My theory is that Apple chooses to make gaming a second class experience on Mac because they don't want the Mac brand to be associated with the main demographics that play AAA games.

I agree with you on wine, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are doing this quietly (landing patches to make Wine better on Mac), but for the purposes of making directx shaders perform better I fail to see why it matters if they support dx to metal conversion or if they support vulkan (for the goals of making games run better for their customers)?

Most of those are gonna work using Rosetta, crossover, and the game porting toolkit.

You really don’t need Apple to support 32Bit x86 macOS games when it’s not much more overhead to run windows x86 games (which is easily the better library to spend time Optimizing for).

I disagree. When OS X went to Intel, there was an explosion of Mac games on Steam. Valve went all in with big ports of TF2 (complete with exclusive era-appropriate in-game items like the earbuds), and all their other games soon followed.

Apple self-owned themselves by slowly killing off support for this, culminating with the transition to the M chips and the upcoming removal of Rosetta to put the final nail in the coffin. Their negligence to support a major market is their downfall here. The hardware is more than willing, the software and company are causing the fumbles.

I think you are right. I suspect any mac gaming share that gets bootstrapped will have to come the crossover/proton way. Thats probably good enough for starters.

Easy fix. Apple can just stop breaking compatibility and partner with Valve to port Proton support to Mac.

But they wont do it because they want to push their own walled garden. And obviously no one will support it because macOS market share is smaller than Linux market share.

Some engines nicely support Mac out of the box. I’m making a party fighter in LOVE2D and am having a good time developing and playing on Mac (cross platform online play is working well too, my friends are all Windows).

Maybe Unity or Godot also offer this benefit? If so then Mac gaming could become much better supported, at least from indies!

    That isn't worth the effort 

That's not the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room for gaming on Mac is Apple's policy non-commitment to traditional gaming. Technical support for non-gambling gaming is just a checkbox item to them for mandatory 45-second segments in product launches. That transcends into their customers and develop into various gaming and Mac related chicken and egg problems.

Personally I would gladly switch to mac as my actual personal PC if games ran well on it.

Isn’t the point that significantly reducing the effort required changes the “is it worth it” equation?

I don't get this attitude.

It'll never be enough until it is. Making porting lower-effort and higher performance can only help.

Not a “Gamer” so I’m always surprised small things like this make a difference.

As a rule of thumb, what is a minimum frame rate a game needs? From there how much does each extra fps make a difference, and at what point do you hit diminishing returns?

I don’t think it matters. My Studio Display XDR has pretty bad motion performance (similar to Macbook, maybe a touch better) and you can still play first-person shooters perfectly fine. In the general case you don’t notice it much. It’s only a problem with fast planar movement, e.g. strafing along a wall and trying to read some text that’s written on it. (Spelunky 2 is much worse than CS in this regard, but still not a massive issue. Just a bit ugly.)

Rosetta will go away. Game support won't. "Starting with computers using macOS 28, Rosetta functionality will be available only for certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks." https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527

I would assume people would switch to using FEX which is tuned for game performance for the x86 emulation bit.

They claim enough of Rosetta will continue to exist for games and things like wine to work. I suspect the main thing they want to kill off are all the x86 slices in the mach-o fat binaries for all of the frameworks.

You might want to not only re-evaluate what you consider a real GPU, but also take a look at what the latest Intel integrated graphics is capable of (Panther Lake laptop chips with 12-core GPU chiplet fabbed by TSMC). Intel is still way behind NVIDIA and AMD in the discrete graphics card market, and their drivers don't have the decades of accumulated hacks to work around badly-written games, but their good iGPUs aren't a nightmare of incompatibility and missing features like they were 15 years ago.

People say they think it's faster than top of the line RTX 3070[1] and hands down the fastest GPU ever for local LLM purposes, and OTOH they're like Intel integrated graphics with RAM shared VRAM for ultra thin laptops, so the truth is either of that, or somewhere between those two. Probably wherever its TDP suggests.

1: (Laptop)

Apple integrated graphics is quite good. Software is the problem.

Yes they have GPUs.

This is not the greatest question because it makes it seem that you think unified gpu+cpu socs are all like intel graphics.

An on-board GPU is not a GPU?

The boosted framerate picture seems to show noticeably less of the rain effect.

It's not the author's fault that GTA VI hasn't come out yet.

Yeah, but at 176 FPS, at first glance it seems competitive with the abilities of some fairly recent dGPUs from nvidia/AMD, though obviously we don't have benchmark-level details here.

I think this is an article allowing quiet optimism rather than all-out celebration.

You're going to need a source for an LLM one-shotting a port of a AAA title from one graphics API to another...

The game porting toolkit allows windows DX shaders to get runtime translated to high performance metal shaders.

It provides a path for Rosetta and Wine to handle what they are good at while letting Apple handle the shader lowering in many cases better then dxvk -> moltenvk -> metal (or whatever the new state of the art thing is, I forget the name).

It’s not JUST for helping with manual porting of the cpu side code.