Adam Kos How many times have we heard that? How many times has Apple lured us to the fact that Macs are not just workstations, but can also be used to spend time in games? We wouldn't count it. However, now it looks like it's really weighing on the mind, and really makes you want to believe that the dawn of playing AAA titles on the Mac is upon us.
Of course, it's already possible, but the problem is that, just as Apple itself has ignored gaming on the Mac, most developers have also ignored it. But there is a lot of potential in games with regard to money, and what smells at least a little like money also smells to Apple itself.
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Amaya Toman Metal 3 and transfer games from other platforms
As part of the opening Keynote at WWDC23, we heard about interesting news related to macOS Sonoma as well as gaming on Mac computers as such. The company began by highlighting the performance of Apple Silicon chips and their incredible graphics performance. In connection with MacBooks, there was also a mention of their long life and great displays.
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Developers still have access to take advantage of Metal 3 (the low-level, low-overhead, hardware-accelerated graphics API) and bring—or should bring—new interesting titles to the Mac. These include DEATH STRANDING DIRECTOR'S CUT, Stray, Fort Solis, World of Warcraft: HUMANKIND, Resident Evil Village: ELEX II, Firmament, SnowRunner, Disney Dreamlight Valley, No Man's Sky or Dragonheir: and Layers of Fear.
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The problem is that most AAA games are released anywhere but Mac. So to make porting games from other platforms to Mac as easy as possible, Metal introduced a new set of tools that eliminates months of porting work and allows developers to see how well their existing game could run on Mac in just a few days. It also greatly simplifies the process of converting game shaders and graphics code to take full advantage of the power of Apple Silicon chips, significantly reducing overall development time.
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Game Mode
MacOS Sonoma also introduces a game mode. The latter delivers an optimized gaming experience with smoother and more consistent frame rates as it ensures that games get the highest possible priority on the CPU and GPU. Game Mode should therefore make gaming on Mac even more immersive, as it also dramatically reduces audio latency with AirPods and significantly reduces input latency with popular game controllers such as those for Xbox and PlayStation by doubling the Bluetooth sample rate. Game mode works with any game, including all the latest ones and the upcoming ones mentioned above.
It's a big step in that Apple could start taking gamers really seriously, when it's already trying to introduce new features to the system just for them, which of course it could have missed out on. On the other hand, we may be surprised by the fact that it is necessary to turn on Game Mode at all, and that it is not activated automatically depending on the performance requirements of your computer. The beta version of macOS Sonoma is available through the Apple Developer Program at developer.apple.com, the sharp version of the system will be released in the fall of this year.
