hey fun fact for yall: the newer apple silicon chips are powerful enough to play modern games through a windows VM!
20 years ago I was playing world of warcraft on a mac book. I got like 10 FPS but I was still raiding.
TIL about asahi
You can get loads of frames per second with cloud gaming, just not necessarily from the right second.
4k high framerate! But the compression algorithm and settings optimize that down to something between 720p and 1080p. With a half second of input latency when factors line up well.
But don’t worry, soon there will be AI input prediction so that the game can predict what you’ll do and render that before you even do it.
Fast forward 10 years and there’s a generation of kids who think that the difference between a video game and a movie/tv show is that video games let you push buttons to look at other things if you get curious while watching. Or that would be the difference, but it’s actually that you can look around accurately in VGs while it’s more of a “let’s see what the AI spits out if I look this way during this scene… Bahahaha, another dickbutt!”
Friendly reminder that Halo was a Mac game first, before Microsoft bought Bungie to prevent Apple from ever having the appearance of competence.
Microsoft didn’t even need to do that, Apple has become more than happy to show how incompetent they are. Behold:
What even is that?
The Apple mouse, charging
The charging port is under the mouse, which makes it so that you can’t use while it is charging
Great design !
The design goal was to avoid people just leaving it plugged in because that is more convenient and that then showing up on photos. Can’t have something as trivial as real life day to day usability ruin your image of minimalism.
FPS isn’t really an issue with cloud gaming at all, should ask about latency if anything.
And connection stability
I swear to fucking god, I must be the only person alive who’s never had any issues playing any game I wanted to on a Mac. You know there’s fucking ways to accomplish this shit right??
Out of genuine curiosity:
What is the most graphically complex game you’ve got working on a Mac?
FPS?
Resolution?
Hardware?
Can’t you just use Bluetooth? Or is latency an issue for macs?
I’m happy not owning a car and using public transport but there are limits.
Fuck that shit, I own a portion of my public transit. My taxes pay for it, I get to vote on the people who run it. That’s ownership
Look at this plebeian, doesn’t even own their own tram.
Too many scary words, you broke them. Nice.
That port joke sure is a dead horse …
It’s a two way sword.
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On one hand, it sucks that MacBooks only have 2 ports on 13" models and 3 on 15" models (4 for M1)
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On the other, all of the ports do charging, they’re all 40gbps USB4/Thunderbolt3, they all do Displayport and HDMI. All the ports do everything. On most other laptops that just isn’t the case.
Honestly 3 ports is enough. And you have the separate MagSafe port too, which means all 3 are typically free. I can’t think of a good reason to have 3 devices regularly hooked up to a Mac laptop. Mouse, keyboard, external hard drive? And mouse/keyboard can be wired to each other and/or wireless?
Are we gaming during our commute now or something though? If you’re at home you’ll have some sort of port hub.
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buy another one
I couldn’t eat that much lasagna.
why would anybody need a mouse + keyboard and a controller at the same time
Controllers suck at menus.
I have done it. Use controller when in a vehicle and mouse + keyboard outside of it.
But what kind of computer does not have a keyboard connected to it? And wireless mouse/controllers are not much more expensive then wired ones.
Usb hubs aint expensive either. Actually both my keyboard and my monitor come with extra usb hubs build in.
I generally prefer wired because I get really tired of dealing with batteries on wireless peripherals, wireless interference, and sometimes latency.
I don’t want to leave my controllers on the charger every time I’m not playing since that’ll drain their battery faster, but that also means my batteries will be at some unknown battery level when I’m starting a game up so it’ll last an unknown amount of time of use before dying, assuming it still had any power at all. Usually these days these types of devices have a way to warn you when they’re low on charge, but I generally play on PC and I don’t know for certain if the wireless controller I’d use could alert me. Then there’s the question of if I notice the alert in the middle of a game, or if I remember to charge it when I’m next able to, or if that alert interfered with something I needed to see/hear at a critical point in a game. Then if the battery dies in a game that could be funny, will probably be frustrating, but also could ruin something I was working a long time towards doing. If the battery is completely dead as in like I haven’t touched it in months, then it may also take up to a few minutes before it’ll have enough charge that I can actually use it since many wireless controllers cannot communicate using the charging cable. And of course the longer I use it the more that battery is going to wear out and eventually need to be replaced entirely. Obviously other mechanical parts also will wear and need to be replaced like the joysticks and of all of them the battery should be the most accessible to replace, but it’s still an additional failure point that can cause more catastrophic failure than many others.
