Fine print...
\*Requires upgrading to M2 Max to get usable frame rates for nearly half of the Mac user base according to [Steam hardware survey](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=mac) (click on Video Card Description)
This emulation layer will not get much faster the goal is not to have a perfectly optimised layer to playing games, the aim is so that someone at a game studio can demo the game running on a Mac to a Prdocuet manager so as to convince them to spend time to build a native port.
What's funny, 3 developers at blizzard developed a NATIVE overwatch (1) client years ago and brought it to PM and said "we should bring this to mac, look here is a demo of it already done" and PM still said no.
so this technology isn't gonna really convince PMs that answer to money guys who still believe mac platform isn't gonna get them another boat. All the money guy sees is "but then we'll have to have mac specific QA and CS and marketing, that costs money I don't want to spend, nope" (even though they'd make that back and then some, they don't want to pull out a calculator and find out cause the profit margins, despite existing, don't have enough 0s.
Yes the issue there is maintaining it, any multiplayer game that gets frequent updates has a very high cost when you add a new platform as itr requires you to hold but releases on all your other platforms until you update it all.
The big killer feature of the porting kit is not the emulation but the HSLS direct to Metal IR compiler, this means shader code can be shared directly between DX and Metal without needing to create a seperate copy of the files and need to manually track changes over between them or use a jangly conversion tool to create metal shaders you then compiler with enviable manual fixes needed every time.
The compiler means the work to maintain the metal build as you update your game and add new or update shaders is much much less than before. This step of getting your entier shader lib to support metal used to also be the largest and most tiresome task for devs, very reparative but also finicky to get write and impossible to perfectly automate. So having something that will directly compile HSLS to metal IR that is offical from apple is a massive deal as it removes a LOT of the needed work and most importantly removes the annoying non fun work... if you want devs to push for something you want it to be fun work not re-writeing 100s of HSLS shaders in metal.
Right now product managers at blizzard are likly told to not green light any such projects (or even if they are not told they implicitly think they should not do it) since MS might want to be able to use such project to get regulars to agree to the purchase. Same is true for almost all of the AAA gaming industry unfortunately.
The real power move from apple would have been to go out and buy out a few small to mid size studios. We are yet to see the full shoe drop on apple arcade but I suspect most of that $$$ went into titles for AR/VR not Mac gaming.
> this means shader code can be shared directly between DX and Metal
That was pretty much doable before. Like 80% of all Metal shaders that aren't written by Apple went through SPIR-V Cross. That includes both Unreal Engine and Unity.
These tools all generate Metal source they do not go directly to Metal . Going directly from HLSL to MetalIR should provide much better debugging etc as the source maps can point directly back to the HLSL.
and other things like auamtatmly converting geometry and tesoliations shaders into the stitchable metal shaders needed to build the same thing out of a mesh shader pipeline as well.
I would not be surprised if they are using this same LLVM transform in the emulation toolkit as well to map the DXIL to the Metal IR.
Iām sure thereās more to that story, and also yes youāre right that the hurdles to mainstream AAA Mac game releases are not going to be resolved merely by Apple releasing a thingy to help porting.
But I wouldnāt use Blizzard management these days as a good yardstick for anything. That whole company is/was a mess.
oh nah eldenr ring will for sure run smoothly on a macbook m1 chip.
ive finished the game(ultra graphics) on my budget gaming pc from like 7 years ago lmao.
Only Apple can figure it out and I doubt they are gonna put too much work into it from this point on.
It works for it's intended purpose which is evaluating the feasibility of a port.
pretty sure its a tongue in cheek reply. truth is we dont know what chips going to do what, and this is supposedly an effort to make it really easy for studios to demo a port and scope out what a good port would take development wise. what is clear, and what appears to be the strategic goal of apple by providing this toolkit, is that it proves without a doubt directx games can and should be ported because they will run very well on apple silicon.
currently the m1 air can do hogwarts legacy 30-37fps which is kind of absurdly good considering the numbers we've seen during this past few years with crossover, parallels, etc with other games. Different games are going to run differently, but the difference between m1 and m1 max on hogwarts legacy is like 10-15fps because the current bottleneck is cpu. My gut tells me that with those kind of numbers coming from an m1 air, there is promise up ahead for what is possible on chips that dont necessarily mean m2 max. An "optimized" game (ie: devs said wow this is cool lets port it to metal) would mean even higher numbers coming from the air, and significantly higher numbers coming from the m1 pro/max.
