OS X New witcher announced, migration to UE5, future of mac gaming

[Irishman]

Do those games run on the current macOS (Monterey) and with M1? I remember having Steam on my 2018 Intel Mac mini and when I upgraded to Catalina it dropped 32 bit support so that meant a lot of old games that were no longer being updated stopped working. I haven't tried anything other than WoW on my iMac.

Well, there you go. A failure of preventive maintenance on your part where it touches on OS updates would have saved you a lot of headaches and stress. It seems like you and I saw Catalina coming from a mile away, knowing that the 32-bit culling was coming. The difference between us was that I took it as a warning to keep running Mojave, whereas you updated anyway, yes?

Also, you asked about websites that constantly update us on Mac games that run on MacOS natively, Rosetta 2, via Crossover, or Parallels.

There is such a site.

Home - Gaming on M1 Apple silicon Macs and MacBooks, bugs, fixes, compatiblity and troubleshooting guides - AppleGamingWiki

www.applegamingwiki.com

You should check it out. It’s run by Andrew Tsai, who’s also very prolific on YouTube and Discord.

If you weren’t aware, there is another site run by a developer named Schnapple, called Mac Source Ports, where you can find Apple Silicon-native games going back to the 1990’s.

Mac Source Ports

Mac Source Ports - Run old games on new Macs

macsourceports.com

 

[GrumpyCoder]

Apple has current customers but the big catch is that huge majority of PC users who currently don't use Mac. If Apple could pay software and game devs to make versions for the current Mac hardware that means more people would buy it.

It was more a rhetorical question. Apple won't pay $50M+ for a AAA title to make developers port it. It didn't work when we had more games on Macs back in the day and it won't work now. There's only one way this might ever happen and that is a user base among people playing AAA games which is more than way under 5%.

If you weren’t aware, there is another site run by a developer named Schnapple, called Mac Source Ports, where you can find Apple Silicon-native games going back to the 1990’s.

Mac Source Ports

Mac Source Ports - Run old games on new Macs

macsourceports.com

I had to click on it. I enjoyed those Star Wars games back in the day. Same for Wolfenstein/Doom, but what really stands out for me are the X-COM games. I remember well when those came out and we used to play them for hours sitting in our computer rooms (aka the attic) eating cookies and drinking hot chocolate and tea on rainy days or in the winter. We must have played those games for years.

This brings back memories of Syndicate, which is one of these titles as well and came out before X-COM if I remember correctly.

Now does anyone have a time machine I could borrow to go back to the early 90s and while we're at it, make me 30 years younger again?

 

[russell_314]

Well, there you go. A failure of preventive maintenance on your part where it touches on OS updates would have saved you a lot of headaches and stress. It seems like you and I saw Catalina coming from a mile away, knowing that the 32-bit culling was coming. The difference between us was that I took it as a warning to keep running Mojave, whereas you updated anyway, yes?

Also, you asked about websites that constantly update us on Mac games that run on MacOS natively, Rosetta 2, via Crossover, or Parallels.

There is such a site.

Home - Gaming on M1 Apple silicon Macs and MacBooks, bugs, fixes, compatiblity and troubleshooting guides - AppleGamingWiki

www.applegamingwiki.com

You should check it out. It’s run by Andrew Tsai, who’s also very prolific on YouTube and Discord.

If you weren’t aware, there is another site run by a developer named Schnapple, called Mac Source Ports, where you can find Apple Silicon-native games going back to the 1990’s.

Mac Source Ports

Mac Source Ports - Run old games on new Macs

macsourceports.com

I will have to check them out. Although I don’t think those old classic games will attract younger people I’m old enough to be interested. When I was talking about gaming I was mostly talking about modern titles. I would love to see Apple make a push to become relevant in this area.

I knew updating was going to break things but I try to keep my Mac updated. I usually wait about three months or so after the major release and then update. At some point updating becomes critical because for example right now Mojave isn’t receiving current security updates. Apple only supports two operating systems back so the last one supported is Catalina.

 

[Irishman]

I will have to check them out. Although I don’t think those old classic games will attract younger people I’m old enough to be interested. When I was talking about gaming I was mostly talking about modern titles. I would love to see Apple make a push to become relevant in this area.

