Such a great breakdown Quinn. Basically its the same conclusion I landed on with SteamOS 3 years ago, where I challenged Valve to put up or shut up about it. And here we are on the eve of SteamOS 3.0 running on Arch with nearly 100% compatibility. You're exactly right, Apple needs to incentive studios and publishers to support the platform if they truly want to get behind gaming on a Mac.
Developers have already several incentives to deploy on Mac: customers more eager to pay (that’s why there are so many exclusive apps for iOS), a decent market share (15% according to some stats), good graphic libraries, middleware that already takes care of everything. On top of everything there is the lack of competition: with few developers supporting, you are more likely to make money… any AA/AAA title would be immediately spotlighted on the App Store. The problem is that of the 15% of computers, the % of machines good for gaming is small, and the % of people interested in gaming is really small… so big titles are at risk of not recouping the cost of porting (which requires extra marketing and most importantly testing), and Apple itself would be looking at equally flushing down the toilet piles of cash to secure exclusives. Plus game devs tend to fall in the “artist” camp, so they want most people possible to enjoy their creations. And gamers don’t like exclusives either, it’s been said over and over in the last few years that the more ubiquitous a game is, the more chances of success it has… the aforementioned problems just make Macs not viable platform. The only incentive Apple could offer is a more powerful baseline lineup.
@@unleashthedog I think I agree with you on this, the more powerful baseline would seriously raise numbers for the gamer potential. As things stand now, you can get a serious gaming PC especially on desktop for the price equivalent to MB Air. This means you can basically buy MacBook Air for MacOS specific applications and run the rest of the stuff on your Windows gaming PC, for a combined price of just one of these new MacBooks Pro line.
@@unleashthedog I agree almost completely, but Apple can't really make their products that good for gaming. Their entire design philosophy would have to change and they would have to fix their horrible relationship with Nvidia. Apple has a huge problem with cooling (even their M1 chips have been proven to be up to 30% faster with cooler modifications) and they have simply refused to fix that problem because they prioritize the thin and light aspects over everything else. While that is a big point in their favor for some, it's awful for gaming due to the lack of thermal headroom for powerful dedicated GPU's to be included. Apple gets around the problem partially with their software optimization, but that alone is not enough to be able to run current gen AAA games at decent settings and framerates. Apple could do this super easily, but they refuse to. It takes them 3-6 years to change extraordinarily small aspects of their design. They won't make a new lineup or do a full 180 because they MIGHT get a little more marketshare in the gaming space.
@@unleashthedog Just a note, Apple has roughly an 8% market share of PCs WW. This excludes Chromebooks which would dilute that number even more. Like you said, it's a math game. It simply isn't worth supporting the platform for maybe 2% more customers.
3 года назад+1335
I'm not even mad because of the title, I'm just sad that you gave me hope that I could finally use just one machine for work and gaming, godammit.
Snazzy's clickbait titles are getting out of hand. Kind of sad. You'd think he'd be above that. Apple's bottleneck isn't the hardware, but their graphics API.
@@ocularpatdown Apple and Google have a similar problem with implementation on traditional gaming: chicken and egg. Traditional PC gamers are literally gatekeeping the possibilities for alternative accesible forms of gaming because of the sunk-cost fallacy of owning/investing in a game ecosystem. If game ecosystems were more accepting of outside access to other forms of hardware outside of the big 3, then Macs/Chromebooks w/ Stadia wouldn’t be so nerfed in access in triple AAA titles.
I really love that you are a mac enthusiast yet you aren't disillusioned to the fact that Apple has pretty much shot themselves in the foot as far as gaming goes on Macs. Heres to hoping that Apple cleans up their act and starts to incentivize game studios to make games for MacOS
I hope they do. Simply because windows has great has they are for gaming not everyone like that os. Linux has been improving now it time for Macs to do the same. Imagine a world where windows Linux and Mac are great for Linux. The best for consumer indeed
@@itsacookie1 how is it not Apple’s fault? They’ve had several generations of computers that were trash at playing games compared to their equivalently priced PC counterparts and they refuse to play the game of incentivizing companies to develop games for their platform. They may not care? That’s relatively likely, but they’ve been mentioning in their past few keynotes that macs are good gaming computers and they haven’t been until now… So that tells me that they do care. It doesn’t matter how good the hardware and software is for the gaming, there just isn’t incentive for developers to make games for the platform so why would they bother?
@@gamingislife3332 Linux has improved at gaming via Proton, which provides support for .... Microsoft DirectX. I wouldn't expect Apple going that route.
@@javiej well yes but my point still stand. Linux is improving gaming wise and it isn't because of Microsoft instead of valve. And because of proton more and more devs are considering making native games for Linux. Has for apple if valve wanted to they can do something similar.
@@gamingislife3332 Well the situation is more like this: - Valve will never help Apple, the whole point of Valve & Steam is having their own game store in a free platform open to everybody , not helping Apple to put fences around their gamers,.asking for a racket in their own online store or creating a slave market in Apple style. They have opposite ideas. - Same about Microsoft with DirectX. For them Apple is the main competitor. -. And neither Apple is interested in promoting DirectX in its own platform, quite the opposite. They are working hard to prevent this happening. Just look at the recent moves affecting potential gamers on Mac; No more boot camp, no more eGPU, a legal war against EA, OpenGL support discontinued for no reason, no HDMI 2.1 support (and yes the hdmi port is back, as back as 2016, which is from where hdmi 2.0 is coming form )
I wasn't impressed until you said the games were running through compatibility. Being able to get 4k 60 on ultra on a non native game is insane! I'd love to see more numbers for apple silicon native games in the future
As a mac-addicted ex-game developer who has been trying to re-learn the most current portable graphics API (re-learning OpenGL from scratch in 2, ES, 3, and 4) in a futile effort to stay current, THANK YOU for calling out the need for Apple to not just go ham on Metal but actually provide _some_ kind of portable low-level for developers of custom engines. Metal is neat or whatever but it is never going to be remotely cost-effective for developers who want to build something small and custom!
The problem is, Apple can justify expensive computers for work, but gamers will bitch about price. Apple is all about demographics. They do not want to compete on price with PC's.
@@uclajd You misunderstood my comment. I'm not talking about cost-effectiveness for users buying hardware. I'm talking about cost-effective for developers to invest in mac ports given the somewhat smaller audience. You can argue about value for dollars with the M1 hardware. On the notchbooks there's not much of a low end but you do get a pretty price-competitive midrange machine; it's no longer the case that you can get a massively more powerful PC on the cheap, and believe me I've tried. But in the worst case on the hardware for users, you're talking about a 25% "apple tax"; a marginal price increase. For developers rewriting their engines from scratch on a new backend, it's more like a 100% (or more, depending) additional cost on a budget of millions of dollars, for an audience that is not really game-focused. They're just never going to do it. I'm saying that Apple providing good support for Vulkan (or maybe something else, I don't know) that developers can target will let more games come to the platform.
Best video I've seen being honest about gaming on a mac. Clearly showing all the pitfalls but also praising the machine for its power and efficiency. Now we just gotta get them windows games supported again :(. RIP Bootcamp.
Exceptional review on gaming. I think you’re right in saying that it doesn’t matter if you have the best hardware if you don’t incentivise the industry to work with you. However, I do believe that a benchmark has been set, and that whoever doesn’t take advantage of this tech to promote their games, incentives or not, is kind of letting time slip away.
Not enough people noticed Apple truly never once bragged about game performance on these new Macs. I think they realize they need to pony up the cash in order to win over more titles and the cash required wouldn’t see an equal or greater return. Essentially: could they? Yes Does it make financial sense for them to? Not likely. They’re doing great financially without the AAA game market and they likely will use that money elsewhere with greater returns
So Apple spends money on Apple TV+ and millions at that. But does not spend much on gaming. The gaming industry is bigger than the movie industry. Younger generations will relate to games than movies more. Seems me to you just defend most of what Apple does, just like a true sheep.
@@rohithmekala2608 yes but gaming hardware is not where the big money is made. Gaming software is what moves big piles of cash. Thats why apple loves the app store for games
@@rohithmekala2608 Apple actually makes LOTS of money from the gaming industry, more than Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. The gaming industry is bigger than movie, but that figure has more than AAA games. Also, they ARE investing in games the same way they invested in TV+, with the Arcade. However the best device they make for gaming rn isn't the macbooks, but the iPads. There are a LOT of real games you can play on it, including emulators, and the controller support is perfect. But of course, no AAA games.
@@rohithmekala2608 Look at you worrying about a company worth couple of billion dollars ! Listen, Apple TV+ is a pile of hot mess at best ! But it exactly does the purpose it is set out to do …. It’s an apple ad in form of shows and movies ! And regarding the laptops! Apple didn’t say they were gaming machines ! And these new MacBooks are quite revolutionary in few ways and way out of reach for most of us 😂 it was set out to be a tool and not a toy … and for those ppl who can make money out of working on it …. It will pay off for them ! And ofcourse it will pay off for apple as well 😂 I mean it’s apple we talking about !
@@rohithmekala2608 you really think apple is losing money on a few AAA titles? lol... apple literally made more money than sony, ms, nintendo and activision combined on gaming. AAA titles arent that big of a market share, mobile gaming is
When I first got my plastic MacBook (2008) I spent way too long gaming with just the trackpad on Portal, WoW and Minecraft too. I did end up getting a mouse eventually but it was an experience 😅
The delays you see in games is probably due to shader compilation at run-time. Games ship with shader source code, and the GPU driver compiles them on-the-fly for the current architecture...
With Apple putting the M1 on the most recent iPad Pro, it's easy to see their vision for gaming. To the extent Apple cares about gaming, they don't want to run x86 games. They want to improve mobile hardware, specifically their own ARM chips, to the point where you will be able to run AAA titles on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. And, of course, they want you to buy those games from their App Store, not from Steam. They want to make _all_ gaming mobile, or at least available to be played on mobile devices. Now that you can run iOS and iPadOS apps on Macs, you can see how this might lead to convergence in gaming. When you think about the regular Nintendo Switch (ignoring the Switch Lite), it's a mobile gaming console that can also be used with a TV. There's no need to have separate Nintendo consoles for mobile and home. Of course, Apple has specifically shied away from Mac gaming in the past because Macs are supposed to be professional tools for getting work done. I think Apple will eventually have to resign themselves to making the iPad and Mac converge. The hardware is already there. They just need to improve iPadOS to the point where it's more capable for productivity, and that will force app developers to make things like DaVinci Resolve for the iPad. Adobe is already moving in that direction.
So all ur saying is u want like Mac apps in the iPad? I mean don’t get me wrong I agree but like do u think they r gonna shy away from gaming on macs or not?
@@myboah4764 pretty much. The iPad Pro has the same guts as a MacBook Pro at this point, but the OS means no access to any professional level software that utilizes that power. It’s more powerful than any casual user needs, and doesn’t have the software anyone who needs that much power uses. Because of that, it’s sort of existing in a pretty useless product segment. An iPad Pro running macOS would just be a better MacBook. Touch screen, 5g data connectivity, Apple Pencil, all with the power of a MacBook Pro And yes they’re shying away from gaming in the traditional sense, with a focus on mobile apps.
