William Gallagher
Valve has announced that SteamVR will no longer support macOS, although older frameworks are still available in beta form.
Three years after launching a long-rumored Mac edition, developer and Steam platform manager Valve has announced that it is ceasing support for SteamVR on the Mac. The news, which comes ahead of any VR or Augmented Reality announcements from Apple, was made in a cursory community notification.
"SteamVR has ended OSX support so our team can focus on Windows and Linux," it says. "We recommend that OSX users continue to opt into the SteamVR [macos] branches for access to legacy builds."
"Users can opt into a branch by right-clicking on SteamVR in Steam, and selecting Properties... -> Betas," it concludes.
The original launch in 2017 was of a beta version, and it was introduced as macOS High Sierra introduced support for eGPUs over Thunderbolt 3.
Users on the SteamVR community site have so far reacted with predictably mixed responses, but most are pointing to how the Mac has traditionally been poorer at gaming than other platforms. This has really always been the case, ever since the Mac was introduced in 1984, but support for eGPUs did seem to be making a difference.
AppleInsider has been using SteamVR on macOS and Windows with Valve's own VR headset for a few months. We'll be discussing it at more length shortly.
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78 Comments
Not good news.
Been having this feeling that the new ARM Mac is the beginning of the end of the Mac as we know it and this story kind of settles it - for me - as the only way this news isnt an absolute disaster. Im thinking the new Mac is not a Mac at all. The new ARM Macs may actually be iPad-laptops gradually dropping the Mac-as-we-know-it - meaning the 'macOS'. As soon as Apple guarantees major software franchises on a new 'MacPad', it has no reason to evolve the macOS layer of OS X. What we now know as Mac may be about to go the "System 9" way (Catalina does feel as clunky as System 8). Apple would be dropping a lot, but it has dropped optical-drives, audio-jacks, Motorola, IBM, beige, etc before.. each deemed as crazy as impossible at the time.. but that is Apple - it would be dropping the mouse-based GUI !! it helped champion all these years.
I suspect this has two reasons, one that Apple has dumped 32-bit support, which means half or more of the existing games aren't supported. Secondly they've deprecated OpenGL, expecting cross platform developers to write for Metal instead, which they just aren't.
Many games and programs are only on the Mac through the virtue of cross-platform APIs, which means the dev can pretty much tick a box and a Mac .app pops out of the compiler, no effort required. But now, many devs have moved onto Vulkan, so that checkbox no longer works. Some devs are using MoltenVK as a translation layer to add Metal support to their programs, but very few devs are writing exclusively in Metal for macOS. This translation layer again makes the Mac experience worse, as it slows the graphics pipeline. Devs can support Win and Linux with one API, but Apple for some reason expects them to use an entirely different one for MacOS. The Mac marketshare is just too small to be worth it, so developers are just dropping support for the Mac instead. Apple seems to be under the impression that the Mac has the marketshare and thus developer profitability that the iPhone does, so they can abuse devs and dictate things at a whim, expecting the devs will follow, like they do on iOS. Only thing is the Mac doesn't have the marketshare of iOS, and so devs don't follow. Yet again this results in a bad experience for Mac users, due to the whims of someone at Apple trying to push their brand of closed-source proprietary API.
More worrying than the loss of games is the eventual loss of cross-platform productivity programs that currently use OpenGL. There are many, many open and closed source CAD, engineering and design programs that use OpenGL. When Apple decides it's finally had enough of OpenGL and removes it from macOS entirely, what happens to the open source programs? People that used Macs for their businesses (as I do) will be unable to upgrade, because the devs who write the open source programs aren't going to spend a disproportionate amount of time on the tiny Mac user base. If I want to work on an up to date OS, I'll be forced to switch to Windows or Linux.
I've said this before, but all this closed source incompatibility is chillingly reminiscent of Apple of the mid-90's and Microsoft in the late 90's and into the Ballmer years. Since Sat Nad has taken over, MS have had a much more open approach and they are being lauded for it, with respect for MS steadily increasing. Apple on the other hand is going backwards compared to the huge amount of open-sourcing and increased compatibility after Jobs' return in the early years of OS X, causing respect to decrease. It really is quite concerning.
Quite a few cross platform developers are moving to Vulkan and there are at least two libraries that allow you to easily recompile Vulkan to Metal. Quite a few games have done that with great success. ~30% speed boost vs OpenGL even though they weren't written directly for Metal.
Unity has had Metal support for many years.
Probably nothing to do with the fact that Apple "deprecated" OpenGL and Vulcan while forcibly preventing NVIDIA from releasing compatible Mac drivers. While Windows users are enjoying numerous VR games, social environments, development tools and even professional enterprise applications, Mac users are oblivious to VR. This is why this very web site stated that "no one claims Xcode will run on the iPhone". They simply do not have the vision to realize that there could be more to a computer user interface than staring at a flat screen. The same goes for Mac developers that are not even thinking about how to expand their user interface with AR or VR. When it emerges as the next big thing, Apple will be starting from square one, begging established Windows developers to port their apps and tools to iOS and macOS.