Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves
macworld.com49 points by kristianp 7 hours ago
49 points by kristianp 7 hours ago
Apple could easily make gaming on Mac feasible by contributing to Proton, Wine, DXVK and officially supporting Vulkan at least through translation layer.
Or just partner with Valve to do exactly this for their platform.
Instead they choose to build another proprietary solution nobody gonna use and that will die as soon as they lose interest.
I agree with you on wine, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are doing this quietly (landing patches to make Wine better on Mac), but for the purposes of making directx shaders perform better I fail to see why it matters if they support dx to metal conversion or if they support vulkan (for the goals of making games run better for their customers)?
> landing patches to make Wine better on Mac
> I fail to see why it matters if they support dx to metal conversion or if they support vulkan
Their strategy trying to push proprietary solutions simply doesnt work when their OS have 2% of PC gaming market share.
Apple announced game porting toolkit 3 years ago and no one uses it. Well, unless Apple fund ports as PR stunts.
At the same time Valve released Steam Deck 4 years ago and by now nearly all Windows games are playable on Linux.
I wish this were/is true, that Apple supports Wine development. But as far as we know, a year from now Apple will end Rosetta 2 support in macOS 28, and with it the ability to run Wine.
AFAIK Crossover is now able to run without Rosetta:
https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2026/6/11/whats-in...
Most likely Wine will work soon too. Only some 32-bit apps will break.
Oh, who gives a damn. Half the games in my Steam library don't work since Apple killed 32bit. When they fix it, I'll know they care about Mac gaming.
Most of those are gonna work using Rosetta, crossover, and the game porting toolkit.
You really don’t need Apple to support 32Bit x86 macOS games when it’s not much more overhead to run windows x86 games (which is easily the better library to spend time Optimizing for).
Why bother with macos version at all then? Soon current version becomes unusable as well, and needs windows fallback to run since macos version is useless
This, once again, misses the elephant in the room.
The fact is simple, there isn't enough of a Mac gaming market for the game developers to go through the effort.
The hardware has been good enough for a while now.
I'm not saying this will never change but the developers that shipped games on PC and Mac report something along the lines of 6-11% of users use a Mac. That isn't worth the effort unless you have a very strong IP and you've already targeted the switch2, the PS5 and XBox.
Some engines nicely support Mac out of the box. I’m making a party fighter in LOVE2D and am having a good time developing and playing on Mac (cross platform online play is working well too, my friends are all Windows).
Maybe Unity or Godot also offer this benefit? If so then Mac gaming could become much better supported, at least from indies!
Easy fix. Apple can just stop breaking compatibility and partner with Valve to port Proton support to Mac.
But they wont do it because they want to push their own walled garden. And obviously no one will support it because macOS market share is smaller than Linux market share.
>macOS market share is smaller than Linux market share
Not true? macOS has like 12-14% and Linux 3-4%
If you check Steam hardware survey you'll see Linux market sgare is 3% against macOS 2%. This is what matter for game studios.
That's because it makes no sense to use Steam on macOS because there are nearly no compatible games and Steam itself only has an ARM version on Beta and the Intel version is unusably slow. Overall a catch-22 situation though.
A very big portion of that is corporate.
I have a macbook home, the one issued by my employer. My personal laptop runs Linux.
That's not the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room for gaming on Mac is Apple's policy non-commitment to traditional gaming. Technical support for non-gambling gaming is just a checkbox item to them for mandatory 45-second segments in product launches. That transcends into their customers and develop into various gaming and Mac related chicken and egg problems.
Personally I would gladly switch to mac as my actual personal PC if games ran well on it.
That isn't worth the effort
Isn’t the point that significantly reducing the effort required changes the “is it worth it” equation?
I don't get this attitude.
It'll never be enough until it is. Making porting lower-effort and higher performance can only help.
Apple is getting kind of a PR problem with developers. In theory they don't do all the same things on Mac as they do on iOS, but as long as they continue to do them on iOS and keep feature creeping the gatekeeper stuff, people are hesitant to end up stuck with Apple taking 30% of their revenue or denying their app for opaque reasons after they've spent big money to develop it.
At which point who is going to spend development resources helping the platform of the company they're most afraid of screwing them if it becomes more popular? Half the reason more game developers are targeting Linux is a hedge against Microsoft doing that sort of thing, and Apple is on the opposite side of where they want to move.
This idea that Apple has been plotting this whole time to turn the Mac into iOS, in terms of limiting the software you can run to their own App Store, is a tired meme that makes zero sense given what we've seen from Apple in the past...checks...19 years.
Like, seriously, do you think they need longer than that to do it if it's really what they plan?
If they were ever going to do it, it would've been when they switched to Apple Silicon chips, and...they didn't!
Perpetuating the idea does no one any favors. It's just pointless paranoia.
That really doesn’t make any sense. Do you really think Apple will ban steam on macOS overnight?
That's not how you boil a frog.
If it gets popular enough then they start trying to get games to use their app store instead of Steam, gradually make it easier to use that and harder to use anything else, then the gate closes only after the herd is where they want it.
Better, then, if it never gets popular enough to begin with.
Nah there will be a new model and a new OS version on it that will only lets you use the App Store (30% tax of course). People here will complain and a fuck ton of people will dick ride Apple with bullshit about how they shouldn't buy that new laptop and they should feel privileged for Apple allowing any money to go to the person actually providing you value.
The high pixel response time on macbook displays means you'll want an external monitor for multiplayer shooters etc., which most gamers are already fine with, but annoying if you want to game while travelling.
Not a “Gamer” so I’m always surprised small things like this make a difference.
As a rule of thumb, what is a minimum frame rate a game needs? From there how much does each extra fps make a difference, and at what point do you hit diminishing returns?
