Gaming news: New or upcoming Mac games

[Homy]

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is coming to Mac.

[Atticus]

Gaming info/quotes from Apple

LINK

[Homy]

The games that were announced for the iPhone 15 Pro, are they also compatible with Apple Silicon iPads and Macs as well?

"The developers are going to work with us to do it. We don't want to speak for the developers here, we'll let them sort of talk to their plans, but I would say Capcom brought out Resident Evil Village last year for Mac and now for the phone this year. And one of the things that fundamentally enabled that is this unification of the architecture of Apple Silicon and the iPhone Silicon and the iPad Silicon. And so you can see that they're able to do exactly what you just suggested, which is bring a game to iPhone and Mac that is the same game. It's the same rendering, it's the same rendering quality and it's the same game they had on a gaming PC and a console. So we really look at these many generations of SoC architecture across the phone, across the iPad, across now, Apple Silicon Macs. And we'd see that as part of one big unified platform, a graphics and gaming platform in particular. So that's the opportunity here for these game developers. And you can see like a Capcom and Resident Evil have already started down that path. So I think we're really excited about what this enables for many more game developers to do the same."

[Homy]

Lies of P is out on MAS and with the weak Swedish Crown it costs about $72. Performance seems to be good according to Reddit and Steam reviews are very positive. Works on Monterey and M1. Oh, I can post images now?

"I have tried on M1 Pro easily got 50-60 fps on high settings. I am impressed by the performance even on base m1 MacBook Air 30-40fps which is super impressive.Worth it totally ."

"on m2max maximum settings constant 60fps. really beautiful graphics. But the game is not my favorite. Good to see games coming to Mac now."

"On my m1 macbook air i got 30-40 fps easily with metalfx performance medium settings."

"I have tried on M1 Pro easily got 50-60 fps on high settings. I am impressed by the performance even on base m1 MacBook Air 30-40fps which is super impressive.Worth it totally."

---

FM 2024 will come to Mac on Nov 6 according to Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/22525...ager_2024/

[Camper-Hunter]

Benchmarks without indicating resolution are basically useless. In the Reddit thread, there's this one though: "Pretty smooth on my MacBook Pro 16” M1 Pro 16 GB. ,1920x1200, Medium / High, 55-65 FPS". So, not that impressive really, since a GTX 980Ti (an 8 years old card but top of the line at the time) outputs 64 fps average at the same resolution but max settings.

The game isn't demanding, and current high end cards get ridiculously high results (320 fps on a 4090). People are saying the game is so well optimised: it probably is well made, but first and foremost it doesn't try to raise the graphics quality bar too high. There's no ray tracing for instance, and most games perform well on modern hardware with only rasterisation.

[Homy]

Benchmarks without indicating resolution are basically useless. In the Reddit thread, there's this one though: "Pretty smooth on my MacBook Pro 16” M1 Pro 16 GB. ,1920x1200, Medium / High, 55-65 FPS". So, not that impressive really, since a GTX 980Ti (an 8 years old card but top of the line at the time) outputs 64 fps average at the same resolution but max settings.

The game isn't demanding, and current high end cards get ridiculously high results (320 fps on a 4090). People are saying the game is so well optimised: it probably is well made, but first and foremost it doesn't try to raise the graphics quality bar too high. There's no ray tracing for instance, and most games perform well on modern hardware with only rasterisation.

Well, I said performance is good, not impressive. True about the lack of resolution but those comments were what I found then. We just have to wait for more detailed benchmarks. It's known that UE 4 on Mac is slow(er). Here are some PC benchmarks done in the Krat Central Station Plaza, one of the most demanding areas. You say 980 Ti is 8 years old but the age is misleading. It's 14% faster than RX 6500 XT from 2022 according to Techpowerup.

TFLOPS is not a good way to measure game performance but 980 Ti does 6.06 while M1 Pro 16 cores does 5.3, 14% slower than 980 Ti. M1 Pro 16c is about as fast as RX 5500 XT. 980 Ti gets an average fps of 64 at 1080 max in Krat Central Station Plaza. Here is a new video showing M1 Pro 16c getting about 60-75 fps at 1080 high. So at max settings it wouldn't be much slower than 980 Ti.

[Homy]

Apple explains Game Mode.

Game Mode optimizes your gaming experience by giving your game the highest priority access to your CPU and GPU, lowering usage for background tasks. And it doubles the Bluetooth sampling rate, which reduces input latency and audio latency for wireless accessories like game controllers and AirPods.

1. Move your pointer over the green button in the upper-left corner of the game window.
   
2. Choose Enter Full Screen from the menu that appears. 
   

When you enter full screen in this way, a Game Mode menu  appears in the menu bar. You can use this menu to confirm that Game Mode is turned on for your game.

Also Crossover 23.5 is released:

"This release offers an alternate way to run DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games through CrossOver, using components from the Apple game porting toolkit. It can be enabled by toggling on “D3DMetal” in the right bottle sidebar. We are happy to report that this new D3DMetal option improves quality, compatibility, and performance for many games on Macs with the M1 chip or later, including Elden Ring, Hogwarts Legacy, Cyberpunk 2077, Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon, Mortal Kombat 1, Deep Rock Galactic, Satisfactory, Monster Hunter Rise, God of War and Batman Arkham Knight. Note that Elden Ring and Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon default to launching with Easy Anti-Cheat disabled."

"The excitement does not stop there! We are also happy to report that Baldur’s Gate 3 is working out of the box, and we recommend enabling D3DMetal or DXVK for the best experience. Denuvo games are now playable, and this release also includes support for GStreamer for multimedia decoding. CrossOver 23.5 is the first CrossOver release with support for macOS Sonoma with optimizations from thorough compatibility testing. CrossOver 23.5 also boasts better compatibility for a variety of distros, including Debian 13, openSUSE Leap 15.1 and the upcoming Ubuntu 23.10 release. Lastly CrossOver 23.5 includes a handful of fixes, including special characters not rendering in certain apps and components not loading with MetaTrader 4."

• "macOS Sonoma is required for D3DMetal option and Denuvo games."