I wonder if this effort to add Vulcan to Linux and then translate DirectX in Asahi Linux would impact Apple's dream of landing AAA games on Apple Silicon.
Apple would like AAA developers to port their AAA games over to Metal so that the game has one code base but can run on iPhones, iPads, Macs, and the Vision Pro.
Perhaps Mac gamers will install Asahi Linux in order to play AAA PC titles.
> would impact Apple's dream of landing AAA games on Apple Silicon
Apple's dream is not to have AAA games land on Apple Silicon - they can do this with Proton-like layer, like they did with GPTK. Apple's wet dream is to have AAA games land in the Apple App Store - not on Steam or Epic Game store. That is why the GPTK effort is only have assed (and the license prevents Valve integrating it into steam directly).
This is a bit of a tangential rant, so I apologize. But I recently tried to update Death Stranding, the flagship AAA game that Apple landed on macOS and in the App Store. The game itself is 77.5 GB; it had required a little over 150 GB to install. I shrugged that off at the time; they haven't figured out how to decompress on the fly, whatever.
I had about 50GB free on my (1 TB M1 Max) machine at the time of the update, and the App Store told me I didn't have enough free space to update. I balked and looked at the update description, which was just "Various minor bug fixes." The update size was...75 GB. They expect me to re-download the entire game for various minor bug fixes.
(I would "just blame the developer" here, but Apple clearly invested a lot into having this game available on macOS, in the App Store, and got Hideo Kojima to show up at WWDC (a full year ago, remember) and brag about how nice the entire experience is. Some of Apple's engineers probably worked directly on this port.)
It then sunk in that I didn't just need 75 GB of free space. I needed 150 GB. The App Store will completely download and completely decompress the entire game before replacing it. That is the patching process for the game. You need 231 GB free at all times on your machine to have and update a 77GB game.
This is completely insulting given Apple's storage prices, and the fact that the App Store does not let you install apps on an external drive.
Apple clearly doesn't get it. They act like they're nominally putting in the effort, but then it's still just completely half-assed even when things are played exactly like they want.
There's like, two guys at Apple who care about gaming. Everyone once in a while they manage to convince marketing to say something about it and rope in a couple more devs to half-assedly hammer out some tickets before they can go back to their normal tasking. There's no traction internally to taking PC gaming seriously at Apple.
Well, Apple employees don't actually live in Cupertino.
(I once went to a city council meeting where residents showed up and complained that new housing might allow Apple employees to live there and that they might be "too poor". Probably would be too.)
Clearly the App Store was never meant for distribution of 75 GB games, it's clearly meant for mostly <~1 GB packages.
I'm surprised they even allow huge apps like that in the first place, and don't have e.g. a 5 GB hard limit for usability reasons. They should have a limit if they're not going to support patch upgrades.
Who the heck has 231 GB free on their Mac internal SSD? Almost nobody. Why would the developer even distribute this via the App Store at all, for such a miniscule user base?
> I had about 50GB free on my (1 TB M1 Max) machine at the time of the update, and the App Store told me I didn't have enough free space to update. I balked and looked at the update description, which was just "Various minor bug fixes." The update size was...75 GB. They expect me to re-download the entire game for various minor bug fixes.
It is an unfortunate truth that one must now bear in mind, that games are for all intents and purposes enterprise software. They are as critical to profitability for the companies involved as enterprise software. They are large, distributed applications which are planned, budgeted, and staffed much like enterprise software. Accordingly, there is little to no concern for performance except when it's absolutely critical: the rendering pipeline and the netcode, for instance. For things like updates, where it would be easy to make some optimizations to reduce download size, those optimizations will not be taken. So you will redownload the entire game, including all of the uncompressed audio clips, every time someone changes a byte somewhere and it's shipped as an update.
It can be done, and Valve are old-school gamedev bros who clearly are interested in making it happen for games on their platform. But not every shop is like that, and in particular I wince when I contemplate updating a PS4 game...
This is a problem even for macOS updates, ever since they moved to the sealed system volume in macOS 11. When you update macOS, it downloads the entire OS and installs it to a separate APFS snapshot. The infuriating thing about this is that the sealed system volume should actually make it easier to provide reliable delta updates, but instead they used it as an excuse to remove them.
And of course Apple's always treated app updates as "download entire new copy of app to separate container and relaunch", ever since day one of the iOS App Store. This too could be handled with APFS snapshots.
I really wish Apple - and the rest of the industry - would stop being so damned allergic to delta updates. It's infuriating knowing how much damned engineering effort, say, Google put into shipping deltas on Chrome, and then everyone else is "just download two copies of every app while you're updating them, bandwidth and storage is free if we don't pay for them".
I am pretty sure App Store updates are smarter than that. For example Xcode delta installs have taken far less space (though they take a lot longer) if you grab them from the App Store.
They don't care about your gaming experience on Mac. They care about money.
I wish they weren't so short sighted here. They can't see through the trees that maybe they won't make money selling games through the app store, but they would make money selling more Macs.
