Boot users in the comments LARPing their gaming fantasy
You can get loads of frames per second with cloud gaming, just not necessarily from the right second.
4k high framerate! But the compression algorithm and settings optimize that down to something between 720p and 1080p. With a half second of input latency when factors line up well.
But don’t worry, soon there will be AI input prediction so that the game can predict what you’ll do and render that before you even do it.
Fast forward 10 years and there’s a generation of kids who think that the difference between a video game and a movie/tv show is that video games let you push buttons to look at other things if you get curious while watching. Or that would be the difference, but it’s actually that you can look around accurately in VGs while it’s more of a “let’s see what the AI spits out if I look this way during this scene… Bahahaha, another dickbutt!”
Friendly reminder that Halo was a Mac game first, before Microsoft bought Bungie to prevent Apple from ever having the appearance of competence.
Microsoft didn’t even need to do that, Apple has become more than happy to show how incompetent they are. Behold:
Even aside from the objectively bad charging port, the shape is also awful and unergonomic. And next to a touch-based scrollwheel, it also has no right-click.
It has right click, you just have to take your index finger off the mouse. Also the original version has replaceable AA batteries which I strongly prefer to rechargeable
What even is that?
That’s how you charge the Apple Mouse. They intentionally designed it so you couldn’t use it while it was charging, because Steve Jobs demanded a cord-free desk. He hated the cords leading to his mouse and keyboard, and didn’t think devices should stay plugged in all the time. So he forced the engineers to design a mouse that couldn’t stay plugged in.
It really is the epitome of Apple’s “I know better than you” design philosophy
Finally, communism.
I swear to fucking god, I must be the only person alive who’s never had any issues playing any game I wanted to on a Mac. You know there’s fucking ways to accomplish this shit right??
Sure you haven’t. Now put down the 5k VR headset and get back to reality.
Out of genuine curiosity:
What is the most graphically complex game you’ve got working on a Mac?
FPS?
Resolution?
Hardware?
Terraria of course!
I really would like an actual answer here… maybe there is some kind of way to run a graphically advanced/demanding game on Mac?
https://www.macworld.com/article/2852664/cyberpunk-2077-ultimate-edition-review.html
The game includes presets that adjust graphics settings for different Mac models, and there are some useful support pages for the Mac version at support.cdprojektred.com, which will help you to get the best performance from the game. I got a steady 40fps when running the game at 1,920 x1,200 resolution on my MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro chip, so you don’t need the latest, fastest Mac models to get good performance.
Apparently Mac Gamers do not have the highest graphical standards, if… 40 fps at basically 1080p x 1.1 counts as ‘good performance’.
I mostly do indie games, and I do fine on a Mac (I have several different OS at home, majority Linux). But, my 2017 iMac with aftermarket 32gb RAM can run BG3 on the lowest settings.
FPS? No idea. I don’t play games for the visuals at all, and if you gifted me a high end gaming PC I still wouldn’t. It’s not a question of superiority or inferiority, it’s just down to taste.
Hrm.
Ok.
FPS? No idea. I don’t play games for the visuals at all, and if you gifted me a high end gaming PC I still wouldn’t. It’s not a question of superiority or inferiority, it’s just down to taste.
So as I said, we would seem to agree that Mac Gamers do not have very high graphical standards, compared to PC/Linux/Console gamers.
Like uh, let me put it this way: Calling 40 FPS in Cyberpunk 77 ‘good’ at 1080p is an actual joke to me.
I can do better than that on my Steam Deck at its native resolution, and … thats a portable device.
‘Good’ to me would be over 60 fps at 2K / 1440p, like an average around 75 fps.
I’m not trying to say that games must have absurdly good graphics to be a good game, hell no, far from it.
But… when you’re actually just talking specifically about advanced graphics … it seems that you, a Mac Gamer, just don’t consider them much.
So your standards there are lower, because you just don’t value them as much.
Like how you could compare two cars for practical usefulness, and conclude car A is an overall better choice, but if you’re specifically talking about which car can go from 0-60 faster, well now car B is a the clear winner there.
… I don’t have BG3, and I tried to look up comparative numbers for BG3 on a Steam Deck, turns out Larian just actually released a Linux native version that’s significantly better than the Proton/Windows version, for Steam Deck users.
