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Comment by GeekyBear

3 months ago

> MacOS is not an attainable gaming support platform in general, as the people who are interested in the AAA games are going to need a Pro series

The M5's GPU cores are expected to pick up the same 40% performance boost we just saw in the newly released iPhones.

AAA games written for the M4 already work just fine, the extra performance is needed when you are also emulating other graphics APIs and CPU instruction sets to run Windows games.

Windows on ARM has the same issues, but Prism isn't as good at x86 emulation.

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GeekyBear

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wyldberry  3 months ago

Attainable isn't about benchmarks and performance, it's ecosystem such as supported kernel hooks for AAA games to invest the time in maintaining their anti-cheats and other parts of the game-as-a-service platform.

It's also about the market accessibility and penetration. When the base level MBA at it's lowest RAM settings is reliably running AAA games is when you might see more interest in the platform from those studios because much like the iOS market, people running Mac tend to be more readily monetized, especially through things like in-game cosmetics.

  • GeekyBear  3 months ago

    The cheapest base M4 Mac Mini has 16 Gigs of RAM and plays AAA games written for Mac today.

    The performance boost is needed when you are running Windows games under emulation.

    Emulation overhead is also an issue for Proton on Linux or Windows on ARM.

    • pjerem  3 months ago

      > Emulation overhead is also an issue for Proton on Linux

      Nope because Proton is based on WINE, which stands for Wine Is Not An Emulator. Windows executables on Linux are running natively at full speed like any other Linux program.

      Wine implements the Windows ABI and is just here to answer the system calls those executables are making.

      In fact, most Windows games are running faster under Linux.

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