from now Apple will end Rosetta 2 support in macOS 28, and with it the ability to run Wine.
  • cousin_it6 hours ago
    Oh, who gives a damn. Half the games in my Steam library don't work since Apple killed 32bit. When they fix it, I'll know they care about Mac gaming.
    • zer0zzz5 hours ago
      Most of those are gonna work using Rosetta, crossover, and the game porting toolkit.

      You really don’t need Apple to support 32Bit x86 macOS games when it’s not much more overhead to run windows x86 games (which is easily the better library to spend time Optimizing for).

      • out_of_protocol4 hours ago
        Why bother with macos version at all then? Soon current version becomes unusable as well, and needs windows fallback to run since macos version is useless
  • keyle6 hours ago
    This, once again, misses the elephant in the room.

    The fact is simple, there isn't enough of a Mac gaming market for the game developers to go through the effort.

    The hardware has been good enough for a while now.

    I'm not saying this will never change but the developers that shipped games on PC and Mac report something along the lines of 6-11% of users use a Mac. That isn't worth the effort unless you have a very strong IP and you've already targeted the switch2, the PS5 and XBox.

    • larrry2 hours ago
      Some engines nicely support Mac out of the box. I’m making a party fighter in LOVE2D and am having a good time developing and playing on Mac (cross platform online play is working well too, my friends are all Windows).

      Maybe Unity or Godot also offer this benefit? If so then Mac gaming could become much better supported, at least from indies!

    • SXX5 hours ago
      Easy fix. Apple can just stop breaking compatibility and partner with Valve to port Proton support to Mac.

      But they wont do it because they want to push their own walled garden. And obviously no one will support it because macOS market share is smaller than Linux market share.

      • sunaookami4 hours ago
        >macOS market share is smaller than Linux market share

        Not true? macOS has like 12-14% and Linux 3-4%

        • SXX2 hours ago
          If you check Steam hardware survey you'll see Linux market sgare is 3% against macOS 2%. This is what matter for game studios.
          • sunaookami2 hours ago
            That's because it makes no sense to use Steam on macOS because there are nearly no compatible games and Steam itself only has an ARM version on Beta and the Intel version is unusably slow. Overall a catch-22 situation though.
            • SXX7 minutes ago
              Its not like every single Linux PC have Steam installed either. And if you run Steam client under Wine / Crossover it able to properly detect real platform.
        • surgical_fire3 hours ago
          A very big portion of that is corporate.

          I have a macbook home, the one issued by my employer. My personal laptop runs Linux.

    • numpad05 hours ago
      That's not the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room for gaming on Mac is Apple's policy non-commitment to traditional gaming. Technical support for non-gambling gaming is just a checkbox item to them for mandatory 45-second segments in product launches. That transcends into their customers and develop into various gaming and Mac related chicken and egg problems.
    • fortedoesnthack6 hours ago
      Personally I would gladly switch to mac as my actual personal PC if games ran well on it.
    • ido5 hours ago

          That isn't worth the effort 
      
      Maybe I'm too unambitious as a small indie, but "porting" my game to mac merely requires building that target (I use unity & have both mac and windows automated building scripts - I press a button and it builds and uploads both to steam). There's nowhere in my codebase where I had to specifically adapt to one or the other.
    • matthewmacleod6 hours ago
      Isn’t the point that significantly reducing the effort required changes the “is it worth it” equation?
    • Nursie6 hours ago
      I don't get this attitude.

      It'll never be enough until it is. Making porting lower-effort and higher performance can only help.

      • AnthonyMouse6 hours ago
        Apple is getting kind of a PR problem with developers. In theory they don't do all the same things on Mac as they do on iOS, but as long as they continue to do them on iOS and keep feature creeping the gatekeeper stuff, people are hesitant to end up stuck with Apple taking 30% of their revenue or denying their app for opaque reasons after they've spent big money to develop it.

        At which point who is going to spend development resources helping the platform of the company they're most afraid of screwing them if it becomes more popular? Half the reason more game developers are targeting Linux is a hedge against Microsoft doing that sort of thing, and Apple is on the opposite side of where they want to move.

        • danaris5 hours ago
          This idea that Apple has been plotting this whole time to turn the Mac into iOS, in terms of limiting the software you can run to their own App Store, is a tired meme that makes zero sense given what we've seen from Apple in the past...checks...19 years.