So if I had the game, what I would do, on a Deck, is up a few more of those settings from low to medium, get to a generally stable FPS just above 45, instead of aiming for 60, and then the Deck OLED at least will let you lock the frame rate at 45, but the refresh rate at 90, so in most games that are not quite fast paced, that’ll basically just ‘feel’ like 90 fps most of the time.
So you end up with a $550 portable machine that can, at least at its native settings, outperform your admittedly signifcantly older, but $1100 2017 iMac, by way of running basically mostly medium settings with a few at low.
Adjust for inflation thats like uh, Steam Deck for about $585, iMac for about $1450. And you put aftermarket (Or is it more like Bonus with Macs?) ram in it as well.
I dunno, I’m not trying to sound like an ass, I’m trying to do actual comparisons of some kind, but you don’t know the FPS, didn’t indicate a resolution…
Which again, makes sense in as much as: You don’t care that much about those things.
But its hard to do graphics comparison without such info.
Can’t you just use Bluetooth? Or is latency an issue for macs?
Connect controller via bluetooth - Done. You dont want to use a mouse anyway because of the latency. The latency is alright for most games with a controller though. Atleast if the servers arent too far away and your connection is somewhat good. I had a free trial month for one of the services and it was pretty useable tbh.
Dont get me wrong i dont like Apple, Geforce Now or cloud anything either. But if a nongamer is able to subscribe to a service for a month or two to play that one game on his macbook thats not a bad thing? Like good for him.
You can’t use proton in Mac? Linux and Mac are both Unix based but I don’t know how much they differ
Afaik MacOS doesn’t support Vulcan, since Apple pushes their own Metal instead. So there’s the problem of translating one to another, and idk how well it works. (To my vague knowledge Proton doesn’t work on Mac, only vanilla Wine does.)
Older games work through Wine, however.
No, you basically cannot use Proton on Mac to anywhere near the degree it currently supports games on Linux.
Long story short, they differ a lot.
Think of like… a bear, dog, and cat all have a single common ancestor if you go back far enough.
… But they are significantly different from each other in a wide variety of ways.
It seems that there are some semi-comparable ways to do more gaming on a Mac.
- Dual Boot Asahi Linux, then use Proton from Asahi, running Windows games via Proton on Linux, on Mac hardware.
https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2025/02/07/proton-asahi-linux-mac-gaming-tutorial.html
Seems to technically work, but basically to me it sounds like where Proton on non-Mac baremetal Linux was around 4-5 years ago, ie, theres a lot of work to be done, but, some things work reasonably well.
- Port the game to Mac yourself with the Mac game porting toolkit.
https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
Somewhat hilariously to me, many Mac/Tech media sites have described this as ‘Basically Proton for Mac’, which uh, no, its not, not even close.
Proton takes Windows hooks and calls and translates them in realtime to execute in realtime on a Linux system. Only non instant thing is building up a shader cache, but I’m pretty sure you do that on Windows too.
This… is porting a game.
Granted, it is impressive that any kind of automated tool/system like this even exists at all, but uh, this is more like a guided recompiling of the entire game binary to something that will run natively on a Mac.
So that is… not any kind of a realtime translation layer.
As best I can tell, results for how well it actually works are roughly:
Most of the time it does produce a valid, working game binary, but performance is often terrible for more graphically complex games.
I guess if any Mac users have more info or corrections to this, I’m all ears.
I know much more about linux and windows than Mac, so I may be missing something or innacurate.
Thanks for the information, I didn’t know that much about the gaming scene in Mac. With the wine libraries being open source, I thought maybe Mac users would have a chance but the walled garden keeps stretching.
I mean, Proton is also open source and… its basically a giant extension/revision of WINE.
So, my guess would be that MacOS (OSX?) is so significantly different than most Linux distros, that you’d pretty much have to develop it to work with Mac libraries, whereas its currently developed and tuned to work with Linux libraries.
Too many scary words, you broke them. Nice.
When the first cloud-only AAA release drops and the gaming rig gets the same FPS as the kid’s school Chromebook, there will be gnashing of teeth.
Good, then all those little kids can move and stay off the other gaming communities.
Latency is why i don’t want to play multiplayer online game, but i can tolerate it since my input is immediate. Cloud gaming gonna be jank as heck in most part of the world, not to mention i don’t really have much time in my hand(like basically most working adult) so the subscription model gonna be more expensive in the long run.
