Posted by haunter 11/2/2025
macOS even fewer, which I can understand. That Apple had to introduce a literal Game Mode in their OS, to make games viable at all, speaks volumes.
- Windows 94.84%
- Linux 3.05%
- macOS 2.11%
Apple was the company that boosted OpenGL popularity by using it as the graphics API for OS X. In Apple platforms world there's only one graphics API that is guaranteed to work across their hardware, so it was a big deal. However, they could not keep up with OpenGL updates, as they overlapped poorly with their products map, i.e. switching new OS X to newer OpenGL revision would require to drop support for older Macs.
Out of that need (and also to address multiple shortcomings of OpenGL) Metal was born. OpenGL support layer was implemented on Metal.
Metal was released before Vulkan API was finalised. There was never need for Apple to support Vulkan. Vulkan, as the OpenGL before it, has the same downsides for Apple, but bringing nothing to the table compared to Metal.
Very few games have custom written Vulkan rendering pipeline. Majority rely on game engines, and if the engine supports Vulkan rendering, it is almost certain to also supports Metal.
So, instead of relying on supporting 3rd party rendering APIs Apple spends resources on helping with porting games to Macs natively.
Apple can support both. There's no reason they shouldn't, as a competitor on the open market; AMD, Nvidia and even Qualcomm are supporting both DirectX and Vulkan in software. It would not require Apple to retool their hardware (as Asahi has shown) and would not require them to depreciate Metal (as their OpenGL support shows). The only significant sacrifice Apple has to make is their unforgiving monopoly on modern GPU APIs that they have meted out against everyone's will but their own.
macOS will be depreciated on Apple's roadmap by the time developers take it seriously as a gaming platform. It's outrageous that people like me have to abandon the Mac because Apple expects me to satisfy myself with iPad games instead of the full range of experiences available on the software market. They have a monopoly, Apple is throwing a temper tantrum because they know Steam has the better experience and they can't compete any better than Microsoft does. Their best strategy is to kill the Mac and pretend the iPad is a console with computer-like features, which should outright terrify you if you own a Mac.
Certainly they were a company that boosted OpenGL, but the company? During the early years OSX had less market share than Linux does today, and OpenGL was already well established by gaming and professional software before OSX ever came out. Quake supported it (not on release), Quake II and Half Life supported it on release, Quake III required it. Heck, Quake III released on Linux shortly before MacOS (classic), making it arguably as influential then, and of course the OSX port of that only came a few years later. But point is, that Id dared to release their new flagship with only OpenGL support shows that OpenGL was already firmly established and supported before OSX existed.
Without quake and a few other popular games, it is likely direct3d would've been the only thing supported by non professional graphics cards.
I have been using a MacBook Pro for decades (Linux/Windows PC for gaming). I haven't seen this happening.
Apple have, in recent years, sponsored a few triple A titles to add MacOS ports but the vast majority of games don't run or run so poorly it doesn't matter.
With CrossOver there are a handful of games that work well, most don't. I tried to play Fallout New Vegas and it wouldn't start. Tried to play Raft with some friends and it didn't start. Borderlands 2/3 didn't start. Democracy 4 started but ran at 2 fps.
Some games like EU4 and Dark Souls 1 remastered work pretty well. I ended up buying an ROG Aly because I travel a lot and want a portable gaming experience. I use game streaming to my MacBook to play games - I wouldn't have bought the Ally if my MacBook could just game.
IMO - if the Asahi team were able to implement Vulkan with no documentation or references - Apple could do so in a weekend if they so desired. I'd like to see Apple write Windows or Linux drivers for their hardware so we can use official Bootcamp and run games on platforms that care about it.
Apple can spend all the resources they want, but they'll never be able to convince enough developers to foster a gaming ecosystem that could ever be taken seriously when there's other platforms that have 20+ years of back catalogue titles available. This has largely been enabled on Linux through wrapping D3D to Vulkan and if Apple put in the work to support Vulkan all that work could be used for free. Or if they more permissively licensed GPTK's D3D>Metal wrapper, but as it stands it's still not as good as DXVK/VKD3D. Practically speaking Steam on Mac would be considerably more useful if there was native Vulkan support.
Of course, Apple wouldn't want that given their desire for vertical control of software distribution, though notably they don't do the same for video or audio. I mean they support MP3s right? That's what games should be treated as, a piece of media. MP3 might not be the best quality, most would prefer AAC or FLAC, but sometimes an MP3 is all a user might have, so they should let users play it. But they can't seem to break free from this delusion that game software should be treated the same as Uber Eats.
First, due to substantial differences in graphics hardware, that is tiled-based deferred rendering for Apple Silicon and immediate mode rendering for NVIDIA and AMD the software simulation or translation layer will never be as good as DXVK/VKD3D, which essentially do rendering on exactly same GPUs. In case of using TBDR the pipeline must be rewritten to get the benefits. Simply put, for Apple hardware every Windows game wrapped in a translation layer will be significantly worse off than a native port. That’s why it’s important for Apple to push for that.