It’s actually really sick that Dolphin Emulator works so well, thank you for mentioning it. I ordered a close-to-base model MacBook Pro 14'' with no intention of playing games on it, but it’s really nice to know that - if I want - I have an entire library of Nintendo games at my legally grey disposal.
the crazy thing I think is that these macbooks are so powerful even with like 3 compatibility layers just imagine if the games were actually optimised for apple silicon nvidia better watch out or their product may not be permanently out of stock
@@snazzy hi snazzy awesome video also can you cover zipbuds 26 surge 3d headphones surge mini earbuds between pro earbuds neobuds pros vie shair headphones earcandi ear mold for iems duolink speakerbuds soundcore motionboom speaker x6 true wireless speaker dbud u earbuds apemist earbuds and sentien audio earbuds and sony off ear headphones auricle open ears elecov clear earbuds relods earbuds sens. ai brain headphones kbears ks2's kz kzn pro x and dum audio sound system gravastar sirius earbuds and maui p900 speaker and devialet phantom gold opera and superlux hd681 and samson sr850 and grado headphones shure iems and audzeze eucild iems. Thank you and sorry for the long list
@@darrendoheny9768 dude cloud gaming is atleast 10 years awag from being viable hardware all the way. like they always say if it ain't broke don't fix it.
This mindset created about people not being "allowed" to even question the fact of playing games on mac is counterproductive. People should complain about not having AAA games to developers even more if they want to change the current market. Great video as always, Snazzy!
This isn't about developers, it is about Apple not supporting standard APIs, macs being on a different architecture, etc. It is not game developers, it is apple the one who is responsible for gaming on macs not being a real thing.
Game developers aren't going to spend a lot of time (money) on a platform that returns very little and that's a risk to develop on. Apple already showed that developing games on macOS is extremely risky, to the point is almost sadistic, with changes in APIs at the last minute, deprecated architectures, exclusive tool chains etc.
@@TheMamon66 but Apple Silicon has been around for more than 10 years now, and a lot of people are familiar with the architecture. Also, most of game engines already have iOS port, so it is a matter of willingness and scale.
@@TheMamon66 Gaming consoles have always used non-standard APIs and used different CPU ISAs, I mean, the Switch uses ARM and it’s own graphics API and that has a doom eternal port. It’s all about the demand (which sadly just isn’t as “there” as it really needs to be), the market share and hardware’s capability.
There's practically no incentive for developers to specifically develop games for MacOS. It's too expensive and very few people own the M1 Max Macs. This won't change
This video is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. On one hand the first 1-3 minutes basically make it look like click bait. Then you do an absolutely incredible, well explained and thorough dive into the state of gaming on this Mac (wow) - last, you demonstrate counter arguments, and you finish it with the accurate answer to your question. The best part? That anyone who wanted to know the answer to your title question and clicked on your video - got an appropriate if not one of the best answers possible. Thank you for whatever the opposite of click bait is. Cheers!
fair enough, but if you already had some semblance of an idea of the answer, this vid is nothing new. we already knew the benchmarks are amazing. we also already knew barely any titles are supported at near their potential FPS, or without a ton of annoying work and middleware.
@@ParallaxEffect True, but there is so much more work done and displayed here. Knowing the answer ahead of time in this case does not negate the value of watching the video which is what I was applauding most. Cheers.
yeah, because comparing the macbook to nearly 3 year old Windows gaming laptops and calling them "the best gaming laptops" is totally incredible. Let's just pretend like RTX 3000 laptop don't exist and Macbook isn't on a 90 watt RTX 3060(not even full power) level in terms of performance in the few games which work properly on a Mac.
@@TabalugaDragon did you finish watching the video? He doesn’t conclude that it’s the best gaming laptop ever he quite clearly explains how it’s mostly a disappointment if your goal is to play pc games. But he explains why. That’s what I’m giving credit for.
@@justlou717 yes I did, but you probably missed this part 12:18 So watch it again. He makes a statement that Macbook can match THE BEST gaming laptops but instead of comparing them to RTX 3000 laptops that have ben out for a while now he compares them to 2000 series ones to make the Macbook look better. He also completely neglected thermals(they are 100 degrees for the macbook in prolonged loads), of course macbook would be quiet if Apple doesn't care about thermals and longevity. This is the reason Windows laptops are so much louder, not just because of M1 efficiency. He also intentionally chose a Windows laptop with bad battery life for his comparison. Asus TUF A15, ROG Strix G15, HP Victus, Dell G15 ALL have 10+ hours of battery life in basic tasks, but he chose this Intel laptop specifically(before Alder Lake with efficient cores comes out mind you) to make it look like it's the norm for Windows laptops to have short battery life even in basic tasks. No, it's not anymore. I could go on what is wrong with this video for a long time but you get the picture.
I don’t have much issues getting the strategy games I like on Mac. Civilization, EU4, rimworld, cities skylines, etc. I have a PS5 for action and sports games so never have to worry about it.
@@snazzy It's more about the historical experience of the audience and not a single piece of content. You might feel he's wrong, but a question as a title still looks no different from all the other clickbait.
I play Minecraft natively (with the native LWJGL libraries recompiled for ARM and an ARM JVM) - and it's pretty nuts, on my 10c/14c M1 Pro, I get anywhere from 230-500+ fps at 1440P or ~160-230 fps at the almost 4K screen of the MacBook. I know not everyone is into MC but it does show that if a game is able to run natively and not even that well optimised, there's more than enough performance for most AAA titles (expecially on the higher specced models).
I do exactly the same, on my MBA M1 8c CPU/8c GPU, with modded Minecraft, and it's just mind blowing to see the performance of theses devices, when something is really compiled for them.
@@Wongseifu548 Minecraft is still something people play; it's not just cherrypicked to show off the M1 machines. I'm looking to build a 6900 XT system, and the game I plan to play most often is Minecraft.
I think you really should've mentioned the abysmal response time and pixel refresh on the 14 and 16 MBP tho. I think that's really important specially if you are a bit more competitive at gaming and not even then. Smearing etc can be annoying to ppl who are used to good quality gaming displays.
I appreciate that this is the only video about this topic that just tells it to you straight. Instead of explaining 30 janky ways you can play games on the mac.
My 2 cents about the stuttering when "new stuff" are coming in games 6:42 is that something funky is probably going on with the way shaders need to be (re)compiled
Quinn, hat off to you. What a completely balanced and thorough analysis of M1 silicon gaming. I use PCs and M1 Macs so can see the benefits of both. I've been trying to argue these same points when commenting on other "reviews" on M1 Mac gaming, but there is a large body of fanboyism from both sides who just can't accept reality.
I used to game on Mac from 2007-2017, and from 2010 exclusively on a Mac Pro (later upgraded with a GTX980). ALL the games I have in my Steam library used to run on Mac. Then Apple dropped, 32-bit, then Nvidia, then OpenGL, then x86. Most of the games I bought to run on a Mac do not run on a modern Mac. I have bought a Windows machine with a 5950X and 6900XT instead. I am not interested in Mac unless my *existing games* and software run on it.
@@Wongseifu548 We don't need a gaming Mac when they can get already existing games running on an M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max. They have the hardware, they just need to lobby game publishers/indie studios to release games for them.
@@muizzsiddique but that’s a no win as far as money for anyone. Apple isn’t losing money by not offering “aaa” games and people that buy macs for creating aren’t going to be paying $60 to play call of duty
I remember YEARS ago when you took a break from youtube and you we're filming yourself on a hoverboard..Time flies. I really liked this video and i hope all the best for you and i'm glad your still on youtube killing it.
I've played several games on Apple Arcade without a hitch, but I am not really a gamer at all. The performance was always excellent, even on higher graphics settings. Using MacBook Air M1 (16 GB RAM, 250 GB SSD, 7-core GPU).
The weird thing is Apple funded Vulkan development but actively chooses not to use it. It would make a world of difference for them. Another thing to maybe look out for is Linux for the M1 that'll bring along Proton.
Why would they support an API they have no control of and can't just add things they need for this years new hardware? They supported it early on as it was a modern replacement for OpenGL which was becoming stagnant and just too clunky to work with, then they just decided too do their own with Metal instead. It's worth noting that Windows doesn't support Vulkan either, or OpenGL (other than some ancient 1.1 version or something). It's the GPU makers who write it into their driver packages. Nvidia used to make drivers for the Mac until they fucked over Apple (like they fuck everyone else over) and threw a hissy fit when Apple started to make their own GPU's for their SoC's and refused to make them any more citing "giving away secrets of driver optmisation" and other such BS. So Apple stopped signing their drivers and that was that. If there's one company who will call your bluff it's Apple, they've been burned by partners too many times to blindly trust anybody else which is why they control the entire stack from hardware to software. They hate being beholden to a third party, especially ones who are making things for the mass, lowest common denominator market like Nvidia and Intel (they seem to have a better working relationship with AMD but then you also see that in the console space).
@@TalesOfWar windows does support vulkan. just play a game for example like doom 2016 and you can select whether you want vulkan or directx. vulkan support on windows goes as far back as some of the gtx 600 series cards
Thanks for making this video! It's exactly how I feel about the state of gaming on the Mac. I have a new M1 Max MBP and I LOVE it. Don't get me started on how good HDR gaming looks on it- try Shadow of the Tomb Raider with HDR on. WOW. We need more games to come to the Mac, since it's a shame that a machine this good doesn't have many games available to play on it!
@Cosine you're hilarious. Just because you can do HDR doesn't mean you can do it well. The MacBook's 1600 nits peak brightness mini LED back-lit display is going to destroy most HDR experiences even on the desktop. And this is from someone with a LG CX TV for a monitor.
@@FifthDread have you heard of oled monitors? I’m happy for apple fan boys finally getting a good screen but 4k monitors and oled have been a thing for a very long time
@@undisturbed809 didn't you see my reply to the other guy? I'm saying the screen offers better HDR than my LG OLED. I use the LG CX 48 at my gaming desktop, I'm no stranger to OLEDs. I know how they can't go above 800 nits, and have full screen ABL preventing the full screen from getting bright. Fantastic displays sure, but to not acknowledge the MacBook display as beautiful is just ignorance.
@@undisturbed809 Sadly, there's only one desktop OLED monitor out there. LG released it earlier this year for $4000. Some people choose to use TVs as desktop monitors, but they're just too big for most people to put on their desk.
I got a MacBook Air M1 few weeks ago (had a 2012 pro before) for music and video production. And I never have thought in a Mac for playing (I have a desktop PC) but even tough, is quite impressive what you can do with this little guy. I love retro gaming, (OpenEmu is spectacular) and some arcade Games r really good. I can't recommend a Mac for someone who will mostly game on his laptop, but hey, casual / mobile gamers with some use for a MacBook as a the tool it is.... not so bad.
As a Linux user, I didn’t realize gaming on a Mac is a worse experience than gaming on Linux and that says a lot given how much of a hassle it is to make some games work on Linux.
I dont know what the hell is everyone talking about Im playing Witcher 3 and Apex on M1 MAX through geforce now and it runs smooth. And no one is talking about it
@@WilliamDailyReacts Witcher 3 came out nearly 7 years ago my friend, and apex nearly 3 years ago. Plus, apex was never a representation of bleeding edge graphics tech lol, even back when it came out.
The 1s+ hangs you were getting in Witcher 3 are caused by shader compilation. Parallels (and Crossover) have to take the DXBC shader, translate that to Metal Shading Language (which is C++) based and the Metal driver then has to compile that to something that the GPU can actually work with. This is because caused partially because modern graphics like Vulkan, Direct3D 12 and Metal require more information to compile a shader than Direct3D 11 (which is what Witcher 3 uses). So the shader compilation can only happen once the game tries to draw something with that shader which is too late and causes this stutter. This will get better though. The driver will cache shaders it has already compiled and on subsequent runs it will just load the already compiled shader which is much faster and should avoid the stutter.
StarCraft 2 on my MBP 15” Retina Mid2012 running Monterey via OCLP runs like a dream, of course, SC could run in my smart toaster given software support
Games hanging in Parallels is absolutely because of the emulator. Many emulators, such as cemu, (a Wii U emulator) does the same thing and is caused by having to load things to memory. However, as long as you keep it open it won’t happen again. Also, dolphin and xemu running well on these macs is really unsurprising. Xemu has tolerable frame rates on my 2015 i5 MacBook Air (albeit at 105°C).
