Tech Radar wrote the most hyperbolic headline I've seen in some time:
Resident Evil Village on the MacBook proves that Apple is the future of PC gaming.
This is such an overstatement that's not even really worth arguing. It's wrong but
I'm much more optimistic about Mac gaming than I've been for a very long time.
This, of course, comes with some pretty big *asterisks* but we will get to that.
[Chill Hip Hop Music]
I have had a pretty good stretch, of not introducing myself in my YouTube videos and I would like to keep that stretch going,
but I do have to talk about myself for one second. That's because at one point in my life among the
many things I've done, I am a former writer for insidemacgames.com during the early 2000s,
when Mac gaming was in a much better place despite the Mac being a much smaller market.
If you haven't heard of inside Mac games; it was basically the biggest Mac gaming publication for quite some time...
.... meaning it was not very big because this is Mac gaming after all.
Anyways... during the late 1990s and early 2000s Apple was not the Goliath that it is today despite
its much smaller market share and Power PC architecture and also changing its operating system
from Mac OS 9 to OS 10 it was not uncommon for large AAA titles to make it to the Mac.
Some of these were the usual suspects like Unreal and Unreal Tournament and
Quake 3 but also we saw Madden Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and 4, Tiger Woods Golf, Alice,
Civilization, The Sims series and so on. Behind the scenes making this happen were
a few publisher slash porting houses like Aspire, Feral Interactive and MacSoft.
These were the companies that had the talented Mac developers who had the skills capable of
porting Windows PC games to the Mac. As Mac users we had some pretty good wins
like the Quake 3 public beta came out first on Mac OS. Here's another good
one that some of you might not know the GeForce 3 first debuted on the Mac. Yes,
really... Apple and Nvidia were once friends or at least on friendly terms.
There's a whole huge story between the saga of Apple and Nvidia and I'm reworking an older video
I made on this very topic so stick around for that. I'll eventually release it. There were even
Mac first gaming titles but if I'm being honest it was mostly the catalog of Bungie software,
like the incredible Marathon series and also the Myth series. As a lot of people
already know Halo was originally a Mac title that was shown by Steve Jobs at Mac world.
[Steve Jobs] This game is going to ship early next
year from Bungie and we're going to see for the first time Halo.
Unfortunately as Apple grew Mac gaming did not. There were a few reasons for this back
in the late 1990s the default computer was a desktop and the minority was the laptop. Sure
it might be Captain Obvious to say this but laptop sacrifices performance for mobility.
In 2005, Apple started shipping more laptops than desktops. I think this is a monumental
change that sometimes gets overlooked, Let's explore this for a second. For example,
in 2005, the iBook packed an ATI Radeon 9550 mobile GPU with 32 Megs of VRAN
on a 4X AGP bus. Compare that to the entry level 17-inch iMac G5,
which shipped with a ATI Radeon 9600 GPU with 128 megabytes of VRAM on an 8X AGP bus.
Later that year, the iMac was refreshed yet again, this time with the ATI Radeon x600 Pro
which had again 128 megabytes of VRAM now on a PCIe bus. I realize these are some old man
GPUs so I don't expect people to really know the performance differences, but you can easily deduce
that the iMac numbers are a lot bigger and if there's one thing gaming likes is bigger numbers.
The summary here is the iMac G5 was a passable gaming machine whereas
the iBook really was not. This meant that less gaming capable
Macs were being sold and thus the market wasn't scaling with the growth of Apple.
The other big change was the switch from PowerPC to Intel. This was a massive shift as it paved
the way for boot camp. Dual booting suddenly meant that any Mac user who was serious about
gaming could install Windows and suddenly have access to the world's largest game library.
Also, another negative of the transition away from PowerPC meant that back catalog of games
needed to be updated if they were to maintain compatibility with Intel Macs.
Anyone who had invested in Mac gaming was suddenly without many of their old game titles.
This had happened a few times already in the max history like the transition from 68k to PowerPC
and OS 9 to OS X. This set Mac gamers back yet again. This inevitably further incentivized Mac
gamers to invest in Windows copies of game titles over the Mac versions as you could
reasonably expect longer term support as Windows uses compatibility layers to extend support to
old software. It was not always effectively for games but still better than nothing.
This is kind of a dead horse topic for me,
if you have spent time watching my channel so I will leave it at that.
During the Intel years the lowest end Mac settled into
using integrated Intel GPUs. These were notoriously underperformers,
which furthered the idea that Macs weren't good for gaming. Bootcamp was the savior
for people semi-serious about gaming but in 2012, Apple stopped shipping any modular.
[Phil Schiller] Mac can't innovate anymore my ass.
