MacBook for gaming?

[SpyderTracks]

Ok, so I upgraded my old Vortex to a MacBook Pro 16" this time around, reason being is with the Vortex I was travelling around for work and wanted to game when I was in B&Bs on my own, the Vortex was an incredible machine for the job.

Now though, I'm almost always home, and have my main PC with the G9 that I'll have for proper gaming.

So I didn't really need to game on the laptop anymore, but having a Mac meant that I could run my Music DAW on it. They're stupidly overpriced, but actually, if you hunt around you can get some very good deals, Amazon are a great source for Macs.

So as it's Thursday, we had Epic's freebie giveaway and there was an important title, so I thought I'd install Steam just to check my catalogue if I already had it, and while it was open I thought I'd check which games in my library are compatible with the Mac

So I'm installing Mad Max which is from 2015 so pretty old now, but I've not played it yet, and also Metro Exodus which I haven't finished yet.

I have low expectations, the reviews I've seen of Mac gaming is pretty damn poor, although as these are older titles perhaps it may be a bit better.

Good for a giggle.

 

[TonyCarter]

I’ve got a MacStudio, but still play on the PC.

Although the Mac version of No Man’s Sky does run well and look gorgeous on the Studio Display. Haven’t launched it on the PC though since I got the AW3423DW OLED, so can’t really say it looks worse/better.

Most of the time - on Intel Macs - I‘d simply play natively in Windows via Bootcamp. My last 27” iMac was the top-of-the-range 2014 model with a 4.0ghz i7-4709k and maxed out AMD Radeon R9 M295X…and it was better in gaming than my 2019 i7-8700k 21.5” model with a Vega48.

 

[HomerJ]

Ok, so I upgraded my old Vortex to a MacBook Pro 16" this time around, reason being is with the Vortex I was travelling around for work and wanted to game when I was in B&Bs on my own, the Vortex was an incredible machine for the job.

Now though, I'm almost always home, and have my main PC with the G9 that I'll have for proper gaming.

So I didn't really need to game on the laptop anymore, but having a Mac meant that I could run my Music DAW on it. They're stupidly overpriced, but actually, if you hunt around you can get some very good deals, Amazon are a great source for Macs.

So as it's Thursday, we had Epic's freebie giveaway and there was an important title, so I thought I'd install Steam just to check my catalogue if I already had it, and while it was open I thought I'd check which games in my library are compatible with the Mac

So I'm installing Mad Max which is from 2015 so pretty old now, but I've not played it yet, and also Metro Exodus which I haven't finished yet.

I have low expectations, the reviews I've seen of Mac gaming is pretty damn poor, although as these are older titles perhaps it may be a bit better.

Good for a giggle.

View attachment 39069

macs seem better than thought with gaming if this vid is anything to go by

 

[TonyCarter]

Yes, the toolkit for devs is coming along in leaps and bounds.

Some enterprising users have installed the dev tools to try some Windows games before they’re officially ‘ported’. Mainly older games…so no Hogwarts, Starfield, Cyberpunk and nothing that uses unique graphics calls that aren’t translated in the toolkit.

The performance in sone test versions isn’t terrible when you consider it‘s basically going through 2 translation layers…and Mac players are used to being capped to 60Hz due Apple concentrating of graphical fidelity over FPS.

 

[SpyderTracks]

They are certainly showing far more attention to the gaming world on Macs than they ever have before, I don't know what exact agreement they had when they were in the Intel / AMD contract, but I suspect there were fairly strict licensing agreements that made it not worthwhile to focus on gaming. But on Intel as @TonyCarter says you COULD game perfectly find in bootcamp, BUT, the top tier GPU's available on Macs in those days were pretty trash, until you got up to the Mac Pro's but even then they were certainly not top tier professional cards.

It's no secret that Steve Jobs just wasn't interested in gaming in any shape or form, he saw it as a complete waste of time, but I do think both the move to Apple Silicon, plus Tim Cooke now being firmly rooted in decision making, that they're starting to take a different tack.

At the moment, the handicap is the "Proton" layer which is essentially an emulation layer, very much the same as Wine for Linux that the steam deck uses, but once they actually properly start porting games to the Metal framework, the power is undoubtedly there, both in the OS and the Apple Silicon graphics

Mine is the basic tier M2 Pro chip, I didn't go for the all out Pro Max one as it's a substantial increase in cost that I just couldn't justify, but even the M2 Pro is incredibly beefy given it's on chip.