I knew updating was going to break things but I try to keep my Mac updated. I usually wait about three months or so after the major release and then update. At some point updating becomes critical because for example right now Mojave isn’t receiving current security updates. Apple only supports two operating systems back so the last one supported is Catalina.

How many modern Mac games are you familiar with?

How about the Metro trilogy from Ukrainian developers 4A? They’ve ported all of their games to the Mac.

How about Borderlands 2 and 3? (Gearbox ported BL3 to Mac themselves, something they had never done before).

Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider?

Prodeus is a very fun boomer shooter if you’re into that sort of thing, which I am.

It’s hard to make recommendations without knowing what you’re into.

 

[diamond.g]

How many modern Mac games are you familiar with?

How about the Metro trilogy from Ukrainian developers 4A? They’ve ported all of their games to the Mac.

How about Borderlands 2 and 3? (Gearbox ported BL3 to Mac themselves, something they had never done before).

Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider?

Prodeus is a very fun boomer shooter if you’re into that sort of thing, which I am.

It’s hard to make recommendations without knowing what you’re into.

Borderlands 3 uses UE4 (as does Tiny Tina's Wonderland). I think that is the last UE4 game to come to macOS (without using crossover or parallels).

 

[Irishman]

Borderlands 3 uses UE4 (as does Tiny Tina's Wonderland). I think that is the last UE4 game to come to macOS (without using crossover or parallels).

Did you see the newest version of UE5 Preview 2, on M1 Max in the Mac Studio? With an uncapped frame limit, with Ray Tracing on, it was getting around 60 fps, and with Ray Tracing off, it was about double that!

This looks gorgeous, man, from the lighting, to the reflections, to the steam affects.

Maybe Apple and Epic have finally buried the hatchet?

 

[diamond.g]

Did you see the newest version of UE5 Preview 2, on M1 Max in the Mac Studio? With an uncapped frame limit, with Ray Tracing on, it was getting around 60 fps, and with Ray Tracing off, it was about double that!

This looks gorgeous, man, from the lighting, to the reflections, to the steam affects.

Maybe Apple and Epic have finally buried the hatchet?

That looks nice. I haven’t seen anything that suggests Epic has brought lumen to MacOS.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

Maybe Apple and Epic have finally buried the hatchet?

Apple vs Epic has nothing to do with it. If developers want to use UE5 for their games and there's enough demand ($$$) then Epic will listen and give developers what they want. The only question is, if Epic implement certain features for a specific platform, will the effort be worth it either by payments from UDN or license fees for every title generating more than $1M in sales. That's really the only thing Epic (and everyone else for that matter) cares about.

If they could make enough money with it, UE5 would run on AmigaOS in no time.

 

[diamond.g]

Apple vs Epic has nothing to do with it. If developers want to use UE5 for their games and there's enough demand ($$$) then Epic will listen and give developers what they want. The only question is, if Epic implement certain features for a specific platform, will the effort be worth it either by payments from UDN or license fees for every title generating more than $1M in sales. That's really the only thing Epic (and everyone else for that matter) cares about.

If they could make enough money with it, UE5 would run on AmigaOS in no time.

I figure that at this stage of the game (heh) developers making games for macOS that want to use a third party game engine are most likely going to choose Unity or Godot over UE since there seems to be better macOS support on those engines than UE.

We see all these cool videos of folks running demo UE4/5 projects on Apple Silicon, but no actual "finished" products.

 

[Irishman]

That looks nice. I haven’t seen anything that suggests Epic has brought lumen to MacOS.

Development on the MacOS side of things are delayed for years largely due to the Apple Silicon transition and the idiotic Apple v Epic trial. Since they’re still working on performance patches on MacOS, I expect that Epic’s back on track to deliver feature parity with the PC (including Lumen and Nanite). Remember, Epic is still using Rosetta 2 for the heavy lifting. There are a lot of Intel Macs out there, but I don’t think they be able to play future UE5 games without crapping themselves.

To be fair, as of now, UE5 is still in development, is not feature complete, and has no games available to play on any platform, even though a few dozen titles have been announced or are in development https://gamerant.com/all-confirmed-unreal-engine-5-games/amp/
(Depending on how seriously we can take DrDisrespect’s claim to have started his own studio to make an UE5 game).

As far as Epic’s own games are concerned, UE4 is the present, while UE5 is the future.

