I love reading the comments on Mac Rumour articles when it's negative news for Apple's platforms or services. To paraphrase: "Vulcan bad!" "Lazy Devs!" "But they support Linux?" and "What a dumb business decision!"
Yes, Apple zealots, Valve is absolutely going to support your vendor-specific graphics API on a platform that they aren't making much money from, and will continue to support and test that platform for years, operating as a charity because they love Apple so much 😂
You can expect this to continue happening for as long as Apple pushes Metal and refuses to support Vulkan [...] If macOS wants to get anywhere it has to be a case "why not support it" instead of "we need to make a Metal compatible version of our engine".
Don't forget that Apple actively breaks software build processes quite frequently for their platform and doesn't allow you to fully automate a lot of them because you need accounts to download the relevant tools and can only use them on Apple hardware. That makes supporting it a pain for cross platform projects.
It sucks when you want to port an app to iOS, or an application to MacOS and find out "oh... I need to have a Mac to compile to these platforms.. and there's no way to otherwise test.."
Meanwhile, with android you can just run an emulator.
Blizzard used to support Mac very well. Diablo and WoW always supported Mac. Valve as well, most Valve first party titles released for Mac. Played lots of Portal 1/2, CS:GO. Also played Minecraft, Sims, KSP.
I do! Lots of modded Minecraft, also Hades, Witcher 3, Tears of the Kingdom and Hollow Knight.
It often requires some tinkering and there isn’t that many games but other than that I love it. Baldur’s Gate 3 released on Mac so I’ll probably play it too eventually. Used to play CS GO, Portal 2 and the other Valve classics back in the day.
If Apple cared about Mac gaming it would actually be great since the recent Macs especially are really capable. But they don’t, so.. it’ll probably stay a niche thing.
I do too! Minecraft and Factorio for sure. BG3 is underwhelming on my M1 MBA, even with the extra RAM, but I mostly use GeForce now for games. I found an adapter from Cable Matters to get that sweet 120Hz at 4k through HDMI. It looks amazing on my TV. The company provides some alternative firmware you can put on the USB-C dongle to make it work, though you need a Windows machine to upgrade the firmware.
I really have no interest in getting another laptop or building a gaming PC I will ignore. I can't justify it. This thing is light, has amazing battery life, and runs everything I need it to. I have a console for other games. If the game isn't on console, osx, or GeForce Now, I just won't play it.
I do agree with some of the others that it would be nice if they got on the Vulcan train.
Same amount of people who play games on Linux. They only support Linux because they have a financial incentive to do so. It's just not attached to player count but instead the success of their own operating system. Steam investing in Linux is like Google investing in Linux.
Mac users are different from others, they don't buy overpriced machines just for gaming. They buy a Mac for the workflow and ecosystem, not for gaming.
Valve saw that, and decided not to waste money on the Mac market.
Apple always makes decisions based on the revenue, Valve did the same for once.
The irony is that volunteers are going to get CS2 running on Apple Silicon before apple purely by reverse engineering their GPUs for Asahi Linux.
Apple really thought they could do what AMD and 3DFX failed to do and randomly push a competitor to Vulkan/OpenGL that only supports a handful of hardware SKUs that aren't dominant in the market anyway.
Metal is incredibly successful... Just not on Mac. It's the graphics API that drives the iPhone and iPad.
It seems like they're worrying about Macs again, but when Metal was released the focus was iOS and it did bring significant performance improvements to that platform.
We can say whatever we want about mobile games, but in numbers, they're dominant and the App Store is one of Apple's biggest revenue sources.
Games "tend" to dominate a single, or very few cores. With modern PCs having 4 or more. You can push an isa-translator off on to a low power core. Since it won't be a constant, heavy lifting task. Then push the translated instructions through your high performance cores. Your biggest penalty on that will generally be a small bit of latency.
Your biggest hit will likely come from having to wrap graphics APIs. But again, that hit is generally what it takes to do the same under Linux with wine/proton.
But as long as your CPUs can push the instructions fast enough. Your data bus can manage the data transfers in a timely manner. And your graphics subsystem can handle the load. It's a doable task.
It's very similar to emulating retro systems in a number of ways.
Nah not even close, it's so tedious and a pain in the ass to develop for apple. I understand why they don't want to do it, and as they say, not s lot of people even play on a mac. So why even bother?
uninstalled it today, it's really a gameplay downgrade from cs:go and that wasn't my fav cs by far.
really shitty that they basically took cs:go away too. yeah, I dig the levels and lighting and crosshairs but otherwise the experience, both multiplayer and even bot practice gameplay was pretty meh.
Not there yet, but the odds are good that it's gonna return as soon as they're finished fixing the game. For the old Workshop you can switch to the csgo beta branch.