Apple’s 2023 MacBook Pro models are the latest entrant in the company’s growing list of Mac products featuring custom chipsets. With several more products to arrive later this year, executives did an interview, talking about the Apple Silicon journey, and one of the topics that was discussed was gaming on the Mac. While it is possible to engage in AAA titles, Apple executives believe that it is a long-term play and that people are not going to transition to this platform overnight.
Apple executives believe that the AAA gaming community has started to realize that an opportunity exists on current-generation Macs
Talking to TechCrunch, Apple’s Vice President of Platform Architecture and Hardware Technologies Tim Millet, and VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, Bob Borchers, discussed several aspects of Apple Silicon Macs, with one area being gaming. As most readers know, Macs are not considered the ‘go-to’ machines for AAA gaming, but the company executives said that this would change with time, especially with Capcom bringing titles to the platform.
“With Capcom bringing Resident Evil across, and other titles starting to come along, I think the AAA community is starting to wake up and understand the opportunity. Because what we have now, with our portfolio of M-series Macs, is a set of incredibly performant machines and a growing audience of people who have these incredibly performant systems that can all be addressed with a single code base that is developing over time. And we’re adding new APIs in and expanding Metal in Metal 3, etc. And then if you think about the ability to extend that down into iPad, and iPhone as well, I think there’s tremendous opportunity.”
Of course, it will take years to bring ‘gamers’ to the Mac, but the journey has to begin somewhere, right? Borchers believes the Apple Silicon has allowed the Mac family to bring gaming capabilities but believes that lots of work is required. For the time being, Macs will continue being used for tackling productivity or meant for creative professionals.
Image showing Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max SoCs
“The story starts many years ago, when we were imagining this transition. Gamers are a serious bunch. And I don’t think we’re going to fool anybody by saying that overnight we’re going to make Mac a great gaming platform. We’re going to take a long view on this. We weren’t going to design GPUs for that space that were unnecessarily complicated, that had features that were not relevant to iOS. But as we looked at the Mac, we realized that this is a different beast. There will be different expectations over time — let’s make sure we have our toolbox complete.”
The M-series also features a unified memory architecture, which is different from the currently available solutions. Millet believes that developers do not have a grip on this new architecture, so perhaps that is why they are hesitant to gravitate comfortably.
“Game developers have never seen 96 gigabytes of graphics memory available to them now, on the M2 Max. I think they’re trying to get their heads around it, because the possibilities are unusual. They’re used to working in much smaller footprints of video memory. So I think that’s another place where we’re going to have an interesting opportunity to inspire developers to go beyond what they’ve been able to do before.”
We expect Apple to improve its SoCs to make them more comparable in gaming, but as far as this generation goes, it is clear that a lot more work is required. If you want to check out the entire interview, click on the source link below. There is a lot more discussion that happened with the publication and the executives surrounding the Apple Silicon Macs, which you will find quite interesting to read.
The post Apple Silicon Macs Entered The Gaming Market With The First Iteration, But Executives Claim That There Is Much Work To Be Done by Omar Sohail appeared first on Wccftech.
