is opening up about audiences’ reactions to 2016’s .
07.04.2024 - 12:59 / howtogeek.com / Sydney Butler / Will
For decades the idea of gaming on a Mac has been seen as a joke by "hardcore" gamers,but that wasn't always the case, and maybe in the near future the Mac's gaming credentials will return.
When PC gaming was still just PC speaker bleeps and bloops, Apple computers offered a gaming experience on another level. Games like Karateka, Prince of Persia, Oregon Trail, and Ultima 1 on the Apple II set the standard for high-end gaming in the late 70s and early 80s. By the 90s every major game worth mentioning had a Mac version, and titles like Myst and the Marathon Trilogy by Bungie showed that Mac was a serious gaming platform, even if it only catered to a much smaller segment of the personal computer market than it does today. Heck, the first Halo game was set to be a Mac exclusive, announced by Steve Jobs himself. Sure, it was a totally different style of game at that point, but it was still on everyone's radar.
From there, the shift to Intel from PowerPC made porting Windows games to Mac easier, but the results weren't always stellar, and when Apple killed 32-bit app support for macOS Catalina, making most of the Mac back catalog unplayable, it didn't help. Still, anyone who doesn't think of the Mac as an important gaming platform has to completely ignore the points in its long existence where it was leading gaming technology or highly influential.
While Apple may have lost focus on gaming, and its latter Intel-based systems usually lacked the GPU power to play anything well, things are very different now. Thanks to the technology the company developed for iPhone and iPad, and its experience with being a gaming platform there, Apple Silicon is a serious hardware platform for games. Even the lowliest M1 Apple Silicon systems are comparable in performance to the last-generation consoles millions of people are still actively using to this day, and its second and third generation of Apple Silicon chips have raised that floor right into current-generation gaming territory.
It's not just the hardware that's ready to game. Apple has its own API known as Metal, and includes AI-upscaling technology in the form of MetalFX. Controller support is universal across macOS and the iOS family. Apple has even created a special porting kit which makes it as easy as possible for developers to port their Windows games to Mac. All the groundwork for an Apple gaming renaissance is in place, now the games have to come.
A platform that's technically ready for gaming is necessary but no sufficient for Mac gaming to be taken seriously. You need the games that people want to play to come to
is opening up about audiences’ reactions to 2016’s .
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