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For years, Apple was ridiculed for claiming that you could play games on the Mac. But now, it’s really true that you can do just that. Thanks to Apple Silicon and its pretty beefy GPU cores, gaming on the Mac is now incredible and sometimes better than PC.
Apple’s Mac product marketing manager, Goron Keppel has just done an interview with Inverse, talking about how the Mac is becoming a leading gaming platform, and it’s all thanks to Apple Silicon. Apple has a renewed interest in gaming on Mac, an interest which we have not seen in the last 25 years.
Keppel told Inverse that “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.” Keppel isn’t just blowing smoke here; anyone who has used any Apple Silicon-based Mac in the past three years will agree with him. The performance of these new Macs is incredible and blows away similarly-specced PCs.
Apple Silicon was designed for Gaming
Apple’s software marketing manager, Leland Martin, says, “Apple Silicon started fresh with a unified hardware platform that not only makes it easier for developers to create Mac games but will allow for those games to run on other Apple devices.”
One of the reasons that Apple fell out of grace with gaming developers was that Apple did not support specific computer hardware. Even looking at Apple’s Intel-based Mac lineup, there were integrated and discrete GPU options. Which Martin says “can add complexity when you’re developing games. Because you have multiple different hardware permutations to consider.”
Martin says that Apple has effectively eliminated that completely with Apple Silicon. Instead, it has a “unified gaming platform now across iPhone, iPad and Mac.” This means that once a game is designed for one platform, it’s a relatively straightforward process to bring it to the others.
Another member of the Mac Marketing Team, Doug Brooks, stated that “Gaming was fundamentally part of the Apple Silicon design.” Continued by stating that “before a chip even exists, gaming is fundamentally incorporated during those early planning stages and then throughout the development.”
Martin also boasted about how Apple has already seen a boost in interest from developers thanks to its Game Porting Toolkit. “We’ve definitely seen interest from developers and publishers like Kojima Productions and Annapurna Interactive Games on how to take advantage of both parts of the Game Porting Toolkit,” Martin says.
Will the Mac take over PC in terms of gaming? Likely not. However, the Mac is the single most popular laptop on earth right now. So, bringing in that market share for game studios is a big deal.