Kind of surprising to me they’re not making more effort towards game support - maybe someone can explain what the barriers are towards mac support - is it lack of shared libraries, x64 only, sheer number of compute cores?
When I see the spec sheet and “16x graphics improvement” I go okay what could it handle in terms of game rendering? Is it really only for video production and GPU compute tasks?
I've answered this a few times, so I'll just give a bog-standard answer here.
Apple had really good game support 3 years ago. Mojave was really among the best when it had Valve Proton natively supported, and it was starting to seem like there might be some level of gaming parity across MacOS, Linux and Windows. Apple broke compatibility with 32-bit libraries in Catalina though, which completely nixed a good 95% of the games that "just worked" on Mojave. Adding insult to injury, they burned their bridges with OpenGL and Vulkan very early on, which made it impossible to implement the most important parts of Proton, like DXVK and CL-piping.
So, is it possible to get these games running on MacOS? Maybe. The amount of work that needs to be done behind-the-scenes is monumental though, and it would take one hell of a software solution to make it happen. Apple's only option at this point is HLE of x86, which is... pretty goddamn terrible, even on a brand-spanking new M1 Max. The performance cores just don't have the overhead in clock speed to dynamically recompile a complete modern operating system and game alongside it.
The gaming capability is there, but Apple only officially supports their own Metal on macOS as far as graphics languages, meaning the only devs with experience with Metal are the World of Warcraft team at Blizzard and mobile gaming studios. MoltenVK exists to help port Vulkan based games, but generally it's rough going at the moment. I'm personally hoping that the volume of M1 Macs Apple has been selling will cause devs to support Macs.
As a former Starcraft 2 player I’d say: don’t count on it. It wasn’t even worth it for Blizzard to make SC2 that performant on Vulkan. They had a graphics option for it, but it was buggy compared to the OpenGL option. When a company that size doesn’t want to commit the dev resources, that leaves little hope for the smaller companies.
They never before had good graphics in mainstream products. And there's no official support for any of the industry standard API(to be fair there is MoltenVK, but not much traction yet), yes, there is support for Metal in UE4/5 and Unity, but AAA games use custom engines and cost/benefit analysis didn't make much sense, maybe now it will change.
Have you seen GPU prices lately? Desktop 3070 level performance in portable laptop for 3500$ is not that bad of a deal. If they make Mac Mini around 2500$ it would be pretty competitive in PC space.
Gaming market spends the most of any home electronics user except ultra rich mansion hi-fi outfitters. Entry gaming laptops are $1300, entry GPUs are $400 if you can find them.
Not competing against consoles, but against big rig gaming PCs, and products from Asus and Razor, and companies like Nvidia/Amd in compute.
When I see the spec sheet and “16x graphics improvement” I go okay what could it handle in terms of game rendering? Is it really only for video production and GPU compute tasks?