![]() ![]() This is a far cry from the nearly 19 TFLOPS of the RTX 3080 mobile GPU running in your standard high-end gaming laptop. The M1 chip, meanwhile, delivers about 2.6 TFLOPS out of its 8-core GPU. The M1 Max, in particular, is a beast of an SoC with up to a 32-core GPU, 64GB of unified memory, and 400GB/s of memory bandwidth that delivers about 10.4 TFLOPS of performance, according to Apple. The Apple M1 chip has been a huge win for the company, and the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips have only further cemented the capabilities of Apple’s new hardware. (Image credit: CCP Games) Can Apple’s new silicon change the game? Other studios, absolutely, should update their worldview on the capabilities of the Mac.” It is a really powerful piece of kit and there’s more to come, based on rumors and whatnot and reading the tea leaves. “The M1 really, really, really changes the situation. Perhaps most important of all, though, is Apple’s move to its own silicon. So that’s definitely been part of our motivation, and the user base that uses a Mac is a healthy number.” “There are a lot of people at Apple that are EVE players, and a lot of people at CCP that are Mac users. We’ve done this because we’ve had a Mac client for the longest time and there’s been a lot of love from Apple on EVE,” Petursson said. “But this process was way smoother than I’d even dared to predict when we started this project,” Finnbogason said. Still, CCP developers found that the process wasn’t as perilous as they expected. There was a lot of just cleanup of old, fantastic ideas that were probably the best ideas at the moment they were made, but the game is 18 years old, so there’s been 18 years of development, 18 years of progress in the world. We had to take the game from 32-bit to 64-bit. “One of the first things we had to do was really look at our core architecture and how we developed the game. “It was a pretty magnificent feat for us,” Finnbogason said. Developing within the Metal framework, Apple’s answer to Microsoft’s DirectX multimedia programming API, required a lot of work for a game that’s accumulated nearly two decades of Windows development quirks and artifacts under the hood. It wasn’t without its challenges, though. We actually managed to ship the game not only natively to Mac, but natively to the M1 processor.’ “Interestingly enough, halfway through that process, we got wind of a new development at Apple with the M1 processor. So when we decided to kind of double down and take the full step of going native on Mac, that really opened up a lot of new possibilities. I don’t want to say it was a side project, but we weren’t really giving it the love it deserved. ![]() “For the past few years we’ve been running EVE through a live client,” Finnbogason said, “so not the most optimal way of operating. What’s more, producing a game as complex as EVE Online isn’t an easy task even for a Windows PC, much less building a wholly separate native Mac client. With most gamers on Windows (not counting console gamers, of course), most games are published on that platform, as well. ![]() With a Windows PC, you have a lot more capability to create a “Frankenstein machine” as Finnbogason calls them, with all kinds of different hardware configurations that make PC gaming on Windows much more powerful.Īnd since the most powerful gaming hardware has been on a Windows PC, most PC gamers have flocked to Windows as a gaming platform. As a result, the hardware often fell short of what was needed. While Macs have been powerful for the use cases they have been designed for, gaming wasn’t one of them. One of the biggest issues with Macs and gaming has been the hardware. Rebuilding Mac gaming almost from scratch “And now,” he added, “Macs have the hardware to back it up.” “Gaming has become such a huge part of what people use iPhones for, and it has probably really changed the way Apple sees gaming. “I think it’s changing because of iPhone games,” Hilmar V. Recently, though, Apple’s approach to gaming has changed. Anyone could learn some BASIC, or QBASIC, or whatever and you could write yourself a game.” It felt in many ways that they were going the Silicon Graphics route. “ became office equipment, it became professional equipment. The change came, Finnbogason said, with the release of the Power Macintosh in 1994, just a year after the release of Myst. Nobody had ever seen anything as beautiful as Myst. “When people were playing Full Throttle, it was the coolest game ever. “It was never a single moment, really, it was a combination of a lot of little things that created this drift,” Finnbogason said. Given the history of Mac gaming and the trajectory Apple has followed since the 1990s, one has to ask, “What the hell happened?” (Image credit: Cyan Games) Gaming on a Mac, past and present ![]()
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