Next is the less likely one these days since I feel that wireless integrity has gotten much better in the last few decades, but I distinctly remember constant frustrations during my first real forray into having a wireless mouse with it operating on a very similar wavelength to my Wi-Fi card and somewhat often just simply not working. It would be operating fine for 50 minutes then be completely unresponsive for 10-60 seconds. I also remember specifically that this mouse had some awful drivers that would crash or forget its configurations about once every 1-3 days, so coupled with that and the battery problem it was difficult to pin point the cause of any particular failure with that mouse. I’d eventually see if the drivers failed via an alert from Windows, the mouse would continue to fail if the batteries were low, and it would do things I don’t want if the drivers forgot their config, but for every failure that didn’t do any of those things it was difficult to know for certain what caused that and how to fix it.
Lastly was the latency which is probably 99% of the time not an issue, but adding in the translation layera between actions to wireless comm to driver to action input can be a frustration. The majority of the times I’ve noticed this are with a mouse that’s waking up from sleep mode, so not super relevant but I do know for particularly high octane games it could have an impact.
The alternative to all of these issues is dealing with a cable. I’d rather deal with the cable, the vast majority of the time.
Controller because it’s a much more convenient way of playing, mouse to line up area strike precisely to this one specific pixel that covers all enemies, and keyboard because I only have an hour of play. I’m not spending it on typing character names like Lafayette Liebhart with a stick.
Obviously.
In most first person game I’ll use the controller for movement and general aiming. If there’s a situation where I need precise aiming, such as a sniper rifle or multiple fast shots, I’ll have my controller in my left hand and mouse in my right.
Some Trackmania players switch between keyboards, controllers or steering wheels based on the current track for example. Also, navigating some menues is better with mouse or keyboard, but laptop inbuilt controls should be enough for that.
Connect controller via bluetooth - Done. You dont want to use a mouse anyway because of the latency. The latency is alright for most games with a controller though. Atleast if the servers arent too far away and your connection is somewhat good. I had a free trial month for one of the services and it was pretty useable tbh.
Dont get me wrong i dont like Apple, Geforce Now or cloud anything either. But if a nongamer is able to subscribe to a service for a month or two to play that one game on his macbook thats not a bad thing? Like good for him.
You can’t use proton in Mac? Linux and Mac are both Unix based but I don’t know how much they differ
No, you basically cannot use Proton on Mac to anywhere near the degree it currently supports games on Linux.
Long story short, they differ a lot.
Think of like… a bear, dog, and cat all have a single common ancestor if you go back far enough.
… But they are significantly different from each other in a wide variety of ways.
It seems that there are some semi-comparable ways to do more gaming on a Mac.
- Dual Boot Asahi Linux, then use Proton from Asahi, running Windows games via Proton on Linux, on Mac hardware.
https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2025/02/07/proton-asahi-linux-mac-gaming-tutorial.html
Seems to technically work, but basically to me it sounds like where Proton on non-Mac baremetal Linux was around 4-5 years ago, ie, theres a lot of work to be done, but, some things work reasonably well.
- Port the game to Mac yourself with the Mac game porting toolkit.
https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
Somewhat hilariously to me, many Mac/Tech media sites have described this as ‘Basically Proton for Mac’, which uh, no, its not, not even close.
Proton takes Windows hooks and calls and translates them in realtime to execute in realtime on a Linux system. Only non instant thing is building up a shader cache, but I’m pretty sure you do that on Windows too.
This… is porting a game.
Granted, it is impressive that any kind of automated tool/system like this even exists at all, but uh, this is more like a guided recompiling of the entire game binary to something that will run natively on a Mac.
So that is… not any kind of a realtime translation layer.
As best I can tell, results for how well it actually works are roughly:
Most of the time it does produce a valid, working game binary, but performance is often terrible for more graphically complex games.
I guess if any Mac users have more info or corrections to this, I’m all ears.
I know much more about linux and windows than Mac, so I may be missing something or innacurate.
Thanks for the information, I didn’t know that much about the gaming scene in Mac. With the wine libraries being open source, I thought maybe Mac users would have a chance but the walled garden keeps stretching.
@capcool there’s gonna be a lot more of those considering the price development of memory and graphics cards. and I think some will be quite happy to push users to thin clients
When the first cloud-only AAA release drops and the gaming rig gets the same FPS as the kid’s school Chromebook, there will be gnashing of teeth.
I won’t gnash my teeth - If they release the game cloud-only, they officially don’t want my money, which only buys games i can archive (Clean Steam Files are fine, the copy protection is more of a formality than a hurdle); same as Denuvo-protected games. A publisher that does this is dead to me.
That could definitely happen with FPS games, and the only advantage you can have is having less than 100 ms to play. While they install anticheat/spyware on the computer with the cloud client.
Latency is why i don’t want to play multiplayer online game, but i can tolerate it since my input is immediate. Cloud gaming gonna be jank as heck in most part of the world, not to mention i don’t really have much time in my hand(like basically most working adult) so the subscription model gonna be more expensive in the long run.