Those are some surprisingly impressive results. Just one nitpick - at the start you mentioned that it competes with a mobile 3080, yet never once have you compared the performance against a 3080 powered Windows laptop. (you only compared against a 3070 and a 2080 Max Q) Doesn't detract much from the machine's achievements.
he;s obviously a sellout. If he cared for the truth he wouldn't call nearly 3 year old machines "the best Windows gaming laptops". Heck RTX 3000 laptops came out like half a year BEFORE M1 Max\pro.
Loved your last statements about the Mac. I currently have a MBP and so far have been disappointed by the lack of support for gaming. Apple really does need to step up their game.
Great video! I'm slightly amused but really also happy that you spent 10 min of 17 min video explaining all the problems of gaming on macs before talking about where things are going with silicon.
I picked up a 16" MacBook Pro with the M1 Max 32 core GPU and this thing is a monster. I have a windows 11 VM running games on steam, I switch back and forth to do Mac stuff, run some Mac games like Diablo 3, WoW at 120 fps in 4k with graphics up! This is the dream setup, now we just need more Mac games and/or more windows 11 ARM games.
Apple dropping support for OpenGL and Vulcan is just sheer f*ing hubris. I honestly don't understand how to feel. I have this incredibly powerful machine but devs won't support it because apple won't do the absolute minimum in supporting open standards. (On the other hand you would have to pay me in order to tolerate a windows box as my main computer.
Apple never supported Vulkan. They supported the initiative but it was never supported on any of their platforms. OpenGL is deprecated, it's dead. They aren't progressing it any more, Vulkan replaced it. Windows doesn't support Vulkan either, or OpenGL other than some ancient version. Support is written into the GPU drivers be AMD and Nvidia and Intel. They made Metal because they control the whole thing. It's a single API they can use on all of their platforms. You can argue the hubris is on the developers for not supporting Metal. I mean, they support DirectX right? That isn't an open standard either. OpenGL ran like dog shit anyway, it was a mess. That's why it was killed and replaced. Also, they moved to Metal 2 years before Vulkan existed and they clearly started work on it long before then. These things don't just happen over night.
It depends on the laptop, my lenovo legion doesnt limit the performance at all on battery, but the downside is that i get only like 2 hours of battery life
@@sixunity1171 Most high performance laptops limit performance on battery to reduce the power draw from the battery. The manufacturers don't want to overheat the battery by drawing too much power.
@@mitchjames9350 gaming performance is a good way for reviewers to frame the comparison so that average consumers can appreciate it. Apple really does not care about gaming performance and seems content to tell customers to buy a PC if that is what they want to do.
@@CapitanTavishI’m sure raytracing is a killer feature in stardew valley, but I didn’t buy my M1 Mini for gaming. It just happens to run games I enjoy. For me it’s win win.
I have a gaming PC and just recently picked up a base model 14" MacBook Pro. I've been playing Hades at max settings and it runs like hot butter. I didn't buy this laptop for gaming so it doesn't bother me but it's nice to know that I can still play some fun games on it in a pinch. Hopefully more games will be natively supported in the future.
Unfortunately I don’t see Apple walking the “we make gaming devices” walk and incentivizing developers to bring their multi-platform games to the Mac. Their strategy seems to revolve around encouraging Apple-specific games via Apple Arcade. I would even wager that, as Apple continues to invest in services, they have begun to see any game not on Apple Arcade or the App Store as direct competition Unless developers become okay with ponying up 30% of their revenue, or Apple becomes okay with de-prioritizing Apple Arcade, gaming on the Mac is more likely to get worse than better. Apple Arcade is premised on the notion that the future of Apple gaming is mobile gaming. Which is fine, and I’m legitimately happy for all those people who really love mobile games and will benefit from a more robust, high-quality game library. But I can’t help but feel burned by Apple’s decision to de-prioritize my use case in pursuit of services revenue
Developers don't need to be okay with Apple, they don't need permission for compiling their games to ARM or for support Metal, and as far as I know, Apple is not putting any complications to do so. They also don't need to be part of Apple Arcade, in MacOS you can install programs just like in Windows, you can download them from your web browser. The incentivization they need doesn't need to come directly from Apple, the main reason they don't port their games for Mac is because it's market share is very low, and I think this will never change. But who knows, with Linux it is the same, and Steamdeck, a game console, runs games on Linux using a compatibility layer called Proton, which is based on Wine. Maybe we can just rely on compatibility layers when they get much better?
I just don't think its our thing (Mac users). There's nothing stopping developers from developing games on Mac, I got steam on here. Just when was the last time you met a Mac user who actually wants to do serious gaming on there Mac? I mean I play a ton of Minecraft does that count? :P
@@Megabean I have to agree. I don't really game on my Mac and I used to game on my iPad but really it was a novelty more than anything. I already have a PS5 and gaming PC if I want to play "serious games". My Mac is for productivity.
@@Megabean if Apple people didn’t like games, the App Store wouldn’t be making so much off of games, and Apple wouldn’t be putting so much money into Apple Arcade. There is a clear and present gaming market among Mac users. But right now, most Mac people who want to game are buying consoles, which is a suboptimal user experience
@@Gilamath. loool the App store is a far cry from actual gaming. And no I'm a Mac user and I just got a gaming PC for that and for Windows only applications. You know how expensive storage is on macs? I'm not gonna install a 100GB game onto my Macbook even if it can support it. Macs are tools, for school, for video work (in my case) for music production or for business. They are not designed for gaming, they've never been designed for gaming.
Currently running mid 2010 and late 2017 iMacs (for various reasons) and find that the 2010 works better on the Mac side as it’s stuck on High Sierra and still has access to 32bit binaries while the 2017 one runs Windows only and later games better. Im holding out for a higher spec iMac or Mini before jumping to M1 (Pro) but I hope the gaming support comes too.
Been playing the classics on my M1 Air Medieval II Total War EU4 HOI4 Rimworld Excellent display, great battery life, fanless and incredibly light. In love with this laptop.
The stuttering you're experiencing is caused by shader compilation. CEMU, a Wii-U emulator used to suffer from this, but the devs introduced a new method called "async-shader compile", which basically eliminated the problem. I'm not sure why those games are suffering from this problem though, as triple A games are usually shipped with precompiled shaders so that users don't have to experience this.
maybe the most well-rounded but still fun video i've seen about this in that it's both honest of about the power of the macbook pro but also honest about the current state of support for gaming on apple silicon. i'm not a huge gamer but i'm excited about the gpu power and the potential it opens up ~~ even if it takes years because once it actually ships I'm going to hopefully be keeping the macbook pro max for at least five years.
You consistently have some of the absolute best tech content. I've been watching for a few years and i consistently watch your stuff and am always impressed by the insights and the presentation✌️
Currently gaming on a base model 2017 macbook air and am upgrading to a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 16gb ram. I only really play Minecraft, Sims 4, and osu!, but I'm excited to see how much performance increases
Blender's adoption of metal was really the eye opener for me. Seeing the performance boost it brings makes me disappointed it's nowhere near as supported as it should be. Although blender only implemented when Apple sent engineers to work on it for them, so like you said, gotta be better incentivized
Excellent explanation and wrap-up of the current state of gaming on Mac. I hope Apple takes the advice you and many others have expressed in incentivizing game studios to develop their games to be compatible with ARM, or potentially even develop their own compiler that can import certain game build types and preprocess them to be more ARM-friendly.
they aint doing shit. thats works that should be done from apple's side like steam did with proton but they aint letting the money scape from their hands. for sure they would ban steam from running on mac if it would ever be possible or they would manage to get 50% of the revenue generated in mac
Repairability and compatibility, the two things stopping me buying another MacBook. I am otherwise very excited about Apple Silicon. Bring on the ARM revolution!!
That's the bad thing Noone consider... Everything soldered... Everything could die... And the move to ARM is not for the performances... They've spent lots of money on tsmc's 5nm for that... (also on making a new design with all the new features including a decent heatpipe after years) But for repairability... They want to kill repair shops and don't let anyone fix their products... Hope other companies WON'T follow this route because when the device will die out of warranty (that for Apple is 2 year in Europe), you'll throw it in the trash: no spare parts, nothing...
@@TrioLOLGamers Yeah, repairability clearly isn't their priority. I would however counter your point about longevity of their computerd. Whilst it may be true for iPhones and possibly some generation of MacBook, it doesn't tally with my experience. My mid 2012 13 inch MacBook Pro is still going strong and it's almost 9 years old. Still performs pretty well all things considered (I did upgrade it to an SSD but it's stock i5 and 4gb ram otherwise). Having said that, it is a Mac from a different era and I haven't owned a newer one. All I'm saying is it's not black and white.
@@tetra1974 Not sure. I have a feeling it can technically be removed but you have to use an apple certified replacement, and if it's not done by a certified repair store it won't work, but I may be getting confused with older Macbooks. I'd suggest having a Google.
Porting games over to mac is quite painful from a programming standpoint (not just because of the graphics API), and it's time consuming to write games that are compatible for both, and while apple has not been very proactive, the companies that make the games are largely to "blame". They haven't seen it as worth their effort/money to port AAA to macs when up to this point not many macs even had hardware capable of supporting them. We'll see what happens now, but this is not a case of Apple messing up something easy. I do hope to be able to play games on mac though, it's a shame such powerful hardware is going unused for gaming. But it's hard to blame apple or game devs when on both ends porting a title generally means losing lots of money and time. Even if apple were willing to heavily subsidized porting, lots of studios wouldn't do it simply because of the effort required.
That 1 second or so hitching is probably the game loading the shaders for that object, ran into a very similar issue with Wii U emulation, although an option called “Asynchronous Shader Compilation” fixed it
New laptops will catch up only if Apple starts letting other use the 5nm TSMC process... And Intel... Well they've just switched to Intel 7 (that is 10nm, but with their technology, so yeah... Similar to 7nm), so only next generation will show how they can perform on Intel 7... (and, also Intel 7 is optimized for Windows 11 because they have energy efficient cores with the standard ones)
Unless they move to ARM or something else equally efficient they never will. x86/64 just has much more overhead in power draw than ARM does. All things being equal, ARM will ALWAYS perform better at lower power draw or at the very least, the same power draw. Even on the same node process ARM is just that much more efficient that it really doesn't matter. Also let's not forget that the M1 is the ENTIRE system, not just the CPU. It's the CPU, GPU, memory, storage, all the other logic that actually runs the thing (hence being a System on a Chip), yet it still performs better than and uses less power than much larger (in total) packages of dedicated and separate CPU, GPU, memory and storage based systems.
@@TalesOfWar they already have an arm laptop several years ago but it it has bugs and can’t run most of x86 apps. Qualcomm also recently announced that they are making a m1 competitor. I’m sure they will come up with a system comparable to m1 in the next few years. But apple may have m5 released when it happens. 🤣
I admit that I'm an ignorant boob who wants to game on the latest MacBook pros. This video finally explained to me the key issues with gaming and macs in a clear, patient, and thorough way. I had a hard time finding a decent breakdown of this topic. I'm just happy I can play some of the newer (but still old) emulated classics. Thank you for that. - ignorant boob
The one game I used to play regularly that is M1 native supported, World of Warcraft, has full screening issues with the notch getting in the way. So on top of all the negatives you mention, that notch is still a hideous cherry on top that as a gamer is way too many compromises to deal with. Got a Razer Blade instead just cause I know it will work with the majority games out there, doesn't have immersion and display blocking protrusions, and is still cheaper than a MacBook. Fan noise and battery be damned until Apple can support sometching other than niche use cases.
I have a similar dilemma with compute tasks: yes, M1 is more power efficient, but I can just use my PC, yeah, it will consume ~300W - and that will be reflected in my electricity bill, but do I want to shelve out another $4000? ... still a dilemma.
