At the "Double 11" in 2020, the Apple M1 chip based on the ARM architecture was officially unveiled, which also opened a new era of Apple's products. Today, M1, M1X and other chips have appeared in a number of Apple products, just after the figure of self-developed chips gradually spread throughout more and more devices, some overseas game manufacturers said that the future of the Mac game market is bright, stronger performance and more unified platform will bring new opportunities for Mac games.
In fact, the British game maker, Ferral Interactive, is not unknown, and it maintains a close working relationship with Creative Assembly, the developer of the Total War series, and is also part of the development team for Total War: Three Kingdoms, and has also completed the separate development of Total War in Rome: Remake.
Of course, Feral Interactive's core business is actually to port Windows games to the Mac and Linux platform, and most of the PC masterpieces that you see on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS are from this manufacturer. So as a stakeholder, it is not difficult to understand that Feral Interactive is optimistic about the future of the Mac game market.
At first glance, the M1 repair chip based on the ARM architecture is applied to the Mac series of products, which really brings more imagination space to Mac games. The reason for this is that iOS, iPadOS, and macOS are actually based on the Darwin kernel, but iOS and iPadOS focus on touch, while macOS prefers to use keyboard and mouse control, and the hardware architecture of the two is obviously different. But after smoothing out the differences in hardware architecture, it is possible to play games on the ARM platform on Mac devices, and even Apple itself has shown the effect of playing Tomb Raider: Shadow on a Mac equipped with M1 chips.
But with the M1 series of chips and a full shift to the ARM architecture, will Mac games really have a bright future? The answer may be no, and Feral Interactive's optimism doesn't change the fact that Macs aren't a good fit to play.
In fact, the Mac product line has been aimed at productivity scenarios from beginning to end, and the combination of software and hardware is also the most advantageous weapon for Mac to compete with Windows PCs. So this also leads to the fact that consumers who will buy Mac devices are basically content creators or light entertainment users who are biased towards the professional field, and their extremely limited scalability directly shuts out gamers.
In the European and American markets, working with Macs and playing games with consoles is a very typical consumer portrait, so the lack of user base has led to almost no game manufacturers developing games specifically for macOS. At present, players want to play mainstream games on the Mac, basically rely on Ferral Interactive, third-party game manufacturers that make a living from porting, and often macOS games are more than 1 year later than the Windows version. If you calculate it purely from the input-output ratio, the input-output ratio of Mac games can almost be said to be pitifully low.
Not to mention that the game as a very uncertain industry, the goal of all game manufacturers is to invest at the least cost, to obtain the maximum user scale, so instead of focusing on the best user base windows to reduce risk, but to allocate energy to develop the Mac version, which can almost be called "self-destruction".
Of course, the deeper reason is that even if there are "head iron" manufacturers who want to fight, macOS can't give game developers too much room to play. After all, the performance of the game on the device is determined by the hardware, API, and driver, and the design of the Mac that does not consider the game in terms of hardware has been put on the table, and the API and driver of the Mac device are also not so friendly to the game.
As a graphical product, the game needs to be implemented through the graphical interface API to convert a line of code into a picture that the player sees, and the Mac problem lies here. Microsoft uses DirectX for Windows and OpenGL for macOS, but for game development, DirectX is currently the industry's most mainstream API.
Before the turn of the millennium, when manufacturers such as 3Dfx were still in the limelight and NVIDIA had not yet risen, OpenGL actually had an overwhelming advantage over DirectX in the game industry. However, Microsoft is more concerned about its own "DirectX", the application of new technologies is far faster than OpenGL, coupled with the lack of cooperation between major manufacturers within OpenGL, making DirectX gradually stand out.
If an API is more popular, then there will naturally be more programmers to learn this API, and game manufacturers will often recruit programmers in the direction of graphics to basically master this API, which will make the more games developed based on this API. The more games that use this API, the more support they will receive from hardware manufacturers and more optimizations for drivers for this API.
To make matters worse, apple has announced the deprecation of OpenGL at WWDC in 2018 in order to promote its own Metal 2 graphics interface, but Metal 2 is currently significantly inferior to OpenGL in terms of multi-platform universality and cost, and this API is not as targeted at the game and multimedia fields as DirectX. So the end result is that, with the exception of a few vendors like Blizzard, other game developers pay little attention to Metal 2.
As for the driver level, Apple and NVIDIA have long parted ways, because of the difference in CUDA (stream processor) technology and OpenGL permissions, NVIDIA's products are now extinct on Mac devices. Even Apple directly banned NVIDIA's CUDA and driver on macOS 10.14 Mojave, forcing the latter to stand up and claim that he had already prepared the relevant driver, but the former has always refused to sign. The influence of Apple's current partner AMD in the field of civilian graphics is not the same as that of NVIDIA for the time being, so the current influence of the two in the game industry can be said to be a heaven and an underground.
Therefore, it seems that Mac devices are almost out of play in the field of traditional PC games, so what about in the mobile game market? Unfortunately, even with the M1 chip, Mac devices may also have no chance in the field of mobile games.
After all, the reason why mobile games can now beat PC and console games is that it can be played anytime and anywhere on mobile phones, and moving mobile games to Macs is equivalent to directly giving up the biggest advantage - portability and mobility, to face the stronger gameplay and better graphics of PC games. So even with the M1 series of chips, the Mac may not have much to see in the game market.
【The picture of this article comes from the network】