this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
-193 points (7.1% liked)

Games

32385 readers
1001 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I haven't had much sleep today so maybe its just me, but I'm a bit confused here:

Valve isn't obligated to continue supporting all its games and software features on Mac, especially when Apple's reluctance to natively support Vulkan and other cross-platform technologies makes game development more complex.

Then the next sentence:

There's no excuse for Steam on Mac to be a far worse experience than on other platforms, though.

As others have mentioned, Apple was the one who chose to abandon x86 and go with ARM - and anyways are there any games that are on Steam that actually are ARM native? You would still end up having to launch a game that is x86 as far as I understand correctly (I haven't used a Mac since the Apple Silicon transition)?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

are there any games that are on Steam that actually are ARM native

Yes. Not a game in this case but still from Steam:

Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Krita/krita.app/Contents/MacOS/krita: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64]

The Steam launcher's architecture is irrelevant to the games and applications on the Steam store.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Porting games to run on ARM is apparently a pain so a lot of devs aren't doing it. Instead they just use some kind of translation program so that ARM can understand x86 instructions rather than recoding the game to support it directly. Resulting in inferior performance but at least it does sort of work which is better than it was before.

I would not be surprised at all if Steam did something very similar.