Apple finally has a renewed interest in gaming on the Mac

A new must-read article says that Apple has a renewed interest in gaming on the Mac, the likes of which it hasn’t shown in the last 25 years.

“Apple silicon has changed all that,” Gordon Keppel, a Mac product marketing manager, tells Inverse. “Now, every Mac that ships with Apple silicon can play AAA games pretty fantastically. Apple silicon has been transformative of our mainstream systems that got tremendous boosts in graphics with M1, M2, and now with M3.”

In three generations of desktop-class chip design, Apple has created a platform with “tens of millions of Apple silicon Macs,” according to Keppel. That’s tens of millions of Macs with monstrous CPU and GPU capabilities for running graphics-intensive games.

In the Inverse article, Raymond Wong (himself a gamer) says Apple’s upgrades to the GPUs on its silicon are especially impressive. The latest Apple silicon, the M3 family of chips, supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and mesh shading, features that only a few years ago didn’t seem like they would ever be a priority, let alone ones that are built into the entire spectrum of MacBook Pros, he adds.

The “magic” of Apple silicon isn’t just performance, Leland Martin, an Apple software marketing manager, tells Wong. Whereas Apple’s fallout with game developers on the Mac previously came down to not supporting specific computer hardware, Martin says Apple silicon started fresh with a unified hardware platform that not only makes it easier for developers to create Mac games for, but will allow for those games to run on other Apple devices.

“If you look at the Mac lineup just a few years ago, there was a mix of both integrated and discrete GPUs,” Martin says. “That can add complexity when you’re developing games. Because you have multiple different hardware permutations to consider. Today, we’ve effectively eliminated that completely with Apple silicon, creating a unified gaming platform now across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Once a game is designed for one platform, it’s a straightforward process to bring it to the other two. We’re seeing this play out with games like Resident Evil Village that launched first [on Mac] followed by iPhone and iPad.”

Read the complete article here.