The Apple Transition To ARM

[RogerWilco]

On 1/11/2021 at 10:32 AM, Apparition said:

Honestly, it's not looking good at all for gaming on Macs as Elder Scrolls Online will not support new Macs and Guild Wars 2 just announced the end of all Mac support completely.

 

In addition, from what I've been hearing elsewhere, Rosetta 2 is a stopgap measure that is only expected to be supported for a couple of years. 

Ever since Apple started with Metal, more and more PC game developers have been abandoning the platform. Gaming on Mac was quite good 2007-2017, but has been steadily getting worse since then. It is why I bought my first Windows machine in over a decade.

I have also been thoroughly unimpressed with a lot of their more recent hardware choices. I am typing this on a 2018 Macboook Pro 15", and the keyboard, Touch Bar and TouchID are horrible, the USB-C only/Thunderbolt3 is either annoying, or sometimes unworkable, I carry a minimum of 6 dongles around.

 

But it is good to see that people got the game running on the M1. Impressive. That gives me hope for when I need another Mac(book).

[krafti]

The COX client runs amazingly well on my M1 MBP w/16gb memory. On default settings, I get framerates around 60fps continually and maybe only some dips during MSR. That's been my main driver since March. If I run two clients at the same time, I still barely drop below 58fps. I'm sure if I adjust the settings and display both clients at once that the results would be a bit more drastic. I often forget the second client is even running.

 

I snagged a copy of Parallels ARM version and it was terrible, although now I see I should try the 32bit version instead. 😄

 

Where would I install vidiotmaps on macOS? I feel like i've tried all the recommended locations and failed

[WanderingAries]

11 minutes ago, krafti said:

The COX client runs amazingly well on my M1 MBP w/16gb memory. On default settings, I get framerates around 60fps continually and maybe only some dips during MSR. That's been my main driver since March. If I run two clients at the same time, I still barely drop below 58fps. I'm sure if I adjust the settings and display both clients at once that the results would be a bit more drastic. I often forget the second client is even running.

 

I snagged a copy of Parallels ARM version and it was terrible, although now I see I should try the 32bit version instead. 😄

 

Where would I install vidiotmaps on macOS? I feel like i've tried all the recommended locations and failed

 

Am jealous of the extra RAM. :p

 

The Parallels beta is over and yes, trying to go the Windows 10 ARM route is not pretty until they sort out a lot of things, but I"m not hopeful at this point since part of the issue is licensing (they'd be releasing a whole new product).

 

See my sig for where the files will unpack to. I've not attempted using things like Mids or the ModApp on MacOS yet, but I know people have.

[RogerWilco]

Snazzy Labs has a nice and thoughtful video on the state of gaming on Apple silicon:

I can recommend watching the full video.

 

In the mean time, I've switched from my Mac Pro 2010 with GTX980, 32GB RAM, HyperX PCIe SSDs on High Sierra to

a Ryzen 5950X with 64 GB RAM, Radeon 6900XT, Thunderbolt 3, several fast Samsung 980 Pro SSDs, Blu-Ray burner/player, 10G Ethernet.

I ordered last December, although it took almost half a year for the parts to arrive.  I paid less than the base M1 Max Macbook.

I could not find a Mac with similar specs for less than almost 2x what the W10 machine costed me, and I had to pay extra to get the GPU, originally I hard ordered an RTX3080 for half the price of the 6900XT.

 

Regrettably the machines comes with Windows 10, I still prefer OSX, but I have given up on Apple's hardware choices since 2013.

But it runs CoH at 4K, 200% world and character details, with a few dips below 60 fps for MSR and Hami.

I have given up on Apple caring about games outside the iOS ecosystem.

Edited November 22, 2021 by RogerWilco

[Solvernia]

deleted

Edited January 28, 2022 by Solvernia

[uninventive]

I can say a year later that M2 is doing great with City of Heroes.  Apple's claims that it runs games as well as a RTX 3000 series is far fetched, but playing at QHD (2560) with almost 100FPS with Ultra Mode on one notch below full blast is pretty good.  Other MMOs I can get to run on it work great too.  (Final Fantasy XIV players may be surprised with M1/M2 as well.)

Rosetta's timeline of existence was 2005-2011 during Apple's first transition away from Motorola/IBM made PowerPC processors to Intel Core solo/Duo/i-Series systems.  So it's not unlikely to guess at Apple's future with Rosetta 2 when they finalize their end of support for Intel processors.  That time may be when Rosetta 2 is removed from new OS support in favor of making new room for features more users rely on.  (If one expects history to tell when Apple considers it's time for it to go, we're 50% through the timeline.)

Optimism is also hopeful that Asahi Linux and Kernel Devs continue to make progress.  If they have enough of Apple Silicon mapped out by then, a future version of Wine can take advantage of a more direct method to utilize Apple's GPU cores by itself.  With or without a performance hit, Rosetta 2 won't matter as much any longer.

Sorry for the necro post, just wanted to offer a different insight that others posted.  The sky didn't entirely fall.  Although the larger point that Apple MX CPUs furthers the effort to making computers into non-upgrade capable appliances more of a norm to mainstream users... that remains valid.

Edited March 26, 2023 by uninventive

[WanderingAries]

1 hour ago, uninventive said:

I can say a year later that M2 is doing great with City of Heroes.  Apple's claims that it runs games as well as a RTX 3000 series is far fetched, but playing at QHD (2560) with almost 100FPS with Ultra Mode on one notch below full blast is pretty good.  Other MMOs I can get to run on it work great too.  (Final Fantasy XIV players may be surprised with M1/M2 as well.)

Rosetta's timeline of existence was 2005-2011 during Apple's first transition away from Motorola/IBM made PowerPC processors to Intel Core solo/Duo/i-Series systems.  So it's not unlikely to guess at Apple's future with Rosetta 2 when they finalize their end of support for Intel processors.  That time may be when Rosetta 2 is removed from new OS support in favor of making new room for features more users rely on.  (If one expects history to tell when Apple considers it's time for it to go, we're 50% through the timeline.)

Optimism is also hopeful that Asahi Linux and Kernel Devs continue to make progress.  If they have enough of Apple Silicon mapped out by then, a future version of Wine can take advantage of a more direct method to utilize Apple's GPU cores by itself.  With or without a performance hit, Rosetta 2 won't matter as much any longer.

Sorry for the necro post, just wanted to offer a different insight that others posted.  The sky didn't entirely fall.  Although the larger point that Apple MX CPUs furthers the effort to making computers into non-upgrade capable appliances more of a norm to mainstream users... that remains valid.

 

I imagine that Ventura is likely the Last OS to run on Intel TBH as the 2019 model Intel Macs were the last (?) produced and Apple has this thing about only supporting 3 generations of OS anyway.

[uninventive]

I suspect a touch longer.  After the security updates for Ventura expire likely as a 'vintage OS'.  Or the next version's security updates if Mac Pro is even being released under Apple Silicon at all.  And even then, OpenCore may patch the Rosetta 2 installer anyway for a few later releases.

The release cadence for OS X back then wasn't as fast as it is now.  They had 2-3 years between releases for the hardware to be exhausted, vs. faster iteration today across both.  It's a coin flip.

Edited March 27, 2023 by uninventive