Apple Makes GREAT Gaming Computers

[CPotter]

 

[emosun]

I think what's funny is the mac itself was always capable of gaming even back to 1998 , but it more or less a user/developer/apple problem of them not caring

[Needfuldoer]

They sure do! I had a blast on my Power Mac 7600 back in the day.

[Zmimgo]

Great video, but you guys also missed PlayCover - a piece of software that allows you to play games for iOS/iPadOS that are blocked on macOS. The setup is a little bit janky, and for intensive games it sure does get hot, but it's hands down the best way to play not natively supported apps on Apple Silicon. You are basically playing a mobile app on a supersized iPad (without touchscreen, of course. Damn you, Apple). It even has 120Hz support, due to the fact that the "emulator" reports itself as an iPad Pro 11" (2018).

 

The only somewhat ethically problematic thing is that you will have to install games using decrypted IPAs. These are basically compressed installers of applications from the app store, and needs to be decrypted to be installed on, for example, on another phone using a different Apple ID, or as PlayCover does it, on macOS.

 

Once set up with keymapping, PlayCover is without a doubt the best performing alternative except for native support. You don't need to translate from x86-64 (or whichever variant of the name you like to use) and run the games using the full power of the SoC.

[Just that Mario]

Seemed like an interesting video, but then turned fast into a "hurr durr apple bad" bs and that's where everything lost credibility. It's kind of pathetic what kind of nonsense Linus and their writers have been lately producing just to get a free ride on the "anti apple" train. It seemed most of the 12 y.o internet trolls have moved on, but apparently LTT is still full of them.

[Ultraforce]

22 minutes ago, Just that Mario said:

Seemed like an interesting video, but then turned fast into a "hurr durr apple bad" bs and that's where everything lost credibility. It's kind of pathetic what kind of nonsense Linus and their writers have been lately producing just to get a free ride on the "anti apple" train. It seemed most of the 12 y.o internet trolls have moved on, but apparently LTT is still full of them.

I'm not sure if it lost credibility, much like how for security and servers aren't very good on Windows it's kind of been known for a long time that video games aren't really well-supported on Apple's desktop/laptops.

The type of general audience that is required to be targeted for most LTT videos means you are unlikely to get too many videos talking aboutwhy MacOS being Unix based helps with certain stuff and there's Mac Address that will make videos about a variety of apple topics so if there was to be a video about why it is that Apple has much better audio stuff then Windows it would be there(similar to the discussion about the Apple Pencil.)

[Ababba]

A great kill a short period of time game that works on the m1 macs is Vampire Survivors. Only $3 on steam.

[Just that Mario]

28 minutes ago, Ultraforce said:

I'm not sure if it lost credibility, much like how for security and servers aren't very good on Windows it's kind of been known for a long time that video games aren't really well-supported on Apple's desktop/laptops.

The type of general audience that is required to be targeted for most LTT videos means you are unlikely to get too many videos talking aboutwhy MacOS being Unix based helps with certain stuff and there's Mac Address that will make videos about a variety of apple topics so if there was to be a video about why it is that Apple has much better audio stuff then Windows it would be there(similar to the discussion about the Apple Pencil.)

I didn't mean the gaming aspect, but rather how Linus is again rubbing himself off and let's be honest - absolutely b*tching about the power cable on a monitor and other actual non-issues until you make them into issues yourself. At which point they are arbitrary issues. It's like they cannot make a civilized educational video without some BS these days. But I guess attracting all the 12 year olds for free views and likes is the new meta.

[Paul Thexton]

<watch_video/>

<wear_fireproof_clothing/>

[Hunter259]

1 minute ago, Just that Mario said:

I didn't mean the gaming aspect, but rather how Linus is again rubbing himself off and let's be honest - absolutely b*tching about the power cable on a monitor and other actual non-issues until you make them into issues yourself. At which point they are arbitrary issues.

 

Here lemme go get you a cat and oh no! It broke the cable! Enjoy the $1600 desk weight until you send it in.

[WillR]

Does anyone know what program he used to display wattage used and CPU Temps on the menu bar? 

[Paul Thexton]

4 minutes ago, Just that Mario said:

I didn't mean the gaming aspect, but rather how Linus is again rubbing himself off and let's be honest - absolutely b*tching about the power cable on a monitor and other actual non-issues until you make them into issues yourself. At which point they are arbitrary issues.