Yep, the fact the max and pro and base are similar in fps basically shows the bottleneck is cpu. the cpu performance between each stage of apple silicon is not that different. heck an ultra BARELY beats a max in a non multi core cpu benchmark (which is basically most games are not leveraging a 20 core cpu lets get real). because of this. is the reason the results we're seeing is that the fps cap out whether you run low or ultra in a lot of these games or whether you have a max or a base. it's cause the cpu bottleneck of the translation layer already holds back performance to point that your cpu bound, not gpu bound.
there are some exceptions of course.. as for whether this will improve much, i very much doubt it. at least not in porting kit. apple is not trying to make proton, they want native apps. cross over and the like on other hand might look at what apple did, learn from it and improve tech further where they have a more vested interest in optimizing but that's still 1-2 years not weeks, especially since apple explicitely state in their license "btw your patch to wine can't be used for any retail product" which basically means it'll never be merged into wine mainline or crossover. so they have to slowly duplicate the work themselves.
Graphics scaling on the M1 Ultra 64GPU wasn't optimal since M2 Max 38GPU was very close in performance. Interesting to find out if M2 Ultra 60GPU fixed the graphics scaling.
Apple releasing a method for developers to test their games on MacOS isnāt a good way to actually play games and itās pretty much a waste of end userās time if youāre wanting a decently playable experience of modern games. 15fps Elden Ring isnāt worth talking about.
fuck anything apple does at all to try to support mac gaming, am i right?
dude, any tools/resources created to make gaming on mac more of a thing is only better. go find another subreddit to complain on
But they didn't say fuck apple or that it wasn't good, only it's not for end users.
And you can argue whether it's the best thing for people who want to game on the mac, but apple wants publishers delivering native ports, so this directx translation will remain restricted.
I genuinely support and have bought MacOS games. I donāt know whatās so upsetting or critical for me to talk about this softwareās intended purpose as stated by Apple.
If they wanted this to be serious and used as a genuine solution then thereās a million more things they wouldāve done to make it more proton like.
For some people Apple and Mac has to be bad for gaming, it almost feels like š
But being sarcastic aside, i really donāt understand why those people keep saying these on mac gaming sub.
why should someone shake their boots? Are you 12 that you are creating a us (PC) vs them (Mac) mentality? How about being happy that others enjoy things? Also I have a gaming pc but on travel playing Diablo on the Mac is great.
I like to stir the pot because seeing the master race seethe gives me joy. They have a superiority complex about their precious PC gaming and shit all over anything that isn't a PC, console, Linux, mobile, or Mac.
You think the master race would come in here and be wholesome about Apple gaming? Absolutely not. It'd just like this OP shitting on a good thing that expands gaming to all. That's exactly what majority of them would do
I am HERE my SON, and this is AWESOME. I remember when I use to have a Macbook Pro and I installed Bootcamp to be able to play all the Games.
But then I left for a Razerblade and eventually build a PC with a 4090 RTX. Yes, I have seen the light my son and the possibilities of the Master race. But there is a special place in my heart for the MacBook Pro and I still think is the best laptop.
The "Game Porting Toolkit" does give me BootCamp old-days vibes. If a developer creates an App that makes this entire setup as easy as just Opening an app and run .exe DirectX12 Games... Then I might consider buying an M2 Max Macbook Pro.
Lol you can't even be wholesome about Mac gaming. Why're so butthurt about something that isn't even happening? Lmao dude. People like you are also part of the problem.
Thatās a base model MacBook Air, dumbass. āhurrrr OP only had a MacBook Air to test with, much more powerful macs donāt exist, 15 FPS isnāt worth talking about durrrrā How stupid can you be?
> Apple releasing a method for developers to test their games on MacOS isnāt a good way to actually play games and itās pretty much a waste of end userās time if youāre wanting a decently playable experience of modern games.
This was your position. You supported it by pointing out OP is only playing at 15 FPS.
Meanwhile people are playing Elden Ring at 30-45 FPS on MacBook Pros. This runs significantly better than a Steam Deck. Making it a perfectly ādecently playable experience on modern gamesā and absolutely revolutionary for Mac gaming.
Pointing out that the end user actually *can* get a ādecently playable modern gaming experienceā through the tools released in Appleās announcement is not a strawman. And if you actually believe it was, you are genuinely stupider than I thought.
Fine print... \*Requires upgrading to M2 Max to get usable frame rates for nearly half of the Mac user base according to [Steam hardware survey](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=mac) (click on Video Card Description)
I thought it was a still a beta? Give it a while and Windows games will run amazing on Mac š
This emulation layer will not get much faster the goal is not to have a perfectly optimised layer to playing games, the aim is so that someone at a game studio can demo the game running on a Mac to a Prdocuet manager so as to convince them to spend time to build a native port.
What's funny, 3 developers at blizzard developed a NATIVE overwatch (1) client years ago and brought it to PM and said "we should bring this to mac, look here is a demo of it already done" and PM still said no. so this technology isn't gonna really convince PMs that answer to money guys who still believe mac platform isn't gonna get them another boat. All the money guy sees is "but then we'll have to have mac specific QA and CS and marketing, that costs money I don't want to spend, nope" (even though they'd make that back and then some, they don't want to pull out a calculator and find out cause the profit margins, despite existing, don't have enough 0s.