It math at this point, if the pc can do the same thing as a new macbook or relatively the same performance, it generally isn't worth it unless the power savings of the mac could balance out its cost. It is also important to consider portability, screen quality and speaker quality as well, for the price you get a whole package. This just comes down to the math of it all. If your PC's performance is negatively affecting your life compared to what the mac would do, get the mac.
@@TrioLOLGamers but who knows, my pc consumes over 500 watts all the time cause it’s always working on something when I don’t use it eg: rendering large blender files or rendering pre edited videos. My server on the other hand consumes over 800 watts 24/7. You can’t just assume things like this
M series so far only has laptop and entry level versions, which are in totally different leagues. Performance over anything would be a desktop tower’s job, and the Mac Pro is still on Intel. Just saying. A $4000 windows flagship thin laptop cannot do what you want with desktop setup either.
I'm hoping someone can show the performance of these in CAD applications through virtualized windows, these are very intriguing propositions and that's the only thing stopping me from buying one
Well there's one more way to game on MacBook, it's to dualboot it on Linux which is now increasingly a great platform for gaming and offers a lot bigger pool of games than Mac.
As well as Dirt Rally I've been quite impressed by Dying Light, an AAA title from a few years back. Runs through Rosetta 2 but uses Metal. I get 120fps at 1080p on my 14" M1 Pro. I imagine it would be similarly buttery at higher resolutions on the Max GPUs. Hopefully game devs will be encouraged by this performance.
Well... I do Play: "LOTRO: The Lord Of The Rings Online" on my: "MacBook Pro With TouchBar". It was a nightmare [VS] it's Win-Client/Version. (Crashed every 5-Min on Higher-Rez-Settings) But then they got rid of the Native-Mac-Version, Replaced it with the Wine-EMU, Pre-Configured by the DEV's for the Game, & It runs like a charm now. Can play it on Very-High-Settings, Problem-Free, Tho on BootCamp on the other hand, It runs smoothly with everything Maxed-Out, Ultra-Settings+Water/Light-Effects, On Parallels-Desktop tho, Even with Maxed-Out PD-Gaming-Settings, It's barley able to run it at Medium-Settings, Pretty much looking at Low-Settings on PD, For a Medioker-OK-Game-Flow. Yup... I've tried em' all... Painfully so.
Other way around. If the AAA games supported the Mac. And yep, I only have a PC for gaming, everything else I use my Macs. My Windows box is essentially a fancy, over powered console.
@@TalesOfWar to each there own man, you can buy a PS5 if you want a gaming system, PCs can do a lot more than gaming, unlike Mac OS is only good at specific things that are supported
This was an excellent overview of the state of gaming on Mac. Imagine for a moment Apple sorted some great titles that people actually want to play running well and easily on Mac. Or better yet, any game running on the new silicon. They would take one of the last major 'features' Intel and Microsoft are clinging to.
I don't want a few games on Mac. I want my full existing Steam library on Mac. The games my friends play on Windows or Linux. This used to be possible 2007-2017, before Apple dropped 32-bit, Nvidia, OpenGL, x86 and such. All the games I have in Steam used to run on Apple. They still do on my 2010 Mac Pro with GTX980 and High Sierra.
Look I get it: "MaC iSn'T fOr GaMiNg!" But it honestly *COULD* be. As stated in the video, the power/hardware is THERE. Right in front of them, andApple is leaving a LOT of potential customers out to dry because they simply refuse to work with the gaming industry. That said, a lot of PC people/gamers may not even make that jump because... Well it's Apple, they have a reputation. And giving up the customization that a windows platform offers is hard. But Apple CAN do it, they just refuse to (again, as stated in the video). To this point (about Apple's reputation) I'm kinda scared to see what the AS Mac Pro will look like, mainly because of the SOC that Apple has. Edit: Changed "should" to "*COULD*" because it makes what I tried to say much more clear (I think...)
I mean the gaming industry has traditionally refused to work with them. It's a two way street. The Mac never got the support for games and the games it does have are mostly all running on some kind translation layer like Cedega/Wine. Why cater to an industry that doesn't want to take the time to even do native ports? Metal is a super easy to use api far easier than Vulkan, yet everyone always talks about Apple having to support Vulkan. Apple went with Metal because they have to think about their iOS developers and something as complex as Vulkan wasn't going to get much adoption (and it still hasn't with most games on PC still being developed in DX, and most non Apple mobile developers still using OpenGLES) due to its complexity. Apple was never going to use something as low level as Vulkan for their development platform. It just wasn't going to happen even if Metal didn't exist.
You're making the assumption they are leaving customers because they are refusing to work with the gaming industry. Most people that buy a mac don't buy it for gaming, and all the macs get sold at the moment because of chip shortages. There does't seem to be a point pushing a segment that they can't dedicate themselves to.
@@leopoldroitel4022 I meant to add that bit of nuance in the comment. Just to be clear, I know people don't buy macs for gaming. The point I tried to make is that that doesn't have to be the case now. I wasn't clear enough by saying that Apple could attract new customers who might be on the fence between MacOS and Windows, but go with Windows because of it's broader support for games. Even now, with the decent performance pushed by even the entry level M1 I could see more people on that fence moving over to Mac. But it is a two way street, as @apoclypse pointed out. And right now, it seems only Apple is interested in playing nice. There's still a number of people who will go with Windows anyway because of the aforementioned reputation Apple has. That said, I'm coming from my own perspective: Longtime Mac user who built a PC for games. Of course that "might be on the fence" could a laughably small audience that wouldn't justify the expense of working with the gaming industry.
@@apoclypse There's also the fact that Metal predates Vulkan by about two years so it makes a LOT more sense that Apple would stick with that over Vulkan. As for it being easier to work with? I have no idea on that one, so forgive me if I take what you say with a grain of salt. I'm a journalist, not a software developer/engineer/designer so my exposure to code and graphics API is pretty low. All that to say: You're correct, it's a two way street but it sounds like Apple is a bit more open to working with game devs than game devs are open to working with Apple atm. At least that's what I seemed to hear from Snazzy (though that was more about Bootcamp and Windows than games).
@@apoclypse true, 2 way street but in order for the game industry to deal with apple, apple must first invest (time+money) in it. that's the case for any platform not just apple. windows is the best game platform for computers right now because of decades of investements by all who are involved. as with microsoft and consoles, it didn't happen over night. ms had to throw a ton of money and time so the xbox system will become what it is today. apple always had the advantage of a closed and more optimized ecosystem than windows, decades of time to improve the gaming aspect of it (in computers), but didn't. so don't be in a hurry to blame the game industry in this. i'm sure apple is just fine with their profits from mobile gaming and won't bother after all...
I have played Dota 1 and DotA 2 on all my Macbooks since 2007. Never had an issue with any of the computers while gaming. I now have a 2020 16" intel Macbook pro. Runs DotA 2 like a dream. Probably gonna have the 16" M1 MAX early next year. And yes it will also run DotA 2 (: More money than sense I know, but I'm happy, so be it (:
Really, the only way the Mac gaming situation could improve is for more developers to port their games on Mac. Many indies do, but for large publishers that have to fund the porting of complex AAAs it's a much harder proposition. Still, the market share of macOS is about 15% (desktop OSes only), which I think could make it worth their while. Some sort of incentive from Apple definitely could help them make the jump. Hell, even Microsoft could make a buck by porting some of their games. GamePass for Mac, anyone? Not that Apple has made it easy over the last few years, with the transitions from OpenGL to Metal, 32-bit to 64-bit and Intel to Apple Silicon. But now that all of these are either done or underway, the software environment is once again stable enough to seriously consider more Mac ports.
I run Trackmania on a 2020 M1 Macbook Pro with Parallels. Had such a hassle getting it to work. Use crossover first but they dropped support, so now I'm on Windows 11 with Parallels
Such a great breakdown Quinn. Basically its the same conclusion I landed on with SteamOS 3 years ago, where I challenged Valve to put up or shut up about it. And here we are on the eve of SteamOS 3.0 running on Arch with nearly 100% compatibility. You're exactly right, Apple needs to incentive studios and publishers to support the platform if they truly want to get behind gaming on a Mac.
Developers have already several incentives to deploy on Mac: customers more eager to pay (that’s why there are so many exclusive apps for iOS), a decent market share (15% according to some stats), good graphic libraries, middleware that already takes care of everything. On top of everything there is the lack of competition: with few developers supporting, you are more likely to make money… any AA/AAA title would be immediately spotlighted on the App Store.
The problem is that of the 15% of computers, the % of machines good for gaming is small, and the % of people interested in gaming is really small… so big titles are at risk of not recouping the cost of porting (which requires extra marketing and most importantly testing), and Apple itself would be looking at equally flushing down the toilet piles of cash to secure exclusives.
Plus game devs tend to fall in the “artist” camp, so they want most people possible to enjoy their creations. And gamers don’t like exclusives either, it’s been said over and over in the last few years that the more ubiquitous a game is, the more chances of success it has… the aforementioned problems just make Macs not viable platform. The only incentive Apple could offer is a more powerful baseline lineup.
sudo pacman -Rns WindowsOS
@@unleashthedog I think I agree with you on this, the more powerful baseline would seriously raise numbers for the gamer potential. As things stand now, you can get a serious gaming PC especially on desktop for the price equivalent to MB Air. This means you can basically buy MacBook Air for MacOS specific applications and run the rest of the stuff on your Windows gaming PC, for a combined price of just one of these new MacBooks Pro line.
@@unleashthedog I agree almost completely, but Apple can't really make their products that good for gaming. Their entire design philosophy would have to change and they would have to fix their horrible relationship with Nvidia. Apple has a huge problem with cooling (even their M1 chips have been proven to be up to 30% faster with cooler modifications) and they have simply refused to fix that problem because they prioritize the thin and light aspects over everything else. While that is a big point in their favor for some, it's awful for gaming due to the lack of thermal headroom for powerful dedicated GPU's to be included. Apple gets around the problem partially with their software optimization, but that alone is not enough to be able to run current gen AAA games at decent settings and framerates.
Apple could do this super easily, but they refuse to. It takes them 3-6 years to change extraordinarily small aspects of their design. They won't make a new lineup or do a full 180 because they MIGHT get a little more marketshare in the gaming space.
@@unleashthedog Just a note, Apple has roughly an 8% market share of PCs WW. This excludes Chromebooks which would dilute that number even more. Like you said, it's a math game. It simply isn't worth supporting the platform for maybe 2% more customers.
I'm not even mad because of the title, I'm just sad that you gave me hope that I could finally use just one machine for work and gaming, godammit.
You can! You can probably just only play like 5 games really well. The ball is in Apple's court and nobody else's.
Lol. Like me having game pass and playing the same 3 titles. Silly me tbh
Snazzy's clickbait titles are getting out of hand. Kind of sad. You'd think he'd be above that.
Apple's bottleneck isn't the hardware, but their graphics API.
@@ocularpatdown Apple and Google have a similar problem with implementation on traditional gaming: chicken and egg.
Traditional PC gamers are literally gatekeeping the possibilities for alternative accesible forms of gaming because of the sunk-cost fallacy of owning/investing in a game ecosystem. If game ecosystems were more accepting of outside access to other forms of hardware outside of the big 3, then Macs/Chromebooks w/ Stadia wouldn’t be so nerfed in access in triple AAA titles.
You can if you buy windows lol….
I really love that you are a mac enthusiast yet you aren't disillusioned to the fact that Apple has pretty much shot themselves in the foot as far as gaming goes on Macs. Heres to hoping that Apple cleans up their act and starts to incentivize game studios to make games for MacOS
I hope they do. Simply because windows has great has they are for gaming not everyone like that os. Linux has been improving now it time for Macs to do the same. Imagine a world where windows Linux and Mac are great for Linux. The best for consumer indeed
@@itsacookie1 how is it not Apple’s fault? They’ve had several generations of computers that were trash at playing games compared to their equivalently priced PC counterparts and they refuse to play the game of incentivizing companies to develop games for their platform.
