Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves

  > landing patches to make Wine better on Mac

AFAIK they dont contribute back to Wine. There some chance they quietly pay to CodeWeavers, but likely this wouldnt be kept secret.

  > I fail to see why it matters if they support dx to metal conversion or if they support vulkan

It matters because if Apple embraced Vulkan it would give more market share to one standard API for non-Windows platforms.

Their strategy trying to push proprietary solutions simply doesnt work when their OS have 2% of PC gaming market share.

Apple announced game porting toolkit 3 years ago and no one uses it. Well, unless Apple fund ports as PR stunts.

At the same time Valve released Steam Deck 4 years ago and by now nearly all Windows games are playable on Linux.

Apple is getting kind of a PR problem with developers. In theory they don't do all the same things on Mac as they do on iOS, but as long as they continue to do them on iOS and keep feature creeping the gatekeeper stuff, people are hesitant to end up stuck with Apple taking 30% of their revenue or denying their app for opaque reasons after they've spent big money to develop it.

At which point who is going to spend development resources helping the platform of the company they're most afraid of screwing them if it becomes more popular? Half the reason more game developers are targeting Linux is a hedge against Microsoft doing that sort of thing, and Apple is on the opposite side of where they want to move.

Pixel response time is a related concept to framerate but more about how long it takes a pixel to change from one color to the next. Usually measured in cycle time from grey to grey again, a low rate just means that images will be smooshy looking, have unclear boundaries, and end up with a 'motion blur' effect. So even if your mbp supports a reasonable sounding 120hz (8.33ms for a full frame sweep), some of those pixels will still be in transition when the next frame hits. At least, my take on it as a somewhat casual gamer.

It depends wildly on the type of game.

e.g. if you're playing a single player turn-based strategy game, you might be taking a few seconds between each decision & UI interaction. Some hard turns you might step away from the computer to think things through for minutes without touching the controls. 30fps for a game like that could be fine. 15-20fps might even be fine, especially if the game engine manages to avoid adding unnecessary input latency & is able to process input events at a faster rate even if the render runs at a low framerate.

If you're playing competitive FPS games, where reflexes matter, you'd want to get input, network & video latency as low as possible, within reason. Not high-frequency trading low. I have no idea at what point it stops making a competitive difference. If you have +100ms more latency than I do, I suspect that'd give me a noticeable advantage. If you have +10ms more latency than I do, I'm not sure that matters.

Dan Luu wrote an article about input latency [1] in 2017 where he measured latency by running experiments pressing a key & measuring how long it takes to see a response on the screen. New computers from 2017 would have around 70ms-170ms latency, depending on the model.

[1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/

Do they plan to have a whitelist of games? I guess they could remove rosetta support for most Cocoa frameworks while keeping OpenGL translation layer.

It’s only a GPU if it’s made in the RTX region of Silicon Valley, otherwise it’s just sparkling floating point calculations.