Which effectively meant that anyone who wanted to have the best of both worlds, a desktop capable
of booting both Mac OS and Windows with the ability to upgrade its hardware ,specifically
the GPU was left hanging... until 2019 with the return of the Mac Pro, but it's price was twice
as high as it's predecessor, which effectively made it unobtainable.
Some people did resort to using eGPUs, but that was less common. To pour salt in the wound,
Apple decided not to bother to update the Mac version of OpenGL late in the Intel years.
This video is starting to feel like a bit of an indictment of all of Apple's past wrongs as it
pertains to gaming. I swear there's a point to this, so why am I actually excited for
the future of Mac gaming or at least feeling better about it than I have for some time?
First I think is the most obvious the Mac market is huge now. In a single quarter,
Apple sells more Macs than it did in all of 2006.
Depending on the estimate it might be as high as double let me rephrase this.
Apple sells about as many Macs in a year as Sony sells PlayStations.
Next up is the lack of boot camp for Apple silicon. If you care about Mac OS gaming
this is a good thing. You're probably thinking right now.... wait! wait! wait! Hold up! What
did he just say? And I don't want you to get this twisted: This really is negative
across the board for Mac users, but if you squint just right, this has a silver lining.
Tthis means if someone wants to sell a game to the Mac market,
it must be ported instead of banking on dedicated users dual booting.
Virtualization so far just doesn't cut it for modern games and it probably never will.
Next up is the much talked about Apple silicon performance. Yes.... Apple over
hypes its GPU performance. We all know this. I know this as well as anybody. My
Mac Pro 2019 scores double the metal compute benchmarks with a 6900 XT over the M1 Ultra.
This particular data-set is not the end-all be-all benchmark. The
top end of PC GPUs are just so much more performant than Apple silicon. However,
there's one major significant change now. Even the lowliest Apple silicon Mac to ever have shipped,
the M1 air, has more than a 2X increase in its GPU performance over the previous year's model.
This is not groundbreaking gaming performance but it's enough for the air to play modern
titles even if it's a reduced visual fidelity. This really opens up the
market moving forward if Apple continues to offer such a high bar at the bottom floor.
I would argue this is way more important for Mac gaming than whatever the top end
GPU's performances is. Next, we have Metal 3. In a better world,
we'd have Vulkan support natively but Metal 3 is a huge step up.
It doesn't have 100% feature parity with DirectX but it does offer a lot of modern
features like intelligent upscaling like DLSS and Fidelity FX. It also now has the ability
let the GPU load in assets directly without using the CPU,
akin DirectStorage, which was very recently introduced into DirectX.
This really seems to indicate that Apple has an interest in trying to update Metal. Finally,
Apple actually seems somewhat interested in gaming these days. Just check out how serious
they sound when they say the word gaming. [Apple Video ]GAMING. Apple Arcade might sound like a
punch line especially when it's expressed in terms like the following: [Tim Cook] We've joined forces
with the world's most Innovative game developers to push the boundaries of what's possible.....
But it does have some decent games even if they're not the sort of titles that hardcore
gamers are after. What the Golf is nothing short of amazing and I really enjoyed Sneaky Sasquatch.
NBA 2K 23 Arcade Edition might not be the full NBA 2K experience but I was shocked
to see it run decently on my notoriously underpowered MacBook 2017 12-inch in 720p.
Stick this game on any Apple silicon Mac and you're looking at playing this
game buttery smooth at a much higher resolution. [Tim Cook] Apple arcade!
More interesting is Apple recently partnered with a few game studios to bring a few select
titles to the Mac, like Resident Evil Village, No Man's Sky and Baldur's Gate 3.
For anyone on the outside looking in , it's pretty easy for them to scoff at this news but
this is a remarkable improvement over the past several years. We have a long way to
climb to the height of Mac gaming but we're moving in the correct direction. Despite my
feelings about Ventura's preferences, Mac OS finally has proper game controller management.
If I'm not mistaken the last time Mac OS had
anything like this was Game Sprockets under Mac OS 9.
While I might not know very much about the gaming industry I do know that Sony is bringing a lot of
his formerly exclusive games to Windows. There's certainly an opportunity here that Apple could
partner with someone like Sony to bring titles like these to the Mac. Two or three years ago,
this would have seemed near impossible but now it seems like it's in the realm of plausible.
This is why I'm feeling somewhat optimistic. It
won't change overnight but it seems like things are changing.
Hey, if you liked the animated background I was using in this video,
I made a still version that you can use as a desktop background. It's in the
description of this video. If you're looking for something else to watch I suggest checking
out my is "Snow Leopard the greatest release of Mac OS of all time?" video.