They may not care? That’s relatively likely, but they’ve been mentioning in their past few keynotes that macs are good gaming computers and they haven’t been until now… So that tells me that they do care. It doesn’t matter how good the hardware and software is for the gaming, there just isn’t incentive for developers to make games for the platform so why would they bother?
@@gamingislife3332 Linux has improved at gaming via Proton, which provides support for .... Microsoft DirectX.
I wouldn't expect Apple going that route.
@@javiej well yes but my point still stand. Linux is improving gaming wise and it isn't because of Microsoft instead of valve. And because of proton more and more devs are considering making native games for Linux. Has for apple if valve wanted to they can do something similar.
@@gamingislife3332 Well the situation is more like this:
- Valve will never help Apple, the whole point of Valve & Steam is having their own game store in a free platform open to everybody , not helping Apple to put fences around their gamers,.asking for a racket in their own online store or creating a slave market in Apple style. They have opposite ideas.
- Same about Microsoft with DirectX. For them Apple is the main competitor.
-. And neither Apple is interested in promoting DirectX in its own platform, quite the opposite. They are working hard to prevent this happening. Just look at the recent moves affecting potential gamers on Mac; No more boot camp, no more eGPU, a legal war against EA, OpenGL support discontinued for no reason, no HDMI 2.1 support (and yes the hdmi port is back, as back as 2016, which is from where hdmi 2.0 is coming form )
I wasn't impressed until you said the games were running through compatibility. Being able to get 4k 60 on ultra on a non native game is insane! I'd love to see more numbers for apple silicon native games in the future
I cannot express how much I loved that you used Elfl for some of your background music. Great video! :)
As a mac-addicted ex-game developer who has been trying to re-learn the most current portable graphics API (re-learning OpenGL from scratch in 2, ES, 3, and 4) in a futile effort to stay current, THANK YOU for calling out the need for Apple to not just go ham on Metal but actually provide _some_ kind of portable low-level for developers of custom engines. Metal is neat or whatever but it is never going to be remotely cost-effective for developers who want to build something small and custom!
The problem is, Apple can justify expensive computers for work, but gamers will bitch about price. Apple is all about demographics. They do not want to compete on price with PC's.
@@uclajd You misunderstood my comment. I'm not talking about cost-effectiveness for users buying hardware. I'm talking about cost-effective for developers to invest in mac ports given the somewhat smaller audience.
You can argue about value for dollars with the M1 hardware. On the notchbooks there's not much of a low end but you do get a pretty price-competitive midrange machine; it's no longer the case that you can get a massively more powerful PC on the cheap, and believe me I've tried. But in the worst case on the hardware for users, you're talking about a 25% "apple tax"; a marginal price increase.
For developers rewriting their engines from scratch on a new backend, it's more like a 100% (or more, depending) additional cost on a budget of millions of dollars, for an audience that is not really game-focused. They're just never going to do it. I'm saying that Apple providing good support for Vulkan (or maybe something else, I don't know) that developers can target will let more games come to the platform.
Understandable, have a nice day.
Understandable, have a day.
Under, stand.
Stand.
standable, nice.
nice
Best video I've seen being honest about gaming on a mac. Clearly showing all the pitfalls but also praising the machine for its power and efficiency. Now we just gotta get them windows games supported again :(. RIP Bootcamp.
Number of youtube videos were Apple fanbois lie about gaming on a Mac? Zero.
We’ll see if anything interesting happens once Microsoft’s deal with Qualcomm expires… that’d be so nice
@@tjwatson2249 when does it expire?
Exceptional review on gaming. I think you’re right in saying that it doesn’t matter if you have the best hardware if you don’t incentivise the industry to work with you. However, I do believe that a benchmark has been set, and that whoever doesn’t take advantage of this tech to promote their games, incentives or not, is kind of letting time slip away.
Not the topic of the video but your lighting in this one is so aesthetically pleasing and fantastic and NEEDS MORE PRAISE
Facts
@@itsdeccy bnbj
I like seeing u here evan :)
Not enough people noticed Apple truly never once bragged about game performance on these new Macs. I think they realize they need to pony up the cash in order to win over more titles and the cash required wouldn’t see an equal or greater return.
Essentially: could they? Yes
Does it make financial sense for them to? Not likely. They’re doing great financially without the AAA game market and they likely will use that money elsewhere with greater returns
So Apple spends money on Apple TV+ and millions at that. But does not spend much on gaming.
The gaming industry is bigger than the movie industry. Younger generations will relate to games than movies more. Seems me to you just defend most of what Apple does, just like a true sheep.
@@rohithmekala2608 yes but gaming hardware is not where the big money is made. Gaming software is what moves big piles of cash. Thats why apple loves the app store for games
@@rohithmekala2608 Apple actually makes LOTS of money from the gaming industry, more than Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. The gaming industry is bigger than movie, but that figure has more than AAA games. Also, they ARE investing in games the same way they invested in TV+, with the Arcade.
However the best device they make for gaming rn isn't the macbooks, but the iPads. There are a LOT of real games you can play on it, including emulators, and the controller support is perfect. But of course, no AAA games.
@@rohithmekala2608 Look at you worrying about a company worth couple of billion dollars ! Listen, Apple TV+ is a pile of hot mess at best ! But it exactly does the purpose it is set out to do …. It’s an apple ad in form of shows and movies ! And regarding the laptops! Apple didn’t say they were gaming machines ! And these new MacBooks are quite revolutionary in few ways and way out of reach for most of us 😂 it was set out to be a tool and not a toy … and for those ppl who can make money out of working on it …. It will pay off for them ! And ofcourse it will pay off for apple as well 😂 I mean it’s apple we talking about !
@@rohithmekala2608 you really think apple is losing money on a few AAA titles? lol... apple literally made more money than sony, ms, nintendo and activision combined on gaming. AAA titles arent that big of a market share, mobile gaming is
Gaming on a trackpad, now that's game breaking.
What a madman
just imagine a game made for trackpad tbh i asked myself some years ago why nobody really did it.
@@LilaLink8P keyboard warriors would be mad
When I first got my plastic MacBook (2008) I spent way too long gaming with just the trackpad on Portal, WoW and Minecraft too. I did end up getting a mouse eventually but it was an experience 😅
@@LilaLink8P carpel tunel fast and furious coming around your block
The delays you see in games is probably due to shader compilation at run-time. Games ship with shader source code, and the GPU driver compiles them on-the-fly for the current architecture...
That is likely.
That is most certainly the reason for those stutters, just like in Dolphin before the development of Ubershader
With Apple putting the M1 on the most recent iPad Pro, it's easy to see their vision for gaming.
To the extent Apple cares about gaming, they don't want to run x86 games. They want to improve mobile hardware, specifically their own ARM chips, to the point where you will be able to run AAA titles on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. And, of course, they want you to buy those games from their App Store, not from Steam.
They want to make _all_ gaming mobile, or at least available to be played on mobile devices. Now that you can run iOS and iPadOS apps on Macs, you can see how this might lead to convergence in gaming.
When you think about the regular Nintendo Switch (ignoring the Switch Lite), it's a mobile gaming console that can also be used with a TV. There's no need to have separate Nintendo consoles for mobile and home.
Of course, Apple has specifically shied away from Mac gaming in the past because Macs are supposed to be professional tools for getting work done.
I think Apple will eventually have to resign themselves to making the iPad and Mac converge. The hardware is already there. They just need to improve iPadOS to the point where it's more capable for productivity, and that will force app developers to make things like DaVinci Resolve for the iPad. Adobe is already moving in that direction.
Now with their new Ultra M1. Nothing else comes remotely close. :)
What they ACTUALLY need to do is put Mac OS on the iPad.
@@talenwaver it does even cheaper but m1 ultra is so much more power efficient but the mac pro should be great
So all ur saying is u want like Mac apps in the iPad? I mean don’t get me wrong I agree but like do u think they r gonna shy away from gaming on macs or not?
@@myboah4764 pretty much. The iPad Pro has the same guts as a MacBook Pro at this point, but the OS means no access to any professional level software that utilizes that power. It’s more powerful than any casual user needs, and doesn’t have the software anyone who needs that much power uses. Because of that, it’s sort of existing in a pretty useless product segment.
An iPad Pro running macOS would just be a better MacBook. Touch screen, 5g data connectivity, Apple Pencil, all with the power of a MacBook Pro
And yes they’re shying away from gaming in the traditional sense, with a focus on mobile apps.
It’s actually really sick that Dolphin Emulator works so well, thank you for mentioning it. I ordered a close-to-base model MacBook Pro 14'' with no intention of playing games on it, but it’s really nice to know that - if I want - I have an entire library of Nintendo games at my legally grey disposal.
the crazy thing I think is that these macbooks are so powerful even with like 3 compatibility layers just imagine if the games were actually optimised for apple silicon
nvidia better watch out or their product may not be permanently out of stock
Yes, yes, that's the video. 😉
@@snazzy hi snazzy awesome video also can you cover zipbuds 26 surge 3d headphones surge mini earbuds between pro earbuds neobuds pros vie shair headphones earcandi ear mold for iems duolink speakerbuds soundcore motionboom speaker x6 true wireless speaker dbud u earbuds apemist earbuds and sentien audio earbuds and sony off ear headphones auricle open ears elecov clear earbuds relods earbuds sens. ai brain headphones kbears ks2's kz kzn pro x and dum audio sound system gravastar sirius earbuds and maui p900 speaker and devialet phantom gold opera and superlux hd681 and samson sr850 and grado headphones shure iems and audzeze eucild iems. Thank you and sorry for the long list
@@snazzy Cloud gaming will win the race I think. It will suit chromebook, mobile, and mac users alike.
apple is greedy, they dont care what their users want anymore
@@darrendoheny9768 dude cloud gaming is atleast 10 years awag from being viable hardware all the way. like they always say if it ain't broke don't fix it.
This mindset created about people not being "allowed" to even question the fact of playing games on mac is counterproductive. People should complain about not having AAA games to developers even more if they want to change the current market. Great video as always, Snazzy!
This isn't about developers, it is about Apple not supporting standard APIs, macs being on a different architecture, etc. It is not game developers, it is apple the one who is responsible for gaming on macs not being a real thing.
Game developers aren't going to spend a lot of time (money) on a platform that returns very little and that's a risk to develop on. Apple already showed that developing games on macOS is extremely risky, to the point is almost sadistic, with changes in APIs at the last minute, deprecated architectures, exclusive tool chains etc.
@@TheMamon66 but Apple Silicon has been around for more than 10 years now, and a lot of people are familiar with the architecture. Also, most of game engines already have iOS port, so it is a matter of willingness and scale.
@@TheMamon66 Gaming consoles have always used non-standard APIs and used different CPU ISAs, I mean, the Switch uses ARM and it’s own graphics API and that has a doom eternal port.
It’s all about the demand (which sadly just isn’t as “there” as it really needs to be), the market share and hardware’s capability.
There's practically no incentive for developers to specifically develop games for MacOS. It's too expensive and very few people own the M1 Max Macs. This won't change
This video is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. On one hand the first 1-3 minutes basically make it look like click bait. Then you do an absolutely incredible, well explained and thorough dive into the state of gaming on this Mac (wow) - last, you demonstrate counter arguments, and you finish it with the accurate answer to your question. The best part? That anyone who wanted to know the answer to your title question and clicked on your video - got an appropriate if not one of the best answers possible. Thank you for whatever the opposite of click bait is. Cheers!
fair enough, but if you already had some semblance of an idea of the answer, this vid is nothing new. we already knew the benchmarks are amazing. we also already knew barely any titles are supported at near their potential FPS, or without a ton of annoying work and middleware.