 

[Irishman]

Apple vs Epic has nothing to do with it. If developers want to use UE5 for their games and there's enough demand ($$$) then Epic will listen and give developers what they want. The only question is, if Epic implement certain features for a specific platform, will the effort be worth it either by payments from UDN or license fees for every title generating more than $1M in sales. That's really the only thing Epic (and everyone else for that matter) cares about.

If they could make enough money with it, UE5 would run on AmigaOS in no time.

Did you watch the video? I guess I’m making the case that, since Epic has just updated the MacOS version of UE5 as well as the performance we’re seeing on Apple’s M1 Max in the Studio, I’m not worried that we won’t see Nanite and Lumen support by the time that games are available to buy and play on a feature complete UE5.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

I figure that at this stage of the game (heh) developers making games for macOS that want to use a third party game engine are most likely going to choose Unity or Godot over UE since there seems to be better macOS support on those engines than UE.

People targeting macOS specifically, yes. I've not used Godot in a real project, only UE, Unity, Cryengine (older version) and a few custom ones. Godot seems to rank "below" the larger engines like Unity/UE, please correct me if I'm wrong. Depending on what developers are targeting, there might still be good reasons to use UE or Cryengine (Windows) over Unity. Particularly performance and photorealistic graphics.

If that's not the case and Unity does the job, then sure, use Unity. I prefer Unity over UE when it comes to usability from a developer/coding kind of view, especially because it's "simple". UE brings some additional overhead which can be a pain or take longer to get things done, but performance can be better.

We see all these cool videos of folks running demo UE4/5 projects on Apple Silicon, but no actual "finished" products.

It might be too early for that, at least for AAA games. Apple Silicon is "new", larger games have years of development time. Yet, we simply have features in Unity/UE4 that are broken in macOS and have been for a while, so workarounds have to be implemented. Some UE5 features are not working either. It's always the question of time and money. I don't think there's a finished UE5 AAA game yet, but I could be wrong. Smaller games? Maybe, I don't know. An updated Fortnite version is supposed to come out mid 2022, so that could be the first?

Game engines are not the only ones. I recently ran into trouble with tensorflow-metal when I tried different dropout methods on a neural network, which wasn't supported. Had to fall back to Keras and running on the CPU (eventually switched to a Nvidia GPU server).

Also techdemos are "easy" to make by artists, but games require a little more. Time will tell what happens with UE5 on Macs. I'd happily do everything on a Mac, but I can't... well, technically I could, it's just not feasible in any way.

 

[Irishman]

I figure that at this stage of the game (heh) developers making games for macOS that want to use a third party game engine are most likely going to choose Unity or Godot over UE since there seems to be better macOS support on those engines than UE.

We see all these cool videos of folks running demo UE4/5 projects on Apple Silicon, but no actual "finished" products.

Well, how many finished games on UE5 have you played? It’s not feature complete yet, not by a long shot (it’s still in beta)

Furthermore, I think you’re conflating UE4 and UE5, because UE4 is feature complete and you can buy games running on it.

UE5 isn’t, and so you can’t.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

Did you watch the video? I guess I’m making the case that, since Epic has just updated the MacOS version of UE5 as well as the performance we’re seeing on Apple’s M1 Max in the Studio, I’m not worried that we won’t see Nanite and Lumen support by the time that games are available to buy and play on a feature complete UE5.

I did watch the video, yes. I'm not so sure Nanite and Lumen will be supported in the future, at least not based on an updated version of the engine which brings raytracing to the table. Raytracing is something rather simple today and what we see in the video shouldn't take too much time to implement. Debugging and performance optimizing can take a while though. Lumen and Nanite are different animals and require much more work. So for now, we're getting a "base implementation" of UE5 on Macs, which doesn't mean they're not working on performance optimization and "simple" stuff.

 

[diamond.g]

Well, how many finished games on UE5 have you played? It’s not feature complete yet, not by a long shot (it’s still in beta)

Furthermore, I think you’re conflating UE4 and UE5, because UE4 is feature complete and you can buy games running on it.

UE5 isn’t, and so you can’t.

Technically this season of Fortnite is using UE5....

Turns out Fortnite Chapter 3 is the first Unreal Engine 5 game

That would explain the missing tornadoes and lightning.

www.pcgamer.com

 

[Janichsan]

In my post #39, you’ve forgotten a lot of fun Mac games, brovah!

All old games, virtually none of them support Apple Silicon.

