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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The biggest problem with gaming on Macs has nothing to do with processors at all; it’s that there are few games that support MacOS.
There are two main reasons for this. Reason number one is a chicken-and-egg classic: Most people who play games have Windows PCs or consoles or both for that. It’s a small market, and it’s not worth the effort to port to a whole new OS for the small overlap of Mac owners who want to play games, but don’t already have a PC or conosle.
Reason number two is that effort: MacOS does not directly support the graphics APIs — the software toolkit — used by game developers, Microsoft’s **DirectX** and the open-source **Vulkan**. Apple has it’s own API, *Metal*, which is incompatible and only runs on iPhones and Macs.
(You can, sort of, use an adaptor API called “MoltenVK” to translate between Vulkan and Metal, but performance takes a small hit, and some features are missing.)
(Apple has also very very recently announced a porting kit to make it easier for DirectX programmers to convert their games, but this is brand new and so far has not yielded any concrete results.)
Honestly, it has little to do with processors at all — Apple’s SoCs are, well, *fine*, very efficient, don’t throttle under load, and the better ones, like the M2 Max and Ultra are probably faster overall than what most gamers have in their dedicated gaming rigs.
Apple’s GPUs, on the other hand, are fair to middling. They could do more here, and perhaps they will, someday.
But it doesn’t really matter without any games to run on ’em.
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