@@ParallaxEffect True, but there is so much more work done and displayed here. Knowing the answer ahead of time in this case does not negate the value of watching the video which is what I was applauding most. Cheers.
yeah, because comparing the macbook to nearly 3 year old Windows gaming laptops and calling them "the best gaming laptops" is totally incredible. Let's just pretend like RTX 3000 laptop don't exist and Macbook isn't on a 90 watt RTX 3060(not even full power) level in terms of performance in the few games which work properly on a Mac.
@@TabalugaDragon did you finish watching the video? He doesn’t conclude that it’s the best gaming laptop ever he quite clearly explains how it’s mostly a disappointment if your goal is to play pc games. But he explains why. That’s what I’m giving credit for.
@@justlou717 yes I did, but you probably missed this part
12:18
So watch it again. He makes a statement that Macbook can match THE BEST gaming laptops but instead of comparing them to RTX 3000 laptops that have ben out for a while now he compares them to 2000 series ones to make the Macbook look better.
He also completely neglected thermals(they are 100 degrees for the macbook in prolonged loads), of course macbook would be quiet if Apple doesn't care about thermals and longevity. This is the reason Windows laptops are so much louder, not just because of M1 efficiency.
He also intentionally chose a Windows laptop with bad battery life for his comparison. Asus TUF A15, ROG Strix G15, HP Victus, Dell G15 ALL have 10+ hours of battery life in basic tasks, but he chose this Intel laptop specifically(before Alder Lake with efficient cores comes out mind you) to make it look like it's the norm for Windows laptops to have short battery life even in basic tasks. No, it's not anymore.
I could go on what is wrong with this video for a long time but you get the picture.
I don’t have much issues getting the strategy games I like on Mac. Civilization, EU4, rimworld, cities skylines, etc. I have a PS5 for action and sports games so never have to worry about it.
I'm really liking the pace in your videos. Great script writing, dude
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
He's kinda wrong sometimes tho turns out.
@@snazzy It's more about the historical experience of the audience and not a single piece of content. You might feel he's wrong, but a question as a title still looks no different from all the other clickbait.
Always happy to see your vids in my notifications, Snazzy boi :)
Thanks, Ryan!
I play Minecraft natively (with the native LWJGL libraries recompiled for ARM and an ARM JVM) - and it's pretty nuts, on my 10c/14c M1 Pro, I get anywhere from 230-500+ fps at 1440P or ~160-230 fps at the almost 4K screen of the MacBook. I know not everyone is into MC but it does show that if a game is able to run natively and not even that well optimised, there's more than enough performance for most AAA titles (expecially on the higher specced models).
I do exactly the same, on my MBA M1 8c CPU/8c GPU, with modded Minecraft, and it's just mind blowing to see the performance of theses devices, when something is really compiled for them.
The fan boy in you is showing
@@Wongseifu548 Minecraft is still something people play; it's not just cherrypicked to show off the M1 machines. I'm looking to build a 6900 XT system, and the game I plan to play most often is Minecraft.
I think you really should've mentioned the abysmal response time and pixel refresh on the 14 and 16 MBP tho. I think that's really important specially if you are a bit more competitive at gaming and not even then. Smearing etc can be annoying to ppl who are used to good quality gaming displays.
I appreciate that this is the only video about this topic that just tells it to you straight. Instead of explaining 30 janky ways you can play games on the mac.
My 2 cents about the stuttering when "new stuff" are coming in games 6:42 is that something funky is probably going on with the way shaders need to be (re)compiled
My thoughts exactly, it puts me in mind of shader compilation in emulators like Yuzu and Cemu
Quinn, hat off to you. What a completely balanced and thorough analysis of M1 silicon gaming. I use PCs and M1 Macs so can see the benefits of both. I've been trying to argue these same points when commenting on other "reviews" on M1 Mac gaming, but there is a large body of fanboyism from both sides who just can't accept reality.
I used to game on Mac from 2007-2017, and from 2010 exclusively on a Mac Pro (later upgraded with a GTX980).
ALL the games I have in my Steam library used to run on Mac. Then Apple dropped, 32-bit, then Nvidia, then OpenGL, then x86.
Most of the games I bought to run on a Mac do not run on a modern Mac.
I have bought a Windows machine with a 5950X and 6900XT instead. I am not interested in Mac unless my *existing games* and software run on it.
I would absolutely love to see Apple being a competitor in the PC gaming space.
Yeah and watch the price tag jump for a "gaming" mac
I can't believe Apple hasn't been more competitive in the billion dollar gaming market. They have the hardware to compete now.
@@Wongseifu548 We don't need a gaming Mac when they can get already existing games running on an M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max. They have the hardware, they just need to lobby game publishers/indie studios to release games for them.
@@muizzsiddique and by lobby we mean incentivise them heavily.
@@muizzsiddique but that’s a no win as far as money for anyone. Apple isn’t losing money by not offering “aaa” games and people that buy macs for creating aren’t going to be paying $60 to play call of duty
I am playing a game as I watch this on my M1 Mac, Parallels and Windows 11 ARM. I was already in the MS Insider program. It works great!
I remember YEARS ago when you took a break from youtube and you we're filming yourself on a hoverboard..Time flies.
I really liked this video and i hope all the best for you and i'm glad your still on youtube killing it.
I've played several games on Apple Arcade without a hitch, but I am not really a gamer at all.
The performance was always excellent, even on higher graphics settings.
Using MacBook Air M1 (16 GB RAM, 250 GB SSD, 7-core GPU).
To be fair apple arcade is mostly simple mobile games which doesn't take much to run
The weird thing is Apple funded Vulkan development but actively chooses not to use it. It would make a world of difference for them. Another thing to maybe look out for is Linux for the M1 that'll bring along Proton.
Ikr? If they supported vulkan there would be so many more games you could game on a Mac
it wont, nothing with proton is compatible with arm, wine is not compatible with arm in the first place, linux arm is useless gaming wise
Why would they support an API they have no control of and can't just add things they need for this years new hardware? They supported it early on as it was a modern replacement for OpenGL which was becoming stagnant and just too clunky to work with, then they just decided too do their own with Metal instead. It's worth noting that Windows doesn't support Vulkan either, or OpenGL (other than some ancient 1.1 version or something). It's the GPU makers who write it into their driver packages. Nvidia used to make drivers for the Mac until they fucked over Apple (like they fuck everyone else over) and threw a hissy fit when Apple started to make their own GPU's for their SoC's and refused to make them any more citing "giving away secrets of driver optmisation" and other such BS. So Apple stopped signing their drivers and that was that. If there's one company who will call your bluff it's Apple, they've been burned by partners too many times to blindly trust anybody else which is why they control the entire stack from hardware to software. They hate being beholden to a third party, especially ones who are making things for the mass, lowest common denominator market like Nvidia and Intel (they seem to have a better working relationship with AMD but then you also see that in the console space).
@@TalesOfWar windows does support vulkan. just play a game for example like doom 2016 and you can select whether you want vulkan or directx. vulkan support on windows goes as far back as some of the gtx 600 series cards
@@And_Rec crossover is using wine, and it runs on m1, which is arm…
Thanks for making this video! It's exactly how I feel about the state of gaming on the Mac. I have a new M1 Max MBP and I LOVE it. Don't get me started on how good HDR gaming looks on it- try Shadow of the Tomb Raider with HDR on. WOW. We need more games to come to the Mac, since it's a shame that a machine this good doesn't have many games available to play on it!
games and software... basically its becoming a final cut machine
@Cosine you're hilarious. Just because you can do HDR doesn't mean you can do it well. The MacBook's 1600 nits peak brightness mini LED back-lit display is going to destroy most HDR experiences even on the desktop. And this is from someone with a LG CX TV for a monitor.
@@FifthDread have you heard of oled monitors? I’m happy for apple fan boys finally getting a good screen but 4k monitors and oled have been a thing for a very long time
@@undisturbed809 didn't you see my reply to the other guy? I'm saying the screen offers better HDR than my LG OLED. I use the LG CX 48 at my gaming desktop, I'm no stranger to OLEDs. I know how they can't go above 800 nits, and have full screen ABL preventing the full screen from getting bright. Fantastic displays sure, but to not acknowledge the MacBook display as beautiful is just ignorance.
@@undisturbed809 Sadly, there's only one desktop OLED monitor out there. LG released it earlier this year for $4000. Some people choose to use TVs as desktop monitors, but they're just too big for most people to put on their desk.
Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed the lighting on this video. Well done!
I got a MacBook Air M1 few weeks ago (had a 2012 pro before) for music and video production. And I never have thought in a Mac for playing (I have a desktop PC) but even tough, is quite impressive what you can do with this little guy. I love retro gaming, (OpenEmu is spectacular) and some arcade Games r really good. I can't recommend a Mac for someone who will mostly game on his laptop, but hey, casual / mobile gamers with some use for a MacBook as a the tool it is.... not so bad.
As a Linux user, I didn’t realize gaming on a Mac is a worse experience than gaming on Linux and that says a lot given how much of a hassle it is to make some games work on Linux.
Uh I wouldn't go that far.
i think it's worth to make the distinction we are talking about ARM Mac here.
FIght! Fight! Fight!
I dont know what the hell is everyone talking about Im playing Witcher 3 and Apex on M1 MAX through geforce now and it runs smooth. And no one is talking about it
@@WilliamDailyReacts Witcher 3 came out nearly 7 years ago my friend, and apex nearly 3 years ago. Plus, apex was never a representation of bleeding edge graphics tech lol, even back when it came out.
The 1s+ hangs you were getting in Witcher 3 are caused by shader compilation. Parallels (and Crossover) have to take the DXBC shader, translate that to Metal Shading Language (which is C++) based and the Metal driver then has to compile that to something that the GPU can actually work with. This is because caused partially because modern graphics like Vulkan, Direct3D 12 and Metal require more information to compile a shader than Direct3D 11 (which is what Witcher 3 uses). So the shader compilation can only happen once the game tries to draw something with that shader which is too late and causes this stutter.
This will get better though. The driver will cache shaders it has already compiled and on subsequent runs it will just load the already compiled shader which is much faster and should avoid the stutter.
Try Baldur’s Gate 3! It runs amazingly well and really shows off just what the M1 is capable of doing in a maxed out high end graphic setting!
Rockstar: Open up! Mr Quinn, come out with your Mac behind your back.
StarCraft 2 on my MBP 15” Retina Mid2012 running Monterey via OCLP runs like a dream, of course, SC could run in my smart toaster given software support
Games hanging in Parallels is absolutely because of the emulator. Many emulators, such as cemu, (a Wii U emulator) does the same thing and is caused by having to load things to memory. However, as long as you keep it open it won’t happen again.
Also, dolphin and xemu running well on these macs is really unsurprising. Xemu has tolerable frame rates on my 2015 i5 MacBook Air (albeit at 105°C).
Those are some surprisingly impressive results.
Just one nitpick - at the start you mentioned that it competes with a mobile 3080, yet never once have you compared the performance against a 3080 powered Windows laptop. (you only compared against a 3070 and a 2080 Max Q)
Doesn't detract much from the machine's achievements.
he;s obviously a sellout. If he cared for the truth he wouldn't call nearly 3 year old machines "the best Windows gaming laptops". Heck RTX 3000 laptops came out like half a year BEFORE M1 Max\pro.
Its not able to compete with a 3080 mobile, MAYBE a 3060 at MOST but it has no chance of beating a gaming GPU
@@LaidBackDeveloper yeah he is so biased no cap
You are leaving out the most important part, RGB :p
mans compared the macbook pro to a 2070 super max-q its literally bullshit lmao
Loved your last statements about the Mac. I currently have a MBP and so far have been disappointed by the lack of support for gaming. Apple really does need to step up their game.