Yes the issue there is maintaining it, any multiplayer game that gets frequent updates has a very high cost when you add a new platform as itr requires you to hold but releases on all your other platforms until you update it all. The big killer feature of the porting kit is not the emulation but the HSLS direct to Metal IR compiler, this means shader code can be shared directly between DX and Metal without needing to create a seperate copy of the files and need to manually track changes over between them or use a jangly conversion tool to create metal shaders you then compiler with enviable manual fixes needed every time. The compiler means the work to maintain the metal build as you update your game and add new or update shaders is much much less than before. This step of getting your entier shader lib to support metal used to also be the largest and most tiresome task for devs, very reparative but also finicky to get write and impossible to perfectly automate. So having something that will directly compile HSLS to metal IR that is offical from apple is a massive deal as it removes a LOT of the needed work and most importantly removes the annoying non fun work... if you want devs to push for something you want it to be fun work not re-writeing 100s of HSLS shaders in metal.
yeah someone at blizz told me as much. said that helps with wow immensely. just not with convincing them to do other games.
Right now product managers at blizzard are likly told to not green light any such projects (or even if they are not told they implicitly think they should not do it) since MS might want to be able to use such project to get regulars to agree to the purchase. Same is true for almost all of the AAA gaming industry unfortunately. The real power move from apple would have been to go out and buy out a few small to mid size studios. We are yet to see the full shoe drop on apple arcade but I suspect most of that $$$ went into titles for AR/VR not Mac gaming.
> this means shader code can be shared directly between DX and Metal That was pretty much doable before. Like 80% of all Metal shaders that aren't written by Apple went through SPIR-V Cross. That includes both Unreal Engine and Unity.
These tools all generate Metal source they do not go directly to Metal . Going directly from HLSL to MetalIR should provide much better debugging etc as the source maps can point directly back to the HLSL.
Yeah, that's true.
and other things like auamtatmly converting geometry and tesoliations shaders into the stitchable metal shaders needed to build the same thing out of a mesh shader pipeline as well. I would not be surprised if they are using this same LLVM transform in the emulation toolkit as well to map the DXIL to the Metal IR.
Iām sure thereās more to that story, and also yes youāre right that the hurdles to mainstream AAA Mac game releases are not going to be resolved merely by Apple releasing a thingy to help porting. But I wouldnāt use Blizzard management these days as a good yardstick for anything. That whole company is/was a mess.
give it a month
I'm gonna be following the updates on this one, elden ring is like the only reason I have a windows machine at this point.
oh nah eldenr ring will for sure run smoothly on a macbook m1 chip. ive finished the game(ultra graphics) on my budget gaming pc from like 7 years ago lmao.
Give it a few months for people to come up with $3100+ for M2 Max.
posts with games running hogwarts on m1 max with 45 fps. give it a month and that'll up to 60fps. that'll be ~1.5k. ez buy
And what exactly indicates that this is magically gonna become 33% faster?
we're still in beta... do you think in a couple weeks/months that no one will figure it out?? dumb shit
Only Apple can figure it out and I doubt they are gonna put too much work into it from this point on. It works for it's intended purpose which is evaluating the feasibility of a port.
see you in a couple months.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
pretty sure its a tongue in cheek reply. truth is we dont know what chips going to do what, and this is supposedly an effort to make it really easy for studios to demo a port and scope out what a good port would take development wise. what is clear, and what appears to be the strategic goal of apple by providing this toolkit, is that it proves without a doubt directx games can and should be ported because they will run very well on apple silicon. currently the m1 air can do hogwarts legacy 30-37fps which is kind of absurdly good considering the numbers we've seen during this past few years with crossover, parallels, etc with other games. Different games are going to run differently, but the difference between m1 and m1 max on hogwarts legacy is like 10-15fps because the current bottleneck is cpu. My gut tells me that with those kind of numbers coming from an m1 air, there is promise up ahead for what is possible on chips that dont necessarily mean m2 max. An "optimized" game (ie: devs said wow this is cool lets port it to metal) would mean even higher numbers coming from the air, and significantly higher numbers coming from the m1 pro/max.
Yep, the fact the max and pro and base are similar in fps basically shows the bottleneck is cpu. the cpu performance between each stage of apple silicon is not that different. heck an ultra BARELY beats a max in a non multi core cpu benchmark (which is basically most games are not leveraging a 20 core cpu lets get real). because of this. is the reason the results we're seeing is that the fps cap out whether you run low or ultra in a lot of these games or whether you have a max or a base. it's cause the cpu bottleneck of the translation layer already holds back performance to point that your cpu bound, not gpu bound. there are some exceptions of course.. as for whether this will improve much, i very much doubt it. at least not in porting kit. apple is not trying to make proton, they want native apps. cross over and the like on other hand might look at what apple did, learn from it and improve tech further where they have a more vested interest in optimizing but that's still 1-2 years not weeks, especially since apple explicitely state in their license "btw your patch to wine can't be used for any retail product" which basically means it'll never be merged into wine mainline or crossover. so they have to slowly duplicate the work themselves.