Power cable thing seems like a none issue until it becomes an issue, and I think that's the point Linus is trying to ram home.

 

A naughty pet cat/dog, or a cable caught under the casters of a chair or set of desk drawers when reorganising an office layout... it's actually pretty easy to imagine ways that that cable can get damaged.

 

That said, personally I'm disappointed about the Studio display for reasons other than the cable.

[sub68]

I currently go between Windows and MAC os for school.

Adobe apps (for me) are a less pain on windows machines.(adobe apps crash on ethier) clear CACHEs do help)

One of my games (OSU) is actually playable on MAC.

But on the flip side macs are way easier to do Audio stuff, drivers are easy and not a pain and doesn't crash often.

Since I do both video and audio work I use both windows and mac devices.

[JakeP]

28 minutes ago, WillR said:

Does anyone know what program he used to display wattage used and CPU Temps on the menu bar? 

I'm wondering this too. If you find out post it here.

[HenrySalayne]

1 hour ago, Just that Mario said:

Seemed like an interesting video, but then turned fast into a "hurr durr apple bad" bs and that's where everything lost credibility. It's kind of pathetic what kind of nonsense Linus and their writers have been lately producing just to get a free ride on the "anti apple" train. It seemed most of the 12 y.o internet trolls have moved on, but apparently LTT is still full of them.

Absolutely! I gamed 5 years exclusively on a Macbook Pro and enjoyed every minute of it. Just fire up boot camp, install Windows and you're good to go. Who cares if games don't support Mac OS?

[BondiBlue]

2 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

Absolutely! I gamed 5 years exclusively on a Macbook Pro and enjoyed every minute of it. Just fire up boot camp, install Windows and you're good to go. Who cares if games don't support Mac OS?

That isn't possible on any Apple Silicon Macs, which was basically the main point of the video. You can't just install Windows on your M1 MacBook Pro like you could on an older Intel Mac, so if it doesn't run on macOS you'll have to find other options. 

[Zodiark1593]

50 minutes ago, Paul Thexton said:

Power cable thing seems like a none issue until it becomes an issue, and I think that's the point Linus is trying to ram home.

 

A naughty pet cat/dog, or a cable caught under the casters of a chair or set of desk drawers when reorganising an office layout... it's actually pretty easy to imagine ways that that cable can get damaged.

 

That said, personally I'm disappointed about the Studio display for reasons other than the cable.

As a bunny owner, non-removable cables are a non-starter.

 

[Egg-Roll]

3 hours ago, emosun said:

I think what's funny is the mac itself was always capable of gaming even back to 1998 , but it more or less a user/developer/apple problem of them not caring

I'm sorry gaming?

You are not wrong at the last part, you do need a strong computer to do a lot of things macs are well known to do, they just have the persona that they are not meant for gaming. Personally I wouldn't run out and buy a mac just to game on it however.

 

49 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

As a bunny owner, non-removable cables are a non-starter.

 

*Stops petting bunny while listening to music*

Bunny: *CHOMP*

Me:

 

Rabbits can be some of the biggest A-holes you'll ever meet in life...

[Zodiark1593]

21 minutes ago, Egg-Roll said:

 

 

*Stops petting bunny while listening to music*

Bunny: *CHOMP*

Me:

 

Rabbits can be some of the biggest A-holes you'll ever meet in life...

My Bunny kind of wound up in my care when my sister moved out, so I never really had a bunny-safe environment set up for her. 
 

Should've seen the bunny bully our chihuahua though. Funniest thing ever. The bunny reveled having someone lower than itself on the food chain. 

[Egg-Roll]

1 hour ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Should've seen the bunny bully our chihuahua though. Funniest thing ever. The bunny reveled having someone lower than itself on the food chain. 

Chihuahuas are basically the cowards of the dog world(at least the ones I've known), fear of everything and either bit or pee on fright, I always mocked them growing up till I was around them, decent pets (still won't own one tho). That said not sure if rabbits have balls of steel or are just downright stupid at times, I've had one go and bug a yellow lab that hated being bugged by anyone/thing unless it felt like it, and also went to say hi to a King German Shepperd who just arrived (who stayed for a few months till we found a new owner), it escaped from its safe area just to say hi, similarly to how we got the Shepperd (old owner didn't want to deal with the nonstop runaway)...

