| | | I take this with a large grain of salt given Apple's lackluster efforts to better support gaming beyond iPhones and iPads in the past, but it could help push sales if they truly commit to it.
Apple Is Doubling Down On Its Gaming Ambitions
At a showcase of titles and hardware, Apple shows that it is committed to making its devices a serious place to game and wants to make it as easy as possible for developers to port their titles to its platforms.
By Tom Caswell
July 18, 2024 at 3:37PM PDT
When I moved to the United States, my parents bought their first Mac: an iBook G4. It was an absolutely devastating choice for me, personally, as it meant that I would not be able to play the newly released RTS game Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth, a title it had felt like I had been waiting a Third Age to play.
Now, 20 years later, Apple's gaming prospects look a lot different. Not only did the Mac move from a Power PC processor to Intel, it has now left those chips in the dust as well for Apple's own silicon. And of course, the iPhone launched, which not only revolutionized the mobile phone landscape, but the gaming industry as well; hundreds of millions of people have played titles like Candy Crush and Angry Birds.
At a showcase of games and devices that Apple put on for media last week in New York City, I got a chance to check out a selection of titles across the company's various hardware options, which put the reality of Apple's gaming prospects into focus. The company recognizes the potential, and it hopes that AAA video game experiences will catch fire on its hardware. What we were shown was a compelling argument as to how it would achieve that.
Before we took a look at any games that were built for the Mac, iPhone, or iPad, my group was shown Control running on a MacBook Pro via Crossover. Back in the day, when my family had that iBook G4, there were ways to get Windows and Windows games running on Mac hardware, but it was a massive hassle, to say the least. I remember trying to use software called Wine to make my Battle for Middle-earth dreams a reality and failing rather miserably.
Now, this kind of compatibility has become remarkably easy, with Crossover running the Windows version of Control via the Windows version of Steam, with graphics and ray tracing cranked all the way up, and getting a comfortably consistent 40+ frames per second. Control is eventually coming to Mac natively, but the team was showing how capable the Mac was now for gaming without developers needing to do any kind of optimization.
After going hands-on with this Windows version of Control, which admittedly felt just as good to play as it does on the various other hardware I've experienced it on, we checked out several games running natively on Mac, namely Valheim, Palworld, and Frostpunk 2. The upcoming release of macOS Sequoia is getting an updated version of Game Mode, which launched as a part of the current version of macOS Sonoma. This revised Game Mode, which kicks in automatically any time you boot up a game, is meant to more effectively reduce background processes and optimize computing power for improved gaming performance.
More at link: gamespot.com |
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