I love reading the comments on Mac Rumour articles when it’s negative news for Apple’s platforms or services. To paraphrase: “Vulcan bad!” “Lazy Devs!” “But they support Linux?” and “What a dumb business decision!”
Yes, Apple zealots, Valve is absolutely going to support your vendor-specific graphics API on a platform that they aren’t making much money from, and will continue to support and test that platform for years, operating as a charity because they love Apple so much 😂
Don’t forget that Apple actively breaks software build processes quite frequently for their platform and doesn’t allow you to fully automate a lot of them because you need accounts to download the relevant tools and can only use them on Apple hardware. That makes supporting it a pain for cross platform projects.
It sucks when you want to port an app to iOS, or an application to MacOS and find out “oh… I need to have a Mac to compile to these platforms… and there’s no way to otherwise test…”
Meanwhile, with android you can just run an emulator.
One of the comments said
You can expect this to continue happening for as long as Apple pushes Metal and refuses to support Vulkan […] If macOS wants to get anywhere it has to be a case “why not support it” instead of “we need to make a Metal compatible version of our engine”.
And I couldn’t have said it better myself
I am with Valve, who plays games on Mac anyway?
I do! Lots of modded Minecraft, also Hades, Witcher 3, Tears of the Kingdom and Hollow Knight.
It often requires some tinkering and there isn’t that many games but other than that I love it. Baldur’s Gate 3 released on Mac so I’ll probably play it too eventually. Used to play CS GO, Portal 2 and the other Valve classics back in the day.
If Apple cared about Mac gaming it would actually be great since the recent Macs especially are really capable. But they don’t, so… it’ll probably stay a niche thing.
But why? Why would you buy a Mac twice the price for gaming when you can buy other cheaper gaming brands?
You said it right, Apple doesn’t care about gaming, and so are their customers.
Apple would not move a finger without return.
Never said I bought it for gaming. It’s my main computer I use for everything, and if I can use it for games, I will.
I also have a desktop PC I use only for gaming but I rarely turn it on, it’s annoying to switch computers and I would rather play on a laptop most of the times.
I do too! Minecraft and Factorio for sure. BG3 is underwhelming on my M1 MBA, even with the extra RAM, but I mostly use GeForce now for games. I found an adapter from Cable Matters to get that sweet 120Hz at 4k through HDMI. It looks amazing on my TV. The company provides some alternative firmware you can put on the USB-C dongle to make it work, though you need a Windows machine to upgrade the firmware.
I really have no interest in getting another laptop or building a gaming PC I will ignore. I can’t justify it. This thing is light, has amazing battery life, and runs everything I need it to. I have a console for other games. If the game isn’t on console, osx, or GeForce Now, I just won’t play it.
I do agree with some of the others that it would be nice if they got on the Vulcan train.
Ayy, nice! I got a base 14" M1 Pro myself and it’s a blast, especially thanks to that display. The refresh rate, brightness and colors are amazing. If you’d like to stay with a single computer, I’d totally recommend upgrading to it as the performance makes a lot more games playable.
Check out the Create mod in Minecraft if you like Factorio, you will love it. It’s basically Factorio but in Minecraft. Oh and Hades should run well on your MBA as well, I’d recommend you try it if you haven’t already!