[hishnash]

Supporting Vulcan is not the saliva bullet that would result in lots of AAA titles running well on these Macs.

TBIR vs TBDR GPUs
Modern AAA games rendering pipelines are optimised for Tile-Based-Immediate-Rendering GPUs, this is the pipeline that AMD, Nvidia and Intel use in there GPUs.  Apple gpus build heavily on PowerVRs IP and are thus Tile-Based-Deferred-Rendering GPUs. While you can take a rendering engine optimised for TBIR and run it on a modern TBDR gpu it is not going to run very well and you will be leaving 20 to 50% of the performance on the table, or even more if your looking at high frame rate gaming were a TBDR gpus can have massive advantages.

Vulcan does support many TBDR features but AAA games that use Vulcan do not use these features and im my experience porting a rendering pipeline from TBIR to TBDR is orders of magnitude harder than porting from VK to Metal.  To make good use of the TBDR gpu you need to completely re-think your rendering pipeline, you need to go back to the drawing board, even considered what visual effects you should use (some effects are much more costly on TBDR gpus but others are much cheaper on TBDR than TBIR so there will be effects you opted to not include in your TBIR pipeline that would be almost free in your TBIR). This optimisation is not just at the pipeline stage but even at the input mess and scenes/envovment stage were the tradeoffs and cost of pre-culling obscured objects in the scene changes a LOT. 

Furthermore VKs TBDR apis are quite limited compared to metals so you would still be limited, in particular for high frame rate lot latency engines such as competitive online gaming. Sure apple could add a load of their own extensions to VK but devs would need to use these and at some point (rather quickly) shoe horning in these features into VK just leads to way more technical debt. There are a load features in Metal that would require a lot of bending of the VK spec to support.

VK is an api that is designed by committee to be the least worst compromise between hardware vendors. However on very single hardware platform it is sub-optimal, just like OpenCL vs CUDA. While OpenCL runs on Nvidia GPUs its performance is very lack-lustre compared to CUDA that has been developed by Nvidia to line-up with the hardware support of the GPUs they sell.

 

[hishnash]

The only way I see Mac gaming taking off is for game devs to see is as a viable strong market. 

I think the best way for this would be for apple to partner with a small number of e-sports titles and work with them to provide extremely optimised support for macOS and apple hardware so as to get to a point were the input to screen update latency on these games is orders of magnitude smaller than anything your going to get on PC. (this is the sort of thing apple are very good at if they set their minds to, having full hardware software stack controle). 

Such a move would overnight pull the pro-gamers to using Macs as it would give them a edge in competitions.  Pro-gamers will accept not having RGB if it gives them 30ms better input latency, they will accept only being able to play that one game they play competitive since this is already the case that they buy dedicated systems for each game. 

If apple were to get even just 2 or 3 big e-sports games to the point were thier hardware provided the best competitive edge that would result in a lot gamers considering the platform and would then create the market for other devs to put in the effort. 

[hishnash]

4 hours ago, Hunter259 said:

Here lemme go get you a cat and oh no! It broke the cable! Enjoy the $1600 desk weight until you send it in.

your aware the cable is removable right? Linus removed it on the WAN show, its just like the HomePod cables were you can remove it and apple will even give you a replacement cable but due to not using a standard socket (there is non that is that thin) they cant legaly say is removable and still sell it without going through a ton of certification of a new main voltage power plug/socket. 

[8tg]

I like how these threads always just turn into shit flinging

As of recently getting a Mac for the first time, I now use everything

all computers are shit 

every operating system sucks

every company sucks

 

there is no machine without flaws, but everything has its values and strong points alongside its weak points 

I’ve used it all, with the exception of apple M1 silicon which I’m looking at now, everything sucks

just pick whatever suck you personally prefer 

[Zodiark1593]

1 hour ago, 8tg said:

I like how these threads always just turn into shit flinging

As of recently getting a Mac for the first time, I now use everything

all computers are shit 

every operating system sucks

every company sucks

 

there is no machine without flaws, but everything has its values and strong points alongside its weak points 

I’ve used it all, with the exception of apple M1 silicon which I’m looking at now, everything sucks

just pick whatever suck you personally prefer 

Only the Avatar, master of all four Operating Systems (Windows, Mac, Linux, Amiga ) can save the internet.