this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Despite having so many game offerings over the years, it REALLY feels like Apple has still spent 30+ years shitting on games and gamers. They want games and gamers to conform to THEIR rules instead of them catering to games and gamers.
I have a $4000 Mac with top-of-the-line hardware that requires that I use emulators or virtualization if I want to play games. I have a bunch of legit "macOS-native" games on Steam that I cannot play because they are 32-bit. OpenGL was also scrapped, and with it any chance of several games that could have been updated to 64-bit. Apple will tell you that those are old and depreciated technologies. Well, guess what, it doesn't fucking matter.
Meanwhile Microsoft and Linux developers have spent the same 30 years catering to games and gamers, trying to ensure everything under the sun keeps working, regardless of how old it is.
Pretty much any Win32 app from the past 30 years still works on Windows, and Steam on Linux has made it dead-simple to load many Windows games as easily as if they were Linux games.
I'm glad Linux surpassed macOS. I hope it keeps growing. It will be better for everyone when it catches up to Windows, as well.
Completely agree with you on all of this, but I do think Apple are making moves to change this by working with developers on the Metal API. However that’s only forward facing rather than looking at “legacy” support for games. My problem is their focus on mobile first gaming rather than any of their other hardware.
As much as I like Apple products, I’m please Linux is finding its place in gaming. Something had to start giving Microsoft some competition somewhere.
I don't think forcing already over-worked game developers into supporting yet another rendering API is going to win them any bonus points though. Apple's insistence on Metal is very strange and a total reinvention of the wheel on both sides.
A assuming you mean Vulkan, but did you know Metal is older than Vulkan by 2 years? It's hardly a reinvention of the wheel from Apple here. Plus it allows them to give complete low level support of their own silicon and hardware that you're likely to not yet with other APIs. A lot of developers also use MolktonVK to get around that support.
Did you know that Vulkan started out as Mantle which predated Metal by half a year? Anyways, the time of release doesn't really matter. What matters is whether its a graphics standard. Instead of adopting standards and creating a better developer experience for everybody, Apple chooses to go their own way...again. That's the reinvention I am referring to and it causes a trickle down effect that affects everybody else. It's extra work on Apple developers and game devs alike.
No reason why they can't be done via Vulkan extensions IMHO. Also, I am okay with them having Metal for such purposes...as long as they also support Vulkan and other standards. The problem is that they don't.
MoltenVK is just another example of the extra work that everybody else has to do to support Apple's platform.
It's gonna be funny if people start dual-booting Linux on Mac in the future because they get better game support with the reverse engineered Linux GPU drivers.
But they do it in literally everything. Keyboard layout, window management, graphic api, hardware, peripherals, browser api on ios, and the list goes on. Dont get me wrong, I totally hate apple for this, but if in 2023 you expect something different from them, I think it is on you
With specific regard to OpenGL, GL 4.1 is still supported on the latest version of macOS afaik. It was asinine that they deprecated it, but I'm not aware of any reason it would preclude a 64-bit port of a game that previously worked in x86 mode.
@BitingChaos @petsoi this is why valve or some other true Linux laptop need to come in the game. Steam deck proves that Linux can be fun and useful. It’s hard finding a gaming laptop that can be used for all day work like school or whatever.
Even if games update to 64-bit, Steam still has 32-bit libraries and won't run on Mac.
Steam on macOS is 64bit only. Valve had to, else they couldn't run on recent macOS.
Interesting. Though at least the ARM ones cannot run x86 architecture anyway (out of the box unless Apple did something).
My copy of Sims Castaway Stories and my multi-disc games like SimCity 4 and Need for Speed Underground 2 beg to differ.