Great video!
I'm slightly amused but really also happy that you spent 10 min of 17 min video explaining all the problems of gaming on macs before talking about where things are going with silicon.
I picked up a 16" MacBook Pro with the M1 Max 32 core GPU and this thing is a monster. I have a windows 11 VM running games on steam, I switch back and forth to do Mac stuff, run some Mac games like Diablo 3, WoW at 120 fps in 4k with graphics up! This is the dream setup, now we just need more Mac games and/or more windows 11 ARM games.
Apple dropping support for OpenGL and Vulcan is just sheer f*ing hubris. I honestly don't understand how to feel. I have this incredibly powerful machine but devs won't support it because apple won't do the absolute minimum in supporting open standards. (On the other hand you would have to pay me in order to tolerate a windows box as my main computer.
@@ocularpatdown I even heard that old admiral's voice in my head as I was typing it 😅
Nah it was good for them to drop the open standard since they could optimize for their hardware better
Apple never supported Vulkan. They supported the initiative but it was never supported on any of their platforms. OpenGL is deprecated, it's dead. They aren't progressing it any more, Vulkan replaced it. Windows doesn't support Vulkan either, or OpenGL other than some ancient version. Support is written into the GPU drivers be AMD and Nvidia and Intel. They made Metal because they control the whole thing. It's a single API they can use on all of their platforms. You can argue the hubris is on the developers for not supporting Metal. I mean, they support DirectX right? That isn't an open standard either.
OpenGL ran like dog shit anyway, it was a mess. That's why it was killed and replaced. Also, they moved to Metal 2 years before Vulkan existed and they clearly started work on it long before then. These things don't just happen over night.
@@TalesOfWar this
14:50 Not to mention that while the computers are running on battery, the Mac enjoys a SUBSTANTIAL performance advantage.
Did he really not realise this??
It depends on the laptop, my lenovo legion doesnt limit the performance at all on battery, but the downside is that i get only like 2 hours of battery life
@@sixunity1171 Most high performance laptops limit performance on battery to reduce the power draw from the battery. The manufacturers don't want to overheat the battery by drawing too much power.
Not a financial one, you have to pay extra for the increased ram and gpu cores to play the games well.
@@mitchjames9350 gaming performance is a good way for reviewers to frame the comparison so that average consumers can appreciate it. Apple really does not care about gaming performance and seems content to tell customers to buy a PC if that is what they want to do.
I’ve been playing Divinity, Stardew Valley, and Diablo 3. Nothing crazy, but they all run at 60fps. M1 Mac Mini
When you realize that with that money you could have bought an RTX machine …
@@CapitanTavishI’m sure raytracing is a killer feature in stardew valley, but I didn’t buy my M1 Mini for gaming. It just happens to run games I enjoy. For me it’s win win.
@@CapitanTavish the RTX gpu alone costs more than a 549/649USD M1 Mac mini
“Perfectly playable” while playing over watch with a trackpad. I died.
I have a gaming PC and just recently picked up a base model 14" MacBook Pro. I've been playing Hades at max settings and it runs like hot butter. I didn't buy this laptop for gaming so it doesn't bother me but it's nice to know that I can still play some fun games on it in a pinch. Hopefully more games will be natively supported in the future.
The Vulkan Api only would help a lot to improve the gaming ecosystem on mac os
Unfortunately I don’t see Apple walking the “we make gaming devices” walk and incentivizing developers to bring their multi-platform games to the Mac. Their strategy seems to revolve around encouraging Apple-specific games via Apple Arcade. I would even wager that, as Apple continues to invest in services, they have begun to see any game not on Apple Arcade or the App Store as direct competition
Unless developers become okay with ponying up 30% of their revenue, or Apple becomes okay with de-prioritizing Apple Arcade, gaming on the Mac is more likely to get worse than better. Apple Arcade is premised on the notion that the future of Apple gaming is mobile gaming. Which is fine, and I’m legitimately happy for all those people who really love mobile games and will benefit from a more robust, high-quality game library. But I can’t help but feel burned by Apple’s decision to de-prioritize my use case in pursuit of services revenue
Developers don't need to be okay with Apple, they don't need permission for compiling their games to ARM or for support Metal, and as far as I know, Apple is not putting any complications to do so. They also don't need to be part of Apple Arcade, in MacOS you can install programs just like in Windows, you can download them from your web browser.
The incentivization they need doesn't need to come directly from Apple, the main reason they don't port their games for Mac is because it's market share is very low, and I think this will never change.
But who knows, with Linux it is the same, and Steamdeck, a game console, runs games on Linux using a compatibility layer called Proton, which is based on Wine. Maybe we can just rely on compatibility layers when they get much better?
I just don't think its our thing (Mac users). There's nothing stopping developers from developing games on Mac, I got steam on here. Just when was the last time you met a Mac user who actually wants to do serious gaming on there Mac? I mean I play a ton of Minecraft does that count? :P
@@Megabean I have to agree. I don't really game on my Mac and I used to game on my iPad but really it was a novelty more than anything. I already have a PS5 and gaming PC if I want to play "serious games". My Mac is for productivity.
@@Megabean if Apple people didn’t like games, the App Store wouldn’t be making so much off of games, and Apple wouldn’t be putting so much money into Apple Arcade. There is a clear and present gaming market among Mac users. But right now, most Mac people who want to game are buying consoles, which is a suboptimal user experience
@@Gilamath. loool the App store is a far cry from actual gaming. And no I'm a Mac user and I just got a gaming PC for that and for Windows only applications. You know how expensive storage is on macs? I'm not gonna install a 100GB game onto my Macbook even if it can support it. Macs are tools, for school, for video work (in my case) for music production or for business. They are not designed for gaming, they've never been designed for gaming.
Currently running mid 2010 and late 2017 iMacs (for various reasons) and find that the 2010 works better on the Mac side as it’s stuck on High Sierra and still has access to 32bit binaries while the 2017 one runs Windows only and later games better.
Im holding out for a higher spec iMac or Mini before jumping to M1 (Pro) but I hope the gaming support comes too.
Loving the colouring in this video. Looks great.
Been playing the classics on my M1 Air
Medieval II Total War
EU4
HOI4
Rimworld
Excellent display, great battery life, fanless and incredibly light. In love with this laptop.
The stuttering you're experiencing is caused by shader compilation. CEMU, a Wii-U emulator used to suffer from this, but the devs introduced a new method called "async-shader compile", which basically eliminated the problem. I'm not sure why those games are suffering from this problem though, as triple A games are usually shipped with precompiled shaders so that users don't have to experience this.
i'd imagine one of the translation layers would have to recompile the shaders during playtime causing the stuttering
maybe the most well-rounded but still fun video i've seen about this in that it's both honest of about the power of the macbook pro but also honest about the current state of support for gaming on apple silicon. i'm not a huge gamer but i'm excited about the gpu power and the potential it opens up ~~ even if it takes years because once it actually ships I'm going to hopefully be keeping the macbook pro max for at least five years.
You consistently have some of the absolute best tech content. I've been watching for a few years and i consistently watch your stuff and am always impressed by the insights and the presentation✌️
First time watching one of your videos.. awesome!! I loved it. Looking forward to watching more of your content!
Currently gaming on a base model 2017 macbook air and am upgrading to a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 16gb ram. I only really play Minecraft, Sims 4, and osu!, but I'm excited to see how much performance increases
Blender's adoption of metal was really the eye opener for me. Seeing the performance boost it brings makes me disappointed it's nowhere near as supported as it should be. Although blender only implemented when Apple sent engineers to work on it for them, so like you said, gotta be better incentivized
it's still in the early stages.
Excellent explanation and wrap-up of the current state of gaming on Mac. I hope Apple takes the advice you and many others have expressed in incentivizing game studios to develop their games to be compatible with ARM, or potentially even develop their own compiler that can import certain game build types and preprocess them to be more ARM-friendly.
they aint doing shit. thats works that should be done from apple's side like steam did with proton but they aint letting the money scape from their hands. for sure they would ban steam from running on mac if it would ever be possible or they would manage to get 50% of the revenue generated in mac
Repairability and compatibility, the two things stopping me buying another MacBook. I am otherwise very excited about Apple Silicon. Bring on the ARM revolution!!
That's the bad thing Noone consider... Everything soldered... Everything could die... And the move to ARM is not for the performances... They've spent lots of money on tsmc's 5nm for that... (also on making a new design with all the new features including a decent heatpipe after years) But for repairability... They want to kill repair shops and don't let anyone fix their products... Hope other companies WON'T follow this route because when the device will die out of warranty (that for Apple is 2 year in Europe), you'll throw it in the trash: no spare parts, nothing...
Is the storage soldered to the motherboard too?🤨
@@TrioLOLGamers Yeah, repairability clearly isn't their priority. I would however counter your point about longevity of their computerd. Whilst it may be true for iPhones and possibly some generation of MacBook, it doesn't tally with my experience. My mid 2012 13 inch MacBook Pro is still going strong and it's almost 9 years old. Still performs pretty well all things considered (I did upgrade it to an SSD but it's stock i5 and 4gb ram otherwise). Having said that, it is a Mac from a different era and I haven't owned a newer one. All I'm saying is it's not black and white.
@@tetra1974 Not sure. I have a feeling it can technically be removed but you have to use an apple certified replacement, and if it's not done by a certified repair store it won't work, but I may be getting confused with older Macbooks. I'd suggest having a Google.
@@tetra1974 yes, it is soldered to the motherboard. Apple has been doing this for years.
Very informative, great video Quinn.
glad I found your channel. great content keep it up
What a good breakdown
I do really hope that top game developers would give a chance to make their games playable on Mac via Metal. Thanks for this vid Quinn!
Porting games over to mac is quite painful from a programming standpoint (not just because of the graphics API), and it's time consuming to write games that are compatible for both, and while apple has not been very proactive, the companies that make the games are largely to "blame". They haven't seen it as worth their effort/money to port AAA to macs when up to this point not many macs even had hardware capable of supporting them. We'll see what happens now, but this is not a case of Apple messing up something easy. I do hope to be able to play games on mac though, it's a shame such powerful hardware is going unused for gaming. But it's hard to blame apple or game devs when on both ends porting a title generally means losing lots of money and time. Even if apple were willing to heavily subsidized porting, lots of studios wouldn't do it simply because of the effort required.
It’s not painful lol it’s actually easier it’s just not profitable as to windows probably
@Garrus Vakarian well those are big chips they can’t be in thermal system of MacBook Air bruh wake up
Congrats on 1 million subs! Also, I totally agree with the last part.
13:50 For a second, I almost took your S.O.S blinking seriously lol 😆
That 1 second or so hitching is probably the game loading the shaders for that object, ran into a very similar issue with Wii U emulation, although an option called “Asynchronous Shader Compilation” fixed it
Battery life to performance ratio is hard to beat. I’m excited for the windows laptops to catch up in the next few years.
New laptops will catch up only if Apple starts letting other use the 5nm TSMC process... And Intel... Well they've just switched to Intel 7 (that is 10nm, but with their technology, so yeah... Similar to 7nm), so only next generation will show how they can perform on Intel 7... (and, also Intel 7 is optimized for Windows 11 because they have energy efficient cores with the standard ones)
Unless they move to ARM or something else equally efficient they never will. x86/64 just has much more overhead in power draw than ARM does. All things being equal, ARM will ALWAYS perform better at lower power draw or at the very least, the same power draw. Even on the same node process ARM is just that much more efficient that it really doesn't matter. Also let's not forget that the M1 is the ENTIRE system, not just the CPU. It's the CPU, GPU, memory, storage, all the other logic that actually runs the thing (hence being a System on a Chip), yet it still performs better than and uses less power than much larger (in total) packages of dedicated and separate CPU, GPU, memory and storage based systems.
