With the new WWDC coming out, Apple boasts about its performance using applications like video editing, encoding, etc. However, I keep hearing that despite the “power” it has, macs are not good for gaming (I know the Apple silicon processors aren’t just a CPU but my point still stands).
Why is this the case? Even with CPUs, I see that some are marketed as doing different things, like the AMD Ryzen X3D line for gaming, versus others that are better for productivity tasks. Shouldn’t a good CPU be able to do both things? What makes them different?
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To add to what others have already said, more specifically about gaming, the reason you don’t often see games for Mac (or any Linux) is because they do not possess the same libraries (specifically the gaming libraries) as Windows. It is a massive obstacle in the way of developing games to be cross-platform. One such graphics library is DirectX, which was developed by Microsoft for their original Xbox and has evolved greatly since then. A vast majority of games use DirectX, and the powerful game engines (most notably Unreal) only really support DirectX. (Unreal does support opengl but it’s complicated, too outside of scope for this thread).
As you may have noticed, however, there are still games that can run on Mac. That is likely because they use Opengl, which is the other “big” graphics library that is cross platform. I won’t go into the reasons why people prefer DirectX over Opengl because that would take too long, but it’s an interesting history.
This all ties into CPUs (and GPUs) because companies like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia know where the market share is. They are reasonably incentivised to work with these libraries to increase gaming performance, among a miriad of other reasons. Apple, on the other hand, has a proprietary processor that they choose to modify to fit their niche. They could make gaming more accessible and incredibly fast on a Mac, but they are just not interested. It also doesn’t help that they are anti-developer, but that’s another topic for another thread.
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