They didn’t really care about it before the Mac App Store either.
The OS and its libraries just aren’t designed for high performance gaming the way MS has put time into that on Windows.
They have Metal, which is supposed to be nice. But that’s their Direct3D. Where is all the other DirectX equivalent?
From what I’ve heard anecdotally that seems to be a big part of the problem. It’s not just that they don’t have Vulcan (which I think is a red herring). Or the GPUs were abysmal (they were on most models before Apple Silicon).
> Apple's wet dream is to have AAA games land in the Apple App Store
This is why their efforts are largely doomed.
I'd love to play more AAA games on my Macbook, but too many of them require a separate purchase from the App Store to make that happen, rather than just putting the Mac versions on Steam alongside the Windows version.
If you're going to make me choose between playing a game on my laptop and playing it on my gaming desktop, I will choose the desktop every single time. It would be nice to take more of those games with me when I travel, but it's not a frequent enough use-case for me to give up all the benefits of real PC gaming.
What do we do as Apple users stuck in this ecosystem whose main goal is to extract more money from our pockets? I hate Windows with all my gut but at least I had a sense of freedom about the software I wanted to install on Windows, including games.
On Mac, I'm constantly reminded that beyond this facade of user-friendly UI and nice visuals, there's a greedy company whose market cap is $3T but doesn't give a flying f* about the end-user because it wants to make even more money.
> What do we do as Apple users stuck in this ecosystem whose main goal is to extract more money from our pockets?
Leave ... the ... ecosystem.
This is the whole point of things like Asahi Linux. Take advantage of the hardware and escape from the software.
If all the developers who slave over Apple devices spent 10% of their time improving the experience on something else, 24 months later Apple wouldn't have a market.
I left. I got tired of fighting bugs in macOS given that Apple clearly no longer gives a damn about macOS.
I just bought my second Lenovo Carbon X1 after leaving Land-Of-The-Fruit. This one is about $1700 + a Saumsung 4TB SSD. Note: I can actually upgrade the SSD. It has 32GB of RAM for half the price of anything equivalent in macOS. The OLED display is right about the equivalent macOS resolution, and it's a matte display. It has a useful set of ports--a goddamn HDMI port as well as 2 USB-C and 2 USB-A ports.
And Lenovo's external dock actually freakin' works.
Yeah, it probably doesn't get the performance or battery life as an M3. Given that I didn't notice on my previous Lenovo vs an M1/M2, I'm not likely to notice this time either.
And, as a "bonus", I can run an actual Windows install if I absolutely must.
I'm not as certain about that as you are. I think there are - as always - different streams withing that mega corporation. It is probably sales-oriented people wanting nothing but AAA games on the App Store and be okay with the Mac not being a major choice for games if that doesn't happen. The other stream is probably more enthusiastic (especially with the Apple Silicon being "enough" gaming machines for 1080p@60) and wants to bring gaming over - that is probably the stream that made GPTK happen and give a licensing exception to crossover to be able to integrate it in their department. I'm in the later department, hoping we will see a proton-like GPTK that can run my steam library.
Well regarding the Macbook/Laptop case vs. Desktop: With me typing this on the MacMini M2 base model (8GB/256GB) retailed at 650€ I can assure you, it is a nice gaming machine hardware-wise. Not for latest and greatest AAA games of course, but I played through all the Tomb Raider reboot games on this machine (using Rosetta2 as they are non-native on Steam) on High details with 1080p. Now the major issue is software, there is just not enough games available. I do use Heroic+Crossover Wine to run some other games, but it is just finnicky and only for the pro user - not average casual gamers.
Saying this, Apple could launch a 999€ Mac Mini with focus on gamers with a custom M4 design soon, if they
had a proper Proton-like layer. Heck, size & noise wise, the Mac Mini beats the current PS5 and Xboxes. But they only treat GPTK as a solution for developers, not gamers. And I highly suspect, this is only due to the fact that they won't get any percentage from games sales, as Steam is the dominant player here.
I don't get it. They already make a ton of money on mobile games - why not embrace Steam and Proton on their platform? What's the money in AAA games on their platform?
edit: this is to say if they had "wet dreams" about selling AAA games on Mac, we'd have seen the tides moving a long time ago.
Apple wants to own the entire computing stack for the average Joe, for legitimate integration reasons and illegitimate monopolistic market capture reasons.
The only way I can see that happening is with an EEE model. You'd go grab all of the non-steam publishers and come up with a standard format that'd mean that studios can push to every platform in a standardized way, then bank on nobody bothering to install steam because the app store already has all of the games you want, and it's installed by default.
This makes no sense to me. Apple does nothing to prevent AAA games on the App Store also being released on Steam. I think it’s more likely that the GPTK license is to encourage developers to make high quality native ports rather than devs checking a box to make their game available on Mac.
It's because Apple told Steam users to fuck off like 3 times in 5 years (nuking 32-bit support; no Vulkan/OpenGL support; switching to ARM). Users and game devs got the message Apple was sending loud & clear.
