I wonder if part of the reason is that apple deprecated opengl on mac os and replaced it with their property graphics api Metal. I image it would be a lot of work to port the source the engine to Metal just for a small amount of users.
Not just OpenGL, they also moved to ARM64 CPU architecture in 2020, which isn’t any longer out of the box compatible with x86_x64 software. It requires extra work and optimization. Using a Mac for gaming is like shooting yourself in the foot. This is also unlikely to change, as moving to ARM64 would lose us all backwards compatibility. I always considered this move of Apple to be a mistake.
Gaming is far from their target market. ARM64 was a smart move for their market. The most commonly used apps are all faster with better battery life, and the transition was pretty smooth.
moving to ARM64 would lose all backwards compatibility.
Well Apple uses a backwards compatibility layer to help with that, it works pretty well from what I’ve heard, but there is a significant performance loss with this approach.
I have an m1 Mac and the Rosetta 2 layer is insanely performant. There is some performance loss but I’d hardly call it significant. It’s imperceptible to me.
I’m both shocked that nobody’s glued together Unicorn Engine and Wine to make WinTel software run on anything, and obviously disinclined to dive into that deep dark hole myself.
Yup. The only reason I play games on macOS is because work gives me a Mac and I want to play games occasionally on it. My main gaming rig is Linux, macOS is just there for the odd 30-min gaming break.
This is a big one. Another one is that developing software for Macs is a huge headache compared to Windows, Linux, and BSD. The tooling simply feels much more awkward to use than most things available on other platforms, and the application packaging is so easy to mess up (not that every developer doesn’t forget the occasional DLL…)
I wonder if part of the reason is that apple deprecated opengl on mac os and replaced it with their property graphics api Metal. I image it would be a lot of work to port the source the engine to Metal just for a small amount of users.
Not just OpenGL, they also moved to ARM64 CPU architecture in 2020, which isn’t any longer out of the box compatible with x86_x64 software. It requires extra work and optimization. Using a Mac for gaming is like shooting yourself in the foot. This is also unlikely to change, as moving to ARM64 would lose us all backwards compatibility. I always considered this move of Apple to be a mistake.
Gaming is far from their target market. ARM64 was a smart move for their market. The most commonly used apps are all faster with better battery life, and the transition was pretty smooth.
Yeah, when I had a Mac it felt like a big smartphone, and it’s pretty good at being that.
Well Apple uses a backwards compatibility layer to help with that, it works pretty well from what I’ve heard, but there is a significant performance loss with this approach.
I have an m1 Mac and the Rosetta 2 layer is insanely performant. There is some performance loss but I’d hardly call it significant. It’s imperceptible to me.
I’m both shocked that nobody’s glued together Unicorn Engine and Wine to make WinTel software run on anything, and obviously disinclined to dive into that deep dark hole myself.
Yup. The only reason I play games on macOS is because work gives me a Mac and I want to play games occasionally on it. My main gaming rig is Linux, macOS is just there for the odd 30-min gaming break.
CS2 uses Vulkan not opengl, apple still don’t support it tho
This is a big one. Another one is that developing software for Macs is a huge headache compared to Windows, Linux, and BSD. The tooling simply feels much more awkward to use than most things available on other platforms, and the application packaging is so easy to mess up (not that every developer doesn’t forget the occasional DLL…)