@@TalesOfWar they already have an arm laptop several years ago but it it has bugs and can’t run most of x86 apps. Qualcomm also recently announced that they are making a m1 competitor. I’m sure they will come up with a system comparable to m1 in the next few years. But apple may have m5 released when it happens. 🤣
Maybe if there were any games for Mac
I admit that I'm an ignorant boob who wants to game on the latest MacBook pros. This video finally explained to me the key issues with gaming and macs in a clear, patient, and thorough way. I had a hard time finding a decent breakdown of this topic. I'm just happy I can play some of the newer (but still old) emulated classics. Thank you for that.
- ignorant boob
Really man, your personality had some nice little tweaks that work so well. Congrats,
The one game I used to play regularly that is M1 native supported, World of Warcraft, has full screening issues with the notch getting in the way. So on top of all the negatives you mention, that notch is still a hideous cherry on top that as a gamer is way too many compromises to deal with. Got a Razer Blade instead just cause I know it will work with the majority games out there, doesn't have immersion and display blocking protrusions, and is still cheaper than a MacBook. Fan noise and battery be damned until Apple can support sometching other than niche use cases.
I have a similar dilemma with compute tasks:
yes, M1 is more power efficient,
but I can just use my PC, yeah, it will consume ~300W - and that will be reflected in my electricity bill,
but do I want to shelve out another $4000?
... still a dilemma.
It math at this point, if the pc can do the same thing as a new macbook or relatively the same performance, it generally isn't worth it unless the power savings of the mac could balance out its cost. It is also important to consider portability, screen quality and speaker quality as well, for the price you get a whole package. This just comes down to the math of it all. If your PC's performance is negatively affecting your life compared to what the mac would do, get the mac.
You won't consume 300w every hour, but it's just the peak... So no... Not worth it...
@@TrioLOLGamers but who knows, my pc consumes over 500 watts all the time cause it’s always working on something when I don’t use it eg: rendering large blender files or rendering pre edited videos. My server on the other hand consumes over 800 watts 24/7. You can’t just assume things like this
M series so far only has laptop and entry level versions, which are in totally different leagues. Performance over anything would be a desktop tower’s job, and the Mac Pro is still on Intel. Just saying. A $4000 windows flagship thin laptop cannot do what you want with desktop setup either.
I'm hoping someone can show the performance of these in CAD applications through virtualized windows, these are very intriguing propositions and that's the only thing stopping me from buying one
I found some small youtuber talking about it, and it was NOT impressive. I`m an engineer and already took it out of my list of machines to buy.
@@Vinizuca if they are small they could have done it wrong
Wow I was blown away by the quality and detail of this video!
Well there's one more way to game on MacBook, it's to dualboot it on Linux which is now increasingly a great platform for gaming and offers a lot bigger pool of games than Mac.
You can't dualboot into Linux on M1 Macs unless you mean Asahi Linux which is in very early alpha
As well as Dirt Rally I've been quite impressed by Dying Light, an AAA title from a few years back. Runs through Rosetta 2 but uses Metal. I get 120fps at 1080p on my 14" M1 Pro. I imagine it would be similarly buttery at higher resolutions on the Max GPUs. Hopefully game devs will be encouraged by this performance.
Well... I do Play: "LOTRO: The Lord Of The Rings Online" on my: "MacBook Pro With TouchBar".
It was a nightmare [VS] it's Win-Client/Version.
(Crashed every 5-Min on Higher-Rez-Settings)
But then they got rid of the Native-Mac-Version,
Replaced it with the Wine-EMU,
Pre-Configured by the DEV's for the Game,
& It runs like a charm now.
Can play it on Very-High-Settings,
Problem-Free,
Tho on BootCamp on the other hand,
It runs smoothly with everything Maxed-Out,
Ultra-Settings+Water/Light-Effects,
On Parallels-Desktop tho,
Even with Maxed-Out PD-Gaming-Settings,
It's barley able to run it at Medium-Settings,
Pretty much looking at Low-Settings on PD,
For a Medioker-OK-Game-Flow.
Yup... I've tried em' all... Painfully so.
Windows gamers: Look what they have to do to achieve a fraction of our powers.
If MacOS supported the AAA games I play, I would 100% ditch my windows machine.
*and they had better price to performance in those games
Other way around. If the AAA games supported the Mac. And yep, I only have a PC for gaming, everything else I use my Macs. My Windows box is essentially a fancy, over powered console.
@@TalesOfWar to each there own man, you can buy a PS5 if you want a gaming system, PCs can do a lot more than gaming, unlike Mac OS is only good at specific things that are supported
13:50 he blinks "... --- ..." which is SOS in morse code hahahah
I'm going to have an M1 & a PC for a long time it seems. That was good video Snazzy. Focussed me somewhat. Thanks.
This was an excellent overview of the state of gaming on Mac. Imagine for a moment Apple sorted some great titles that people actually want to play running well and easily on Mac. Or better yet, any game running on the new silicon. They would take one of the last major 'features' Intel and Microsoft are clinging to.
And being able to play all those games without needing a charger
I don't want a few games on Mac.
I want my full existing Steam library on Mac. The games my friends play on Windows or Linux.
This used to be possible 2007-2017, before Apple dropped 32-bit, Nvidia, OpenGL, x86 and such.
All the games I have in Steam used to run on Apple. They still do on my 2010 Mac Pro with GTX980 and High Sierra.
@@rogerwilco2 I agree that would be the ideal scenario. I'm just being realistic...
The cost of a Mac that can run games well is a lot more than most gaming desktops and laptops.
@@mitchjames9350 Yes because, generally, games aren't optimised for Apple's desktop OS or in this case their new hardware. But imagine if they were!
Man if they really get into gaming, I'll buy this laptop in a heart beat. I am tired of having sub-par battery on my gaming laptops...
How many hours do you play games a day away from the electric grid?
You have changed my decision to actually go for Base M1 pro instead of base M1 max, and get a PS 5 for the difference. 😁
Try getting one at that difference price and I'll pay you double
@@ruhtam8971 lol, I already use a PS 4 Pro, I can get the PS 5 whenever it is easily available (at launch price) in the future.
@@Prat_San my comment was on the inflated prices and unavailability of the current gen consoles
@@ruhtam8971 I had understood. :)
@@ruhtam8971 Where I am you can get ps5 next day for like 800-900usd. That's less than the price difference between m1 pro and m1 max, is it?
This video definitely needs an update - really exciting news with the game porting kit from apple. Looking forward to your take on it. :)
Nice video very informative and thoughtful. Thank you!
Look I get it: "MaC iSn'T fOr GaMiNg!"
But it honestly *COULD* be. As stated in the video, the power/hardware is THERE. Right in front of them, andApple is leaving a LOT of potential customers out to dry because they simply refuse to work with the gaming industry.
That said, a lot of PC people/gamers may not even make that jump because... Well it's Apple, they have a reputation. And giving up the customization that a windows platform offers is hard. But Apple CAN do it, they just refuse to (again, as stated in the video).
To this point (about Apple's reputation) I'm kinda scared to see what the AS Mac Pro will look like, mainly because of the SOC that Apple has.
Edit: Changed "should" to "*COULD*" because it makes what I tried to say much more clear (I think...)
I mean the gaming industry has traditionally refused to work with them. It's a two way street. The Mac never got the support for games and the games it does have are mostly all running on some kind translation layer like Cedega/Wine. Why cater to an industry that doesn't want to take the time to even do native ports? Metal is a super easy to use api far easier than Vulkan, yet everyone always talks about Apple having to support Vulkan. Apple went with Metal because they have to think about their iOS developers and something as complex as Vulkan wasn't going to get much adoption (and it still hasn't with most games on PC still being developed in DX, and most non Apple mobile developers still using OpenGLES) due to its complexity. Apple was never going to use something as low level as Vulkan for their development platform. It just wasn't going to happen even if Metal didn't exist.
You're making the assumption they are leaving customers because they are refusing to work with the gaming industry. Most people that buy a mac don't buy it for gaming, and all the macs get sold at the moment because of chip shortages. There does't seem to be a point pushing a segment that they can't dedicate themselves to.
@@leopoldroitel4022 I meant to add that bit of nuance in the comment.
Just to be clear, I know people don't buy macs for gaming. The point I tried to make is that that doesn't have to be the case now. I wasn't clear enough by saying that Apple could attract new customers who might be on the fence between MacOS and Windows, but go with Windows because of it's broader support for games. Even now, with the decent performance pushed by even the entry level M1 I could see more people on that fence moving over to Mac. But it is a two way street, as @apoclypse pointed out. And right now, it seems only Apple is interested in playing nice. There's still a number of people who will go with Windows anyway because of the aforementioned reputation Apple has.
That said, I'm coming from my own perspective: Longtime Mac user who built a PC for games.
Of course that "might be on the fence" could a laughably small audience that wouldn't justify the expense of working with the gaming industry.
@@apoclypse There's also the fact that Metal predates Vulkan by about two years so it makes a LOT more sense that Apple would stick with that over Vulkan.
As for it being easier to work with? I have no idea on that one, so forgive me if I take what you say with a grain of salt. I'm a journalist, not a software developer/engineer/designer so my exposure to code and graphics API is pretty low.
All that to say: You're correct, it's a two way street but it sounds like Apple is a bit more open to working with game devs than game devs are open to working with Apple atm. At least that's what I seemed to hear from Snazzy (though that was more about Bootcamp and Windows than games).
@@apoclypse true, 2 way street but in order for the game industry to deal with apple, apple must first invest (time+money) in it. that's the case for any platform not just apple. windows is the best game platform for computers right now because of decades of investements by all who are involved. as with microsoft and consoles, it didn't happen over night. ms had to throw a ton of money and time so the xbox system will become what it is today. apple always had the advantage of a closed and more optimized ecosystem than windows, decades of time to improve the gaming aspect of it (in computers), but didn't. so don't be in a hurry to blame the game industry in this. i'm sure apple is just fine with their profits from mobile gaming and won't bother after all...
Betteridge's law of headlines says "no".
Betteridge can suck it.
It's sad that many games don't run on MacBooks
I have played Dota 1 and DotA 2 on all my Macbooks since 2007. Never had an issue with any of the computers while gaming. I now have a 2020 16" intel Macbook pro. Runs DotA 2 like a dream. Probably gonna have the 16" M1 MAX early next year. And yes it will also run DotA 2 (: More money than sense I know, but I'm happy, so be it (:
Great work & presentation ! - guess I'll stick with my PC gaming latop & M1 Mac Mini until this gets sorted...
Really, the only way the Mac gaming situation could improve is for more developers to port their games on Mac. Many indies do, but for large publishers that have to fund the porting of complex AAAs it's a much harder proposition. Still, the market share of macOS is about 15% (desktop OSes only), which I think could make it worth their while. Some sort of incentive from Apple definitely could help them make the jump. Hell, even Microsoft could make a buck by porting some of their games. GamePass for Mac, anyone?
Not that Apple has made it easy over the last few years, with the transitions from OpenGL to Metal, 32-bit to 64-bit and Intel to Apple Silicon. But now that all of these are either done or underway, the software environment is once again stable enough to seriously consider more Mac ports.
Agree with the fact Crossover is a dodgy solution for now, emulators are so great though.
I run Trackmania on a 2020 M1 Macbook Pro with Parallels. Had such a hassle getting it to work. Use crossover first but they dropped support, so now I'm on Windows 11 with Parallels
I have never owned a Mac and I still watched to the end!
First time on the channel. Great video!
6:30 This has always been an issue for Linux gaming as well, it goes away almost entirely after loading each asset at lease once.