Unfortunately, it's going to take YEARS for game devs to really give Mac any attention. But with the efforts of major games like Resident Evil: Village and Baldurs Gate 3 hitting the Mac, certainly Apple are obviously changing their perspective and getting some big Dev Studios even interested in working with them, and that's just not been the case... well.... ever before.

Top 25 Mac games for 2023

These are the top 20 best Mac games available right now, from RPGs to racing, shooting games to puzzles, together with links to buy at the best price.

www.macworld.com

Apple KNOW they're missing out on a HUGE user base by not appealing to gamers, if they could include that base, they really would start to permeate the PC market in a far far bigger way.

I have high hopes. I don't think Mac gaming will be anything close to equalling PC probably within a decade at least, but if they can at least have games being natively ported, that would be a fantastic start.

 

[TonyCarter]

The other ‘elephant in the room’ for Mac gaming is the inability to upgrade the RAM, CPU, GPU…and the shared memory…so you have to replace the whole machine to upgrade. At least with some Intel Macs you could get a Thunderbolt breakout box for a proper GPU, but support was limited, flaky under Bootcamp and was £300-£500 on top of the GPU.

 

[HomerJ]

The other ‘elephant in the room’ for Mac gaming is the inability to upgrade the RAM, CPU, GPU…and the shared memory…so you have to replace the whole machine to upgrade. At least with some Intel Macs you could get a Thunderbolt breakout box for a proper GPU, but support was limited, flaky under Bootcamp and was £300-£500 on top of the GPU.

yeah watching Louis rossmann it does seem that way

 

[SpyderTracks]

The other ‘elephant in the room’ for Mac gaming is the inability to upgrade the RAM, CPU, GPU…and the shared memory…so you have to replace the whole machine to upgrade. At least with some Intel Macs you could get a Thunderbolt breakout box for a proper GPU, but support was limited, flaky under Bootcamp and was £300-£500 on top of the GPU.

Yeah, absolutely, although I have zero qualms with SoC, and in a lot of ways it has it's absolute benefits, what I don't agree with is soldering it onto the board, that and their software restrictions on replacement parts I'm really hoping the right to repair movement will eventually make illegal. There are huge movements happening largely spearheaded by iFixit and Louis Rossman, there have been some huge bills that's just been passed in I think California which is addressing the hardware side, currently they're not so focussed on software restrictions, but I think that will come in time

https://pirg.org/california/articles/california-is-on-the-verge-of-winning-the-right-to-repair/

Apple backs Biden's push for right-to-repair law

Apple , the world's largest tech company, said on Tuesday that it will back a U.S. right-to-repair bill, following years of complaints from consumer advocates that its sleek devices are difficult and expensive to fix.

www.reuters.com

But what needs to happen is the Chip MUST be socketed, sure, keep it an SoC, but have the buyer be able to upgrade it to a new M3 / M4 etc, keep sockets the same for a minimum of say 5 generations, there's absolutely no reason they can't do that. SSDs should never ever ever be soldered either, that's just criminal.

 

[TonyCarter]

My Mac Studio will be the first machine that I’ve got no intention of taking apart…unless iFixIt suddenly come up with a solution to add extra nvme storage or RAM…but I don’t really need a lot of internal storage as I’ve used external devices via Thunderbolt for years.

But Apple really make it hard (i.e. expensive) for small upgrades at time of purchase…e.g. £200 to go from 8GB to 16gb RAM , or 256gb to 512gb SSD

However, I was almost tempted by the Ultra version which basically just has 2 boards joined together…and in theory can be x4 in a MacPro.

 

[TonyCarter]

I can see Apple eventually allowing upgrades, but maybe by adding a 2nd, 3rd, 4th SOC daughterboard. But you just know it will be almost the same cost as a new machine.

 

[SpyderTracks]

However, I was almost tempted by the Ultra version which basically just has 2 boards joined together…and in theory can be x4 in a MacPro.

It is insanely powerful, but the step up in price is ridiculous at the moment.

Again, Apple charge literally like $200 for 8Gb RAM, that's just ludicrous, there should be basic caps on this sort of thing.

You ready for the November 7th M3 announcement? I'm holding out for a new iPad, just the standard one, but would really like M3.

 

[HomerJ]

It is insanely powerful, but the step up in price is ridiculous at the moment.

Again, Apple charge literally like $200 for 8Gb RAM, that's just ludicrous, there should be basic caps on this sort of thing.

You ready for the November 7th M3 announcement? I'm holding out for a new iPad, just the standard one, but would really like M3.

$200 for 8gb is insane

 

[TonyCarter]

There’s the ‘Scary Fast’ event on 30th October.