          Like, seriously, do you think they need longer than that to do it if it's really what they plan?

          If they were ever going to do it, it would've been when they switched to Apple Silicon chips, and...they didn't!

          Perpetuating the idea does no one any favors. It's just pointless paranoia.

        • puelocesar5 hours ago
          That really doesn’t make any sense. Do you really think Apple will ban steam on macOS overnight?
          • AnthonyMouse5 hours ago
            That's not how you boil a frog.

            If it gets popular enough then they start trying to get games to use their app store instead of Steam, gradually make it easier to use that and harder to use anything else, then the gate closes only after the herd is where they want it.

            Better, then, if it never gets popular enough to begin with.

          • tick_tock_tick5 hours ago
            Nah there will be a new model and a new OS version on it that will only lets you use the App Store (30% tax of course). People here will complain and a fuck ton of people will dick ride Apple with bullshit about how they shouldn't buy that new laptop and they should feel privileged for Apple allowing any money to go to the person actually providing you value.
  • bakoo7 hours ago
    The high pixel response time on macbook displays means you'll want an external monitor for multiplayer shooters etc., which most gamers are already fine with, but annoying if you want to game while travelling.
    • JSR_FDED7 hours ago
      Not a “Gamer” so I’m always surprised small things like this make a difference.

      As a rule of thumb, what is a minimum frame rate a game needs? From there how much does each extra fps make a difference, and at what point do you hit diminishing returns?

      • WaxProlix7 hours ago
        Pixel response time is a related concept to framerate but more about how long it takes a pixel to change from one color to the next. Usually measured in cycle time from grey to grey again, a low rate just means that images will be smooshy looking, have unclear boundaries, and end up with a 'motion blur' effect. So even if your mbp supports a reasonable sounding 120hz (8.33ms for a full frame sweep), some of those pixels will still be in transition when the next frame hits. At least, my take on it as a somewhat casual gamer.
      • shoo7 hours ago
        It depends wildly on the type of game.

        e.g. if you're playing a single player turn-based strategy game, you might be taking a few seconds between each decision & UI interaction. Some hard turns you might step away from the computer to think things through for minutes without touching the controls. 30fps for a game like that could be fine. 15-20fps might even be fine, especially if the game engine manages to avoid adding unnecessary input latency & is able to process input events at a faster rate even if the render runs at a low framerate.

        If you're playing competitive FPS games, where reflexes matter, you'd want to get input, network & video latency as low as possible, within reason. Not high-frequency trading low. I have no idea at what point it stops making a competitive difference. If you have +100ms more latency than I do, I suspect that'd give me a noticeable advantage. If you have +10ms more latency than I do, I'm not sure that matters.

        Dan Luu wrote an article about input latency [1] in 2017 where he measured latency by running experiments pressing a key & measuring how long it takes to see a response on the screen. New computers from 2017 would have around 70ms-170ms latency, depending on the model.

        [1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/

        • thot_experiment6 hours ago
          I very much don't trust that article as a baseline. YMMV but I measured with a 240hz camera with a mid-high tier computer and a 144hz monitor in 2018 and a nice computer w/ 165hz in 2025 and I never got the huge latencies he experienced, I had click to photon of something like 10 frames max, so 42ms, with the average IIRC being closer to 5 frames.
        • try-working6 hours ago
          input lag is a minor part of it. it depends on the game, but for example in CS2, refresh rate changes game mechanics like recoil, movement, even trajectories of thrown grenades.

          i went from 60hz to 240hz, with <100fps average, and the difference was still immense. refresh rate is more important than fps, that's how big it is.