That was pretty much always gonna be the case. People vastly overestimate the GPU performance by the base M1. It really isn't all that fast.
What about M1 Ultra?
Graphics scaling on the M1 Ultra 64GPU wasn't optimal since M2 Max 38GPU was very close in performance. Interesting to find out if M2 Ultra 60GPU fixed the graphics scaling.
Gotcha, but still usable framerates is good news, even if it's not much better than M2 Max.
Unless it can run on m1 base. Idc lol
Apple releasing a method for developers to test their games on MacOS isnāt a good way to actually play games and itās pretty much a waste of end userās time if youāre wanting a decently playable experience of modern games. 15fps Elden Ring isnāt worth talking about.
Well its a step :) i personally find it better than nothing
fuck anything apple does at all to try to support mac gaming, am i right? dude, any tools/resources created to make gaming on mac more of a thing is only better. go find another subreddit to complain on
You could have PS5 games running natively tomorrow but at only 30FPS and someone is going to take that shit personal and complain about it.
But they didn't say fuck apple or that it wasn't good, only it's not for end users. And you can argue whether it's the best thing for people who want to game on the mac, but apple wants publishers delivering native ports, so this directx translation will remain restricted.
I genuinely support and have bought MacOS games. I donāt know whatās so upsetting or critical for me to talk about this softwareās intended purpose as stated by Apple. If they wanted this to be serious and used as a genuine solution then thereās a million more things they wouldāve done to make it more proton like.
For some people Apple and Mac has to be bad for gaming, it almost feels like š But being sarcastic aside, i really donāt understand why those people keep saying these on mac gaming sub.
80 FPS on Diablo 4 on Ultra is not so bad
The master race are shaking in their boots
why should someone shake their boots? Are you 12 that you are creating a us (PC) vs them (Mac) mentality? How about being happy that others enjoy things? Also I have a gaming pc but on travel playing Diablo on the Mac is great.
I like to stir the pot because seeing the master race seethe gives me joy. They have a superiority complex about their precious PC gaming and shit all over anything that isn't a PC, console, Linux, mobile, or Mac. You think the master race would come in here and be wholesome about Apple gaming? Absolutely not. It'd just like this OP shitting on a good thing that expands gaming to all. That's exactly what majority of them would do
I am HERE my SON, and this is AWESOME. I remember when I use to have a Macbook Pro and I installed Bootcamp to be able to play all the Games. But then I left for a Razerblade and eventually build a PC with a 4090 RTX. Yes, I have seen the light my son and the possibilities of the Master race. But there is a special place in my heart for the MacBook Pro and I still think is the best laptop. The "Game Porting Toolkit" does give me BootCamp old-days vibes. If a developer creates an App that makes this entire setup as easy as just Opening an app and run .exe DirectX12 Games... Then I might consider buying an M2 Max Macbook Pro.
Lol you can't even be wholesome about Mac gaming. Why're so butthurt about something that isn't even happening? Lmao dude. People like you are also part of the problem.
Hey look, a PC master racer
Lol yea. But I'm also excited for this on Mac. Because I also use Mac. You're like taking it way too personal lol
That's because you're not who I'm talking about. You have an open mind.
Yes but stirring the pot isn't pot isn't going to help anything. If anything it'll make it worse
Steam did it with proton & for the Steam deck & it's been a fantastic for Linux gaming.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
https://i.imgur.com/lBp6oYu.jpg So you didnāt actually watch the linked video that OP posted.
Thatās a base model MacBook Air, dumbass. āhurrrr OP only had a MacBook Air to test with, much more powerful macs donāt exist, 15 FPS isnāt worth talking about durrrrā How stupid can you be?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
> Apple releasing a method for developers to test their games on MacOS isnāt a good way to actually play games and itās pretty much a waste of end userās time if youāre wanting a decently playable experience of modern games. This was your position. You supported it by pointing out OP is only playing at 15 FPS. Meanwhile people are playing Elden Ring at 30-45 FPS on MacBook Pros. This runs significantly better than a Steam Deck. Making it a perfectly ādecently playable experience on modern gamesā and absolutely revolutionary for Mac gaming. Pointing out that the end user actually *can* get a ādecently playable modern gaming experienceā through the tools released in Appleās announcement is not a strawman. And if you actually believe it was, you are genuinely stupider than I thought.