- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
Gaming on a Mac might be a reality in the next major update as they’ve added a “Game Porting Toolkit” that’s very similar to Linux’s Proton. It allows you to play Windows games on MacOS, with… Pretty good results, actually!
Seems like Mac is getting very serious about taking market share from Windows.
I’ve been a Apple MBP owner since 2008 and a Mac user as far back as I can remember. The argument that macs can’t game always ticked me off because if you had any of the pro models (e.g. a dedicated gpu), from a hardware perspective this demonstrably wasn’t true. Install boot camp and a copy of windows and games ran without barrier. It’s just that most developers didn’t produce games to run natively on Mac so therefore gamers didn’t buy macs. Ergo “can’t”game on a Mac.
Hm. Installing a separate OS is not exactly painless, is it? I mean, I did the same, but just because you could use a pogo stick to get from a to b doesn’t make it a proper form of transportation.
And the whole Apple silicone story makes this point moot anyway. I am very happy that the toolkit exists. Hopefully we see a healthy and easier to use open source tool chain soon (think Lutris like tools) and more native ports down the line.
It wasn’t painless but I didn’t find it too taxing either. Apple made the partioning process fairly straight forward and ever gave us the appropriate drivers to ge two does up and running. The most annoying part was waiting for windows to install the latest service pack.
Upgradable GPU
I’ll give you that, you had to upgrade the whole box. Doesn’t change the fact that if you had one with a decent gpu that you could still game with it.
Nobody that is computer hardware centric is going to take interest in buying an Apple computer though. So it will never end up in their hands to begin with
Fair enough and you raise a valid point. I ended up building a hackintosh, which is going five years strong now, so I could upgrade parts as desired/when needed. I love it and am sad that it’s probably only going to be able to stay up to date on software for another year or two.
I understand where you are coming from with the whole hackintosh thing but in that case it’s not actually an Apple computer but a PC made to run MacOS. I come from the audio industry so back in the day it was pretty common to have people building hackintosh’s and go through the whole process of doing all that’s involved. I got wrangled into helping a lot of studios get their situations setup and typically everyone would dual boot with 7 or 10 and it would follow a pretty common theme of
“hey we’re 3 months in and this is working great” to “ya we’re 6 months in and we’re having some issues with MacOS, so we did some fixes and it’s pretty stable now” to “we’re at 8 months and everything is getting pretty messy, reinstalled MacOS and it seems fine. To be safe we kinda migrated to Winblows for the time being since we are busy and we can’t really have any downtime right now, we’re looking to get a trashcan or a Mac mini here soon hopefully” to “hey we’re 12 months in and, ya know, things are pretty smooth on Winblows so we haven’t really been focusing too much on the computer situation, we also noticed we can handle higher plugin loads and we run better at lower latency which is pretty nice. For now I think we’re good.” Then hearing nothing from them about their computer for a while “ya man remember when we built that hackintosh lol, boy that was a mess, we actually just ended up wiping the MacOS drive for more storage.” In my audio career I also started out on Mac and held on for a while but always felt something was missing but I grit my teeth and tucked it away because it was just so common in the industry at the time. Sorry I went on a bit of a tangent, but yeah, if you had a hackintosh typically everyone was dual booting anyhow so switching to Windows for gaming would have been a more practical methodology so it was never explored too much in my experience. Not to mention, from what I recall all the anti-cheat stuff would cause problems with games that were being translated so you would have to cut your options down significantly. With the current situation of how things are going with Apple and how software tends to lose support pretty quickly for older OS versions it seems pretty unlikely that hackintosh will be a viable thing for professionals much longer unless they choose to stay on older versions.
True, it’s not an Apple computer. But for me the thing that always drew me towards macOS was the OS. The hardware is an added bonus in that it was solid and sturdy. Except when it wasn’t. When something went wrong, that was a pain because of the walled garden that Apple had built. No way to fix it by yourself (often) so off to the Apple Store goes for a 1-2 week turn around time.
I definitely have heard your experience before though. People build them and then want to set it and forget it. Definitely can’t do that with a hackintosh. With a little attention over the years though it’s been a good experience and fairly robust for me.
Sad it can’t be maintained forever and will make the jump back onto Apple silicon when this machine goes but glad I dipped my toe in these waters.