Second, Apple is the owner of the biggest game storefront in terms of revenue. They don’t have to ask for game developers to come, they are already here. The market we are talking about is AAA games market. And this market is characterised by dedicated hardware: consoles and gaming PC. So I think this is where lies the actual problem: Apple doesn’t make dedicated hardware for games.
Doesn't matter for the back catalogue, which is the thing that is missing that makes the platform a running joke re: gaming. It's also an issue that affects Adreno on Snapdragon, but it isn't stopping Valve from planning to ship a version of Proton for that platform. Having personally talked to a DXVK developer about this specifically, the overhead, while existent, I understand isn't necessarily as severe as you make it out to be either.
> Second, Apple is the owner of the biggest game storefront in terms of revenue. They don’t have to ask for game developers to come, they are already here. The market we are talking about is AAA games market. And this market is characterised by dedicated hardware: consoles and gaming PC. So I think this is where lies the actual problem: Apple doesn’t make dedicated hardware for games.
Not just AAA, but most everything outside of the F2P/casual sphere. Speaking as someone who actually likes games as a form of art, the App Store's library is the video games equivalent of reality TV and home shopping. It's mostly exploitative trash. Maybe Apple is happy with cornering the market on exploitative trash though, good for them.
> every Windows game wrapped in a translation layer will be significantly worse
That's not wholly accurate, though. Apple Silicon has reverse-engineered drivers that do perfectly well keeping up with immediate-mode multiple-pass graphics pipelines, MoltenVK is not SOTA anymore: https://youtu.be/BbJMPfXTbbE?t=447
You're correct that tile-based deferred rendering is more efficient. That's not the issue, though. Apple can (and already does) support traditional raster APIs on the desktop, because they have to for compatibility's sake. Thousands of Mac apps will never use TBDR or Metal and will never be updated to use it. And there's no good reason to stop supporting those applications, because OpenGL runs perfectly well on Apple Silicon. The same goes for DirectX, whether you're willing to acknowledge it or not.
There are hundreds of thousands of games that do not support TBDR and will never be ported to Mac in their lifetime; and Mac owners could be playing them regardless. The only one holding them back is Apple, because they'd rather Mac owners play Genshin Impact and earn Tim a few RSUs with a gachapon pull.
Skipping unnecessary operation during frame rendering is always better for games.
Looking at this kind of footage really does not convince me that "porting properly done" is worth enduring a library with no games. Nevermind the fact that the game runs fine through translation on the $400 Steam Deck hardware. You really are overstating the difference it makes.
Maybe there's subtleties on why the situation is like it is, but the matter of the fact is that most developers need to go out of their way to support Apple (maybe even to a larger extent even than to support linux).
> spends resources on helping with porting games to Macs natively.
This is news to me, is there some writing about it somewhere?
How does mesa manage then if apple cannot?
...and ARM support. That's the bigger footgun, imo.
It's sad for me as a long-time Mac fan and gaming fan that Apple has always had hardware and OS that was technically superior when it comes to gaming, but neither Jobs nor Cook ever cared about gaming except as a checkbox, so it all went to waste.
The amusing thing to me is that so many productive things have come OUT of pursuing gaming, such as graphics cards being useful for mining and then AI.
My Steam account has numerous games in it that supposedly work on macOS, but not really because they shipped 10+ years ago and weren't updated since. Some don't launch at all. Some do, but with various more-or-less-breaking bugs. Of the remaining ones, many don't advertise hi-DPI support so macOS renders them at 1080p instead of 4K.
It desperately needs a stable API for games. Which Proton could provide, except there's also that whole Apple Silicon thing meaning that x64 Windows binaries aren't easily runnable.
Linux has always cared about both software preservation and gaming, so it deserves to be the long-term "home" of gaming IMHO, as hacky as it is.
I just wish there was something, anything that could compete with Apple Silicon though :/
It's kind of baffling because it does almost nothing to help the game developers that it's ostensibly aimed at, while it does help end-users play unmodified Windows games on their Mac, which Apple doesn't endorse.
https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases
For some, it is the only real legal option given windows 11 licensing.
Apple M3/M4 are a great chip, but they EOL the hardware ecosystem every 12 years on average. Few companies can tolerate that level of development liability, and Apple users benefit from the FOSS ecosystems cross-platform efforts. =3
While Valve might make up a big part of CodeWeavers book of business now, that was not true when the original contract was signed.
If anything Valve is moving towards ARM and taking the library along with it.
They also make a Linux build of CrossOver.
Macs actually run a lot less of the Steam library without doing pretty involved workarounds like hsing CrossOver. Since Valve sells the Steam Deck they put a lot of work into getting Windows games to run on Linux automatically. They didn’t put that effort into the Mac platform.
Edit: fixed % cos I was way off writing from memory.
The recurring compilation of Vulcan shaders after every update bothers a bit, but it works very well.