Apple Wants to Boost Gaming on Macs with New Interview
During a recent interview with marketing executives Gordon Keppel and Leland Martin, Apple discussed its efforts to improve gaming on high-end Macs. The company emphasized the shift from Intel to Apple silicon processors, providing industry-leading performance-watt ratios for MacBooks. The new M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips for Macs also include Hardware ray tracing and mesh shading, which contribute to improved graphics for games, according to Keppel.
TRANSFORMATION WITH APPLE SILICON
“Now, every Mac with Apple silicon can fantastically reproduce AAA games. Apple silicon has transformed our mainstream systems, which have seen huge graphics improvements with M1, M2, and now with M3,” said Keppel in the interview.
STREAMLINING DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
According to Martin, Apple silicon has brought the Mac to the same basic hardware architecture as the iPhone and iPad, simplifying the development process. “If you look at the range of Macs just a few years ago, there was a mix of both integrated and discrete GPUs. This can add complexity when developing games because you have multiple hardware configurations to consider. Today, we have completely eliminated this issue with Apple silicon, creating a unified gaming platform across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Once a game is designed for one platform, it is a simple process to bring it to the other two. We are seeing this happen with games like Resident Evil Village, which was launched on Mac first, followed by iPhone and iPad,” Martin explained.
NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND Software
Dynamic Caching, a new technology integrated into the M3 chip family, allows the GPU to allocate memory usage in real-time. Apple claims that this capability drastically increases GPU usage and performance for more demanding apps and games. Additionally, macOS Sonoma includes a new Game Mode, which optimizes CPU and GPU performance for gaming, prioritizing these processes.
IMPROVEMENTS AND TOOLKIT FOR GAMING
The Game Mode also allows other improvements, such as the ability to reduce audio latency with AirPods and reduce input latency with popular third-party game controllers. In early 2023, Apple released a toolkit that makes it easier for developers to bring Windows games to the Mac. This provides an emulation environment for developers to test existing and unmodified Windows games on the Mac to assess their performance with macOS before writing new code.
ARRIVAL OF AAA GAMES
As the year progressed, numerous AAA games started to appear on the Mac, including the remake of Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil Village, Stray, and Baldur’s Gate 3. Death Stranding Director’s Cut and Assassin’s Creed Mirage are also scheduled to be released in 2024. The full interview on Inverse is a useful read for anyone interested in gaming on the Mac.
L’INTERVISTA COMPLETA E LA FONTE
In closing, it’s worth highlighting the full interview available on the Inverse website for those interested in the details of Apple’s efforts to enhance gaming on Mac. With the hardware and software improvements, as well as the arrival of AAA games, Apple aims to position Macs as a desirable platform for gamers.
Intervista completa disponibile su Inverse, in FONTE.