Apple Events

iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 with Apple Intelligence, Apple Watch Series 10, Apple Watch Ultra 2, AirPods 4, AirPods Pro 2 hearing health, AirPods Max.

www.apple.com

That could be for an M3 iMac…probably 24”…but I’ve been waiting for a 27-32” iMac since the original Apple Silicon announcement. I finally caved and went Mac Studio + Display combo.

 

[SpyderTracks]

There’s the ‘Scary Fast’ event on 30th October.

Apple Events

iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 with Apple Intelligence, Apple Watch Series 10, Apple Watch Ultra 2, AirPods 4, AirPods Pro 2 hearing health, AirPods Max.

www.apple.com

Christ is it the 30th???? For some reason I had the 7th in my brain, thanks for correcting me!

 

[TonyCarter]

$200 for 8gb is insane

Tell me about it. Have been paying the Apple tax since 1990.

 

[HomerJ]

Tell me about it. Have been paying the Apple tax since 1990.

sounds more like an apple robber Barron tax

 

[TonyCarter]

sounds more like an apple robber Barron tax

It hurts a lot more when it’s coming out of your own pocket rather than a business expense 🤨

My SE/30 (company supplied) was about £5000 in 1990, plus £1200 for the FPU upgrade 3 months later so that we could use more cells in a spreadsheet. In today’s money it would be a £12k machine. The 20mb HDD was about £500 🤣

I was only getting £3.50/hour back then.

 

[SpyderTracks]

The thing is, there are niche uses where a Mac still makes far more sense.

I think for older generations, it's a far more user friendly OS than windows, it tends to be more resilient, as they don't have to cater to so many differing models and and they make their own boards and a lot of the internal components, drivers are extremely polished, you rarely get any kind of config issue at the OS level.

For audio, I still swear by them, I started out with Reason and Cubase on the PC which was great for learning, then a sound engineer friend of mine gave me his old work MacBook where the wifi card had failed, and there were other issues with it, his business just bought a replacement as he was on the job and the Apple contract just couriered him a new one, I managed to fix it so my mate said just to keep it. That was when I discovered Logic Pro and have never looked back, not just the DAW itself, but the 3rd party plugin support is just streets ahead on Macs given they really were the only solution up until maybe 10 years ago when Reaper and other PC daws really started making headway.

And of course portability, now they're on Apple Silicon, the battery life just leaves any windows machine in the dust. 24 hours is actually viable which is just nuts really. The fan on mine (I believe there is one) I've never heard come on, although I haven't stressed it properly yet. And the screens are to die for. The only real windows competitor is probably Razer or perhaps Alienware, and actually if you look at the prices on those, they're probably more absurd than the Macs.

 

[HomerJ]

The thing is, there are niche uses where a Mac still makes far more sense.

I think for older generations, it's a far more user friendly OS than windows, it tends to be more resilient, as they don't have to cater to so many differing models and and they make their own boards and a lot of the internal components, drivers are extremely polished, you rarely get any kind of config issue at the OS level.

For audio, I still swear by them, I started out with Reason and Cubase on the PC which was great for learning, then a sound engineer friend of mine gave me his old work MacBook where the wifi card had failed, and there were other issues with it, his business just bought a replacement as he was on the job and the Apple contract just couriered him a new one, I managed to fix it so my mate said just to keep it. That was when I discovered Logic Pro and have never looked back, not just the DAW itself, but the 3rd party plugin support is just streets ahead on Macs given they really were the only solution up until maybe 10 years ago when Reaper and other PC daws really started making headway.

And of course portability, now they're on Apple Silicon, the battery life just leaves any windows machine in the dust. 24 hours is actually viable which is just nuts really. The fan on mine (I believe there is one) I've never heard come on, although I haven't stressed it properly yet. And the screens are to die for. The only real windows competitor is probably Razer or perhaps Alienware, and actually if you look at the prices on those, they're probably more absurd than the Macs.

final cut pro is still pretty good on mac, even though the final cut of ten years ago was better

 

[TonyCarter]

When I started in DTP, there was no viable ‘Windows’ option (there was a Xerox option, but that was server-based).

We upgraded to the next model every year, and even went to colour.

First ‘home’ Mac was a 660AV (other than a Mac Classic that I acquired from work), which had a DSP built-in for video capture and midi.

…and it’s strange that we’re only now getting back to the resolutions & fidelity of the old 32-bit, billion-colours 32” Trinitron, illyama & Radius CRTs we used for DTP before we were forced to move over to crappy, small, 256-colour LCD monitors.