      • thefz4 hours ago
        Frame rate has absolutely nothing to do with the screen you project the frames on. In competitive multiplayer shooters, frame rate matters a lot.
    • archagon3 hours ago
      I don’t think it matters. My Studio Display XDR has pretty bad motion performance (similar to Macbook, maybe a touch better) and you can still play first-person shooters perfectly fine. In the general case you don’t notice it much. It’s only a problem with fast planar movement, e.g. strafing along a wall and trying to read some text that’s written on it. (Spelunky 2 is much worse than CS in this regard, but still not a massive issue. Just a bit ugly.)
  • altairprime6 hours ago
    The corresponding WWDC video for toolkit v4 is at https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/357
  • t-36 hours ago
    Isn't the translation layer going away soon though?
    • mcraiha6 hours ago
      Rosetta will go away. Game support won't. "Starting with computers using macOS 28, Rosetta functionality will be available only for certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks." https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527
      • krackers6 hours ago
        Do they plan to have a whitelist of games? I guess they could remove rosetta support for most Cocoa frameworks while keeping OpenGL translation layer.
    • klipklop6 hours ago
      I would assume people would switch to using FEX which is tuned for game performance for the x86 emulation bit.
  • jimz5 hours ago
    What's all the fuss about? I've been gaming on my Mac just fine. https://files.catbox.moe/dfcfha.png
  • nicce5 hours ago
    How it is getting priority if they deprecated Rosetta? Or am I understanding it wrongly?
    • zer0zzz5 hours ago
      They claim enough of Rosetta will continue to exist for games and things like wine to work. I suspect the main thing they want to kill off are all the x86 slices in the mach-o fat binaries for all of the frameworks.
      • inatreecrown24 hours ago
        Do you have a source on that, them claiming continued support for "things like wine"?
  • m4637 hours ago
    Do macs really have GPUs though? Or are they like intel integrated graphics?
    • wtallis6 hours ago
      You might want to not only re-evaluate what you consider a real GPU, but also take a look at what the latest Intel integrated graphics is capable of (Panther Lake laptop chips with 12-core GPU chiplet fabbed by TSMC). Intel is still way behind NVIDIA and AMD in the discrete graphics card market, and their drivers don't have the decades of accumulated hacks to work around badly-written games, but their good iGPUs aren't a nightmare of incompatibility and missing features like they were 15 years ago.
    • numpad05 hours ago
      People say they think it's faster than top of the line RTX 3070[1] and hands down the fastest GPU ever for local LLM purposes, and OTOH they're like Intel integrated graphics with RAM shared VRAM for ultra thin laptops, so the truth is either of that, or somewhere between those two. Probably wherever its TDP suggests.

      1: (Laptop)

    • SXX5 hours ago
      Apple integrated graphics is quite good. Software is the problem.
    • lalaithion7 hours ago
      Yes they have GPUs.
    • weikju7 hours ago
      An on-board GPU is not a GPU?
      • Y-bar5 hours ago
        It’s only a GPU if it’s made in the RTX region of Silicon Valley, otherwise it’s just sparkling floating point calculations.
    • zer0zzz5 hours ago
      This is not the greatest question because it makes it seem that you think unified gpu+cpu socs are all like intel graphics.
  • reedf16 hours ago
    It is, and has been for a long time, a concious choice for apple to avoid gaming.
  • bigyabai7 hours ago
    The original GPTK was mostly comprised of forked code. This bump likely includes a lot of the upstream optimizations that other ARM gamers have been using for a while now.
  • 7 hours ago
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  • bparsons7 hours ago
    The example they give is a frame rate boost on GTA V - a game released 16 years ago.
    • fragmede7 hours ago
      It's not the author's fault that GTA VI hasn't come out yet.
    • Nursie6 hours ago
      Yeah, but at 176 FPS, at first glance it seems competitive with the abilities of some fairly recent dGPUs from nvidia/AMD, though obviously we don't have benchmark-level details here.

      I think this is an article allowing quiet optimism rather than all-out celebration.

  • Jyaif6 hours ago
    I don't think the Game Porting Toolkit is useful these days: LLMs one-shot ports from one graphics API to another.

    Just like programming languages, graphical API choice is irrelevant now.

    • seabrookmx6 hours ago
      You're going to need a source for an LLM one-shotting a port of a AAA title from one graphics API to another...
      • Jyaif3 hours ago
        I one-shotted non trivial software from OpenGL to Metal with a cheap (=non state of the art) LLM. That was 6 months ago.

        Anything in Unreal Engine that you think Fable wouldn't be able to adapt on its own to a different graphics API?

    • zer0zzz5 hours ago
      The game porting toolkit allows windows DX shaders to get runtime translated to high performance metal shaders.

      It provides a path for Rosetta and Wine to handle what they are good at while letting Apple handle the shader lowering in many cases better then dxvk -> moltenvk -> metal (or whatever the new state of the art thing is, I forget the name).

      It’s not JUST for helping with manual porting of the cpu side code.