Gaming On Mac: Game Porting Toolkit Tested! Cyberpunk, Hogwarts, Dead Space + More! By Digital Foundry
Gaming On Mac: Game Porting Toolkit Tested! Cyberpunk, Hogwarts, Dead Space + More! By Digital Foundry
When does this come out for the general public?
It’s a developer tool so likely never, but we can install it now and there are tonnes of guides, e.g. https://youtu.be/dQAPWwhInqo
So basically buy a $4k machine and you can barely eek out 60fps on some games. Better than nothing for sure but probably still cheaper just to buy an extra PC on the side for gaming unless you already have a very high end Mac.
I’ve been using GPTk to run Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade on my (M1 Pro) MacBook Pro. I used CXPatcher to install the GPTk files into Crossover. It’s been a great experience so far.
While this may help game studios port their games over to macOS. But as a consumer, I don’t see it becoming a long term platform for playing games. I might buy an M1 Mac now and be able to play games optimized for M1. But in a year or 2, games become optimized for the latest and greatest MX generation. Now my $4K M1 Mac is useless.
On the PC side, I can simply opt to upgrade a specific component(s) rather than replacing the entire PC.
Maybe it could become viable if Apple opens up their hardware for upgradable components. But I highly doubt that will happen in the next decade.
What I do see as viable is “cloud gaming” which will be portable across all OS and hardware. But unfortunately latency issues and inconsistent network availability block it from going mainstream.
I might buy an M1 Mac now and be able to play games optimized for M1. But in a year or 2, games become optimized for the latest and greatest MX generation. Now my $4K M1 Mac is useless.
I don't see that happening, it doesn't even happen that quickly in PC gaming which is notoriously fast moving. I think it would be more like consoles. Since the pool of hardware is limited, developers can aim at the M1 for example for a few years and then once the market naturally moves on to upgrade in significant numbers they can change the target.
But there's more than just hardware or even porting toolkits like this that are needed for Macs to be core gaming machines. Apple needs to actually care about it for one thing, instead of milking 30% of IAPs until the heat death of the universe.