The M4 Pro chip inside Apple's ludicrously tiny new Mac Mini would make for an unbelievably good handheld gaming PC
Pity nothing like that will ever happen.
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If developers actually supported macOS, it would be a way better form factor over PCs. PCs consume ludicrous amounts of power, while my M1 Max MacBook Pro could run Baldur's Gate 3 at max graphics with no performance issues. On battery. Over extended periods. Make ARM better already.
Macs can game--people just don't want them to.
Cyberpunk was just announced.
It seems Apple is making a run at this again. And they have all the pieces this time. And the industry is very mature, and the tech landscape has become rather flat across consoles and PCs.
The PC world as a whole is now seriously eyeing ARM as their base too.
The Switch is already ARM, and very successful. With a follow up that will be the same architecture.
Now’s the time if there ever was one.
Cyberpunk was just announced.
The problem is Apple is chasing after individual games to be released for Mac instead of fixing the underlying issue that developing for Mac is too expensive. Every year they proudly announce one or two new AAA games and meanwhile hundreds of new games were released on every other platform and I just want more indie titles. What is their end goal? I don’t understand.
Uh, Unity and Unreal do Mac builds quite easily. Most indies use those. These engines take care of Metal, and Mac support. Godot also does fine, to my knowledge.
The AAA games that have been announced and brought over during recent years have actually often been games that don’t use those two engines. Indies use those two engines a lot, though.
If you just mean buying the hardware is expensive. Then I guess you have a point. But the Mac Mini is capable of finishing off the Mac details on Unity and Unreal games just fine.
I’m not saying everything is perfect. But it’s all progressively getting better.
Edit: I should mention that the code signing situation is a big bummer. Something should be done to make that easier and any fees a one time thing.
If it’s so easy why are less and less games released for Mac? There used to be a surge of new games, when Steam added Mac support, but then it dropped and now it feels like no dev cares anymore.
People being the people making the games.
Apple's love affair with Metal and the utter lack of Vulkan support for ages on Apple silicon slowed down/totally killed anyone porting games.
This really didn't get sorted out until pretty recently, and shit's gotten better in the last six months or a year.
Hopefully it keeps getting ports and such, but it took WAY too damn long to even be in a position for this to start happening.
Yep this is the real reason - Apple is so hostile towards developers and no support outside of proprietary Metal API it’s no surprise there are few games.
Part of this is Apple's fault. They were part of the head council of the Kronos group responsible for Vulkan, but chose to implement a proprietary graphics API (Metal) over just rolling Vulkan.... Developers obviously don't want to support an additional graphics library on top of what they already do (significant effort) so you lose a lot of games that would've been otherwise marginally expensive to port over.
You have it backwards here. Apple needs to support developers. They make it expensive and inconvenient to develop on their ecosystem. But until Apple releases their stranglehold, I would be just fine if I never have to use their shitty OS, development software, and tools ever again.
my M1 Max MacBook Pro could run Baldur's Gate 3 at max graphics with no performance issues. On battery. Over extended periods
I'm a bit skeptical on this claim, or maybe we have different ideas of what "extended periods" mean. My M1 Max MBP would have just under two hours of run time with VS Code doing .NET Core dev. It was even worse when doing Ruby on Rails work. And that was when MBP was new. My whole team were issued these, and our experiences were the same. Zoom calls were even worse, with about 90 minutes of run time.
The ARM architecture has amazing battery life when idling, quite unlike x86. But when it gets spooled up, it eats angry pixies just the same as x86. All of my x86 laptops can do .NET Core work.. for two hours.
I couldn't believe how long I could get out of my 15" M2 Air's battery when playing No Man's Sky. A good five hours of gameplay without needing to worry about plugging in. Meanwhile, my previous Intel MacBook struggled to get five hours on standby.
