Mones Hawass Books
Tuesday, June 13, 2023 10:00 AM
The Mac is good at many, many things, but somehow it is perceived as not good for gaming. This perception has some credibility, but it does not mean that the Mac is a failure when it comes to gaming. However, Apple wants to change this perception with macOS Sonoma later in the year. This year, in WWDC 2023 Apple announced a handful of features that showed its intentions for gaming on the Mac.
The strength of the interface is Metal
Metal is an API created by Apple that can run hardware-accelerated graphics on Apple’s platforms. Apple says Metal is “a low-cost API, a rich shader language, tight integration of graphics and computation, and an unparalleled suite of GPU profiling and debugging tools.”
This year, a new game porting toolkit makes it easier than ever to bring games from other platforms to the Mac, and the Metal shader converter simplifies the process of converting game shaders and graphics code.
Metal introduces a new game porting toolkit, eliminating months of pre-work and enabling developers to see how well their current game is running on the Mac in just a few days, and it also simplifies the process of converting game shaders and graphics code to take full advantage of Apple silicon’s performance, greatly reducing of the total development time, as Apple claims. This will make it easier for developers to port games to Mac.
Big names and games coming to Mac
With the M series of processors, gaming has definitely become an interesting offering on Macs. Game developers, according to Apple, are taking advantage of Metal 3, to bring exciting new names to the Mac. Some of the big names coming to the Mac include DEATH STRANDING DIRECTOR’S CUT, Stray, Fort Solis, World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, HUMANKIND, and Resident Evil Village: Winters’ Expansion, The Medium, ELEX II, Firmament, SnowRunner and Disney Dreamlight Valley.
An all-new game mode
with macOS SonomaApple will also introduce a dedicated gaming mode, and according to Apple, the gaming mode will provide an enhanced gaming experience with smoother and more consistent frame rates, by ensuring that games get the highest priority on the CPU and GPU.
Game Mode also makes gaming on Macs more immersive — reducing audio latency with AirPods, and dramatically reducing input latency with popular game controllers like Xbox and PlayStation by doubling the Bluetooth sampling rate. Game mode will work with any game, including all recent and upcoming Mac games.