Pixel response time is a related concept to framerate but more about how long it takes a pixel to change from one color to the next. Usually measured in cycle time from grey to grey again, a low rate just means that images will be smooshy looking, have unclear boundaries, and end up with a 'motion blur' effect. So even if your mbp supports a reasonable sounding 120hz (8.33ms for a full frame sweep), some of those pixels will still be in transition when the next frame hits. At least, my take on it as a somewhat casual gamer.
It depends wildly on the type of game.
e.g. if you're playing a single player turn-based strategy game, you might be taking a few seconds between each decision & UI interaction. Some hard turns you might step away from the computer to think things through for minutes without touching the controls. 30fps for a game like that could be fine. 15-20fps might even be fine, especially if the game engine manages to avoid adding unnecessary input latency & is able to process input events at a faster rate even if the render runs at a low framerate.
If you're playing competitive FPS games, where reflexes matter, you'd want to get input, network & video latency as low as possible, within reason. Not high-frequency trading low. I have no idea at what point it stops making a competitive difference. If you have +100ms more latency than I do, I suspect that'd give me a noticeable advantage. If you have +10ms more latency than I do, I'm not sure that matters.
Dan Luu wrote an article about input latency [1] in 2017 where he measured latency by running experiments pressing a key & measuring how long it takes to see a response on the screen. New computers from 2017 would have around 70ms-170ms latency, depending on the model.
I very much don't trust that article as a baseline. YMMV but I measured with a 240hz camera with a mid-high tier computer and a 144hz monitor in 2018 and a nice computer w/ 165hz in 2025 and I never got the huge latencies he experienced, I had click to photon of something like 10 frames max, so 42ms, with the average IIRC being closer to 5 frames.
input lag is a minor part of it. it depends on the game, but for example in CS2, refresh rate changes game mechanics like recoil, movement, even trajectories of thrown grenades.
i went from 60hz to 240hz, with <100fps average, and the difference was still immense. refresh rate is more important than fps, that's how big it is.
Frame rate has absolutely nothing to do with the screen you project the frames on. In competitive multiplayer shooters, frame rate matters a lot.
I don’t think it matters. My Studio Display XDR has pretty bad motion performance (similar to Macbook, maybe a touch better) and you can still play first-person shooters perfectly fine. In the general case you don’t notice it much. It’s only a problem with fast planar movement, e.g. strafing along a wall and trying to read some text that’s written on it. (Spelunky 2 is much worse than CS in this regard, but still not a massive issue. Just a bit ugly.)
The corresponding WWDC video for toolkit v4 is at https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/357
Isn't the translation layer going away soon though?
Rosetta will go away. Game support won't. "Starting with computers using macOS 28, Rosetta functionality will be available only for certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks." https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527
Do they plan to have a whitelist of games? I guess they could remove rosetta support for most Cocoa frameworks while keeping OpenGL translation layer.
I would assume people would switch to using FEX which is tuned for game performance for the x86 emulation bit.
What's all the fuss about? I've been gaming on my Mac just fine. https://files.catbox.moe/dfcfha.png
How it is getting priority if they deprecated Rosetta? Or am I understanding it wrongly?
They claim enough of Rosetta will continue to exist for games and things like wine to work. I suspect the main thing they want to kill off are all the x86 slices in the mach-o fat binaries for all of the frameworks.
Do you have a source on that, them claiming continued support for "things like wine"?
Do macs really have GPUs though? Or are they like intel integrated graphics?
You might want to not only re-evaluate what you consider a real GPU, but also take a look at what the latest Intel integrated graphics is capable of (Panther Lake laptop chips with 12-core GPU chiplet fabbed by TSMC). Intel is still way behind NVIDIA and AMD in the discrete graphics card market, and their drivers don't have the decades of accumulated hacks to work around badly-written games, but their good iGPUs aren't a nightmare of incompatibility and missing features like they were 15 years ago.
People say they think it's faster than top of the line RTX 3070[1] and hands down the fastest GPU ever for local LLM purposes, and OTOH they're like Intel integrated graphics with RAM shared VRAM for ultra thin laptops, so the truth is either of that, or somewhere between those two. Probably wherever its TDP suggests.
1: (Laptop)
An on-board GPU is not a GPU?
It’s only a GPU if it’s made in the RTX region of Silicon Valley, otherwise it’s just sparkling floating point calculations.
This is not the greatest question because it makes it seem that you think unified gpu+cpu socs are all like intel graphics.
It is, and has been for a long time, a concious choice for apple to avoid gaming.
The original GPTK was mostly comprised of forked code. This bump likely includes a lot of the upstream optimizations that other ARM gamers have been using for a while now.
The example they give is a frame rate boost on GTA V - a game released 16 years ago.
Yeah, but at 176 FPS, at first glance it seems competitive with the abilities of some fairly recent dGPUs from nvidia/AMD, though obviously we don't have benchmark-level details here.
I think this is an article allowing quiet optimism rather than all-out celebration.
I don't think the Game Porting Toolkit is useful these days: LLMs one-shot ports from one graphics API to another.
Just like programming languages, graphical API choice is irrelevant now.
You're going to need a source for an LLM one-shotting a port of a AAA title from one graphics API to another...
I one-shotted non trivial software from OpenGL to Metal with a cheap (=non state of the art) LLM. That was 6 months ago.
Anything in Unreal Engine that you think Fable wouldn't be able to adapt on its own to a different graphics API?
The game porting toolkit allows windows DX shaders to get runtime translated to high performance metal shaders.
It provides a path for Rosetta and Wine to handle what they are good at while letting Apple handle the shader lowering in many cases better then dxvk -> moltenvk -> metal (or whatever the new state of the art thing is, I forget the name).
It’s not JUST for helping with manual porting of the cpu side code.
