Apple making the case that Apple Silicon Mac & iPhone are great gaming machines

Apple held a surprise, invite-only event on Thursday to showcase some games coming to its devices in 2023, and they aren't limited to Apple Arcade.

They include titles such as Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile, Run Legends, Lego Starwars castaways, Honkai: Star Rail, and The Medium. Apple showed off games running on an Apple TV and The Medium, which ran natively on Macs.

Invitees included CNN, Tom's Guide, as well as YouTube personalities such as Jacklyn Dallas who wrote about the experience on her Instagram.

"Yesterday I went to an Apple event that truly left me SOOOO inspired and excited !!!!" wrote Dallas. "It was a bunch of developers that are making apps for Apple arcade and Mac. Games are so special to me because they can transcend cultural differences and are so based in storytelling and having fun."

Devices running Apple Silicon chips have plenty of power for gaming and other tasks. For example, in one demo, Apple showed The Medium running on a new M2 Mac mini.

CNN's Mike Andronico wrote how smoothly he could play the game in 4K resolution and possibly at 60 frames-per-second.

"While developer Bloober Team couldn't speak to specific performance numbers," he said, "the company noted that the game has been tested on both M1 and M2-powered Macs, and should run well on even the basic 2020 MacBook Air."

After the launch of macOS Ventura, Apple started to focus on how it's improving the experience of gaming on the Mac. For instance, the launch of Metal 3 — Apple's graphics framework — can tap into a Mac's GPU to significantly upgrade gaming visuals.

The company also has MetalFX Upscaling technology that allows developers to quickly render complex scenes using less compute-intensive frames and then apply resolution scaling and temporal anti-aliasing.

Accelerated performance and gorgeous graphics are the results, giving gamers a more responsive gaming experience.

55 Comments

lkrupp 10521 comments · 19 Years

About 1 year ago

Getting the big names in gaming to support Apple Silicon is going to time and a whole lot of money. About the only way they will convince gamers themselves is to come up with a Mac that will wipe the floor with their custom setups. Can that ever happen? Maybe, IF Apple decides it’s worth it and is willing to apply the resources.

My opinion? They aren’t willing.

atonaldenim 67 comments · 4 Years

great to see that Apple is putting some resources into promoting gaming on their platforms.

rezwits 854 comments · 17 Years

lkrupp said:

Getting the big names in gaming to support Apple Silicon is going to time and a whole lot of money. About the only way they will convince gamers themselves is to come up with a Mac that will wipe the floor with their custom setups. Can that ever happen? Maybe, IF Apple decides it’s worth it and is willing to apply the resources.

My opinion? They aren’t willing.

Come on, Two options? AppleTV ($149) or M2 MacMini ($599)

That's pretty compelling especially by the time a PS6 or XboxZ /s comes out, and they can't delivery enough units, and Apple could blow them away? Looks tasty to me...

jSnively 396 comments · 13 Years

Games are a hits-driven business and when 95% of hit titles don't even run on your platform then you're not a "great" gaming machine. Once in a blue moon you'll get a AAA title years late, but even in the most recent case, the Mac version of RE:VIII is one of the worst looking versions of that game you can play.

Also, Bloober team is... rough. Layers of Fear was a great horror game (some may say the best), but the 5 or so titles they've done since have been pretty mediocre-to-bad. Observer probably gets a nod, but that's about it. I don't think anybody has faith they will do a good job with the SH2 remake.

The MetalFX stuff is good (and needed for the resolution Apple pushes in their monitors), but it's generations behind what DLSS offers at this point. If Apple were serious they would bootstrap a solution based off the work being done on the Linux side of things (Wine/DXVK/VKD3D etc.) instead of trying to get developers to port to their proprietary APIs which will never happen en masse.

Apple has *never* actually been serious about gaming, but it would be cool to see that change.

danox 3395 comments · 11 Years

jSnively said:

Games are a hits-driven business and when 95% of hit titles don't even run on your platform then you're not a "great" gaming machine. Once in a blue moon you'll get a AAA title years late, but even in the most recent case, the Mac version of RE:VIII is one of the worst looking versions of that game you can play.

Also, Bloober team is... rough. Layers of Fear was a great horror game (some may say the best), but the 5 or so titles they've done since have been pretty mediocre-to-bad. Observer probably gets a nod, but that's about it. I don't think anybody has faith they will do a good job with the SH2 remake.

The MetalFX stuff is good (and needed for the resolution Apple pushes in their monitors), but it's generations behind what DLSS offers at this point. If Apple were serious they would bootstrap a solution based off the work being done on the Linux side of things (Wine/DXVK/VKD3D etc.) instead of trying to get developers to port to their proprietary APIs which will never happen en masse.

Apple has *never* actually been serious about gaming, but it would be cool to see that change.

Apple play, Long and do not become dependent on third-party outfits, do what you need to do behind the scenes. In short continue to stay vertical in computing.