Borderlands 3 uses UE4 (as does Tiny Tina's Wonderland). I think that is the last UE4 game to come to macOS (without using crossover or parallels).

The soon to be released Mac versions of Psychonauts 2 and the System Shock remake also use UE4.

 

[diamond.g]

All old games, virtually none of them support Apple Silicon.

The soon to be released Mac versions of Psychonauts 2 and the System Shock remake also use UE4.

We have release dates for those two games yet?

 

[Janichsan]

We have release dates for those two games yet?

No precise dates, but System Shock is supposedly coming in summer/autumn (backer beta should be right around the corner). Psychonauts 2 is a bit more vague, but probably a bit after that.

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

For Mr or Ms PC buyer who's not loyal to any brand and they see PC A that will play their favorite games and works with the software they use vs PC B that only plays a few games and works with some of the software they use it's not hard to see what is the more attractive purchase. You have to look at it from the outside as someone who don't have a brand loyalty. I'm not talking about hardcore PC gamers that watch LTT but non techy people who don't watch videos about computers or hang out in computer forms. They might play some games, get work done then maybe do some online shopping.

Apple is all about consumer loyalty, so you are talking about a consumer segment Apple specifically isn't targeting. People buy into the Apple ecosystem and stay there, and Apple loves that. Apple won't throw a dime at something that has a minute return of consumers, and at that, some that don't stay with the brand. Apple has a lot of money for a reason, not because they slander it on everything.

 

[Irishman]

Technically this season of Fortnite is using UE5....

Turns out Fortnite Chapter 3 is the first Unreal Engine 5 game

That would explain the missing tornadoes and lightning.

www.pcgamer.com

It looks exactly the same, plus the “upgrade” removed tornadoes and lightning, per the PCGamer article.

Why doesn’t Fortnite use Nanite and Lumen on PC?

 

[diamond.g]

It looks exactly the same, plus the “upgrade” removed tornadoes and lightning, per the PCGamer article.

Why doesn’t Fortnite use Nanite and Lumen on PC?

I believe those two features are not done yet. But I do agree they should switch at least the lighting engine over. I think softbody deformations is still an issue for nanite (I wonder if that is why they made no build mode).

 

[russell_314]

Apple is all about consumer loyalty, so you are talking about a consumer segment Apple specifically isn't targeting. People buy into the Apple ecosystem and stay there, and Apple loves that. Apple won't throw a dime at something that has a minute return of consumers, and at that, some that don't stay with the brand. Apple has a lot of money for a reason, not because they slander it on everything.

You are correct that Apple has a loyal customer base but that customer base is very small compared to the overall market. I think the reason why it’s small is Apple doesn’t put in enough effort to expand their customer base. I think they should make more of an effort to attract new customers.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

Why doesn’t Fortnite use Nanite and Lumen on PC?

Leaving aside if these are ready or not, I think they're not needed for a game like Fortnite.
Nanite is all about geometry complexity and level of detail while Lumen is is about dynamic global illumination and reflection. While there is some degree of reflection of weapons fire in Fortnite, overall Fortnite is using cel shading for which there is little if any benefit with Nanite and Lumen. So my guess is the switch to UE5 happens for marketing reasons (Epic) and maybe overall performance. Then again, I haven't looked into UE5 in detail and I'm still stuck with UE4, so take it with a grain of salt.

 

[diamond.g]

Leaving aside if these are ready or not, I think they're not needed for a game like Fortnite.
Nanite is all about geometry complexity and level of detail while Lumen is is about dynamic global illumination and reflection. While there is some degree of reflection of weapons fire in Fortnite, overall Fortnite is using cel shading for which there is little if any benefit with Nanite and Lumen. So my guess is the switch to UE5 happens for marketing reasons (Epic) and maybe overall performance. Then again, I haven't looked into UE5 in detail and I'm still stuck with UE4, so take it with a grain of salt.

Fortnite does have an RT mode (no one uses) that could probably benefit from switching off the "legacy pipeline" and onto Lumen.

 

[JMacHack]

So…

One company (CDPR), decides to make their next game in one series (The Witcher), which has never had a Mac release, instead of their in-house engine (which we can assume has zero Mac compatibility), in Unreal 5 which has better, if not perfect Mac compatibility than said in-house engine.

And from these facts we are to deduce that gaming on the Mac is dead?