The funny thing is most games in my library say they won't run on macOS because they're 32-bit applications, and they won't show up in my library when filtering by "Mac". But they all run perfectly fine, so they're obviously 64-bit. I think I heard once that they all default to 32-bit unless the developer says otherwise...
I'm sure it doesn't make a big difference but the issue with this is it doesn't count Mac users using CrossOver/Whisky because they get detected as Windows users, while Linux users with Proton are reported as using Linux.
From what I’ve seen, for some reason, the people who buy a Mac are not the people who game. College students buying for schoolwork, business people buying for (I assume?) excellent battery life and resulting portability, and graphics/video/music creators. The two Venn circles just don’t overlap.
I play games on my Mac, but I don't use Steam. I just play World of Warcraft which is a native Apple Silicon game, and a few other games that don't require Steam.
x86 -> ARM is already done by apple (rosetta2). What they need is a wine layer to mimmick the Windows API to allow a large amount of existing games to run on macOS without the devs porting. Which DOES exist, it is called crossover (and uses wine and GPTK). But it is a 3rd party company.
Pretty much, Asahi Linux could become the new Bootcamp for Mac users who dual booted to play games.
FWIW I played Diablo II Resurrected on a M1 with "Whiskey". I was quite impressed that I was able to play a native Windows game just like that. It doesn't work anymore just because a stupid Blizzard launcher update now crashes and prevents starting the game.
I also ran EverQuest II admittedly an old DX9 game but still the game ran beautifully on a M1 mac mini at 1440p.
Linux Asahi may help also with older x32 titles like Guild Wars.
While that's true, I don't think they'd need the trademark. They can call it Apple StraightforwardY, duplicate any trademarked APIs and redirect the old ones to their own methods for "compatibility". The Oracle v Google lawsuit proved that APIs can be implemented, even by competitors.
I see even less incentive for Apple to concede defeat and implement Microsoft's API than for them to port Vulkan. After all, they've already shipped a graphics engine that a handful of games have ever used with their OS so they have experience!
Why would apple Implement an API they have zero control over? That's just stupid. In contrast Apple already is a member of khronos and you get DirectX for free anyway if you have Vulkan due to dxvk. There are only downsides to implementing DirectX.
No single 3D API is capable of supporting all 3 of those platforms. However, if those are the only 3 you're concerned with, then Direct3D gets you farther (Windows+Xbox) than Vulkan (Windows only). You're still going to have to write/use something different for PlayStation (which has its own custom API).
The two major platforms that favor Vulkan are Android and Switch, but the former is in the "mobile" category rather than the "desktop/console" category and few games overlap both categories.
But really, Asahi Linux on M1 Mac is about as niche as you can get, so broad hardware support for native APIs isn't really relevant, and I don't think AAA games are necessarily what's meant to be supported either, since they generally won't work for other reasons (can't install x86-64 Windows kernel driver DRM/anticheat on an ARM Linux machine).
AAA gaming is THE driving factor for getting Vulkan on Asahi. There really are only a tiny subset of games that require a kernel anti cheat. Let alone the wealth of single player games.
I'd love to hear about all these DRM-free single-player AAA games. If you're talking about older games, then maybe we're just talking past each other; I assumed we were talking about recent AAA games.
Recent AAA games absolutely run on Linux using Proton. DRM isn't really a concern. The biggest and most successful DRM vendor, Denuvo, even goes out of their way to make sure their product does not interfere with Proton compatibility.
It's pretty rare for a new game to come out and not be playable on the Steam Deck within a week if not on day 1. And when that does happen, it's usually a PvP multiplayer game with kernel-level anticheat.
I'd assume Denuvo DRM works on Linux x86-64 because the company has made it work on that platform. I'd be surprised, with FEX in the middle, if it doesn't get bent out of shape running on ARM: either flagging itself as having been tampered with, or the game. Maybe the company also has a solution for ARM support though.
I do think the question of "why Vulkan" has been thoroughly answered though: 1. DXVK means Direct3D->Vulkan translation already exists (but not the other direction) and 2. Proton already proves that Vulkan gets you most AAA games (with the exceptions having nothing to do with the 3D API).
Because DXVK already exists, and you do still want to run Vulkan anyways. There are AAA games out there using it instead of Direct3D. Natively re-implementing Direct3D APIs would be a tremendous amount of work for little or no real benefit.
For some reason I'm completely unable to find its license through Google (I swear I used to be able to find this sort of stuff with search engines...); but I remember it being extremely prohibitive, to the point where even using it for personal use to play Windows games is illegal. It's only for use by game developers as a tool to help them on the road to port their games to macOS.
...which, unlike DXVK, cannot be redistributed with your app to make it playable on MacOS. So, by definition, Game Porting Toolkit is a mandatory extra-step for Mac users when Linux and Windows users press the little green "Play" button on their screen.
Apple would like AAA developers to port their AAA games over to Metal so that the game has one code base but can run on iPhones, iPads, Macs, and the Vision Pro.
Perhaps Mac gamers will install Asahi Linux in order to play AAA PC titles.