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Linux surpasses the Mac among Steam gamers

(arstechnica.com)
433 points Sporktacular | 2 comments | 04 Aug 23 00:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.95s | source
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bnralt ◴[04 Aug 23 10:54 UTC] No.36998151[source]▶
> Meanwhile, Apple has been making a lot of noise about making the Mac a more viable gaming platform, given the exceptionally strong graphics performance (for integrated graphics on a laptop, at least) of the M1 and M2 series chips in the latest Macs.

Mac was actually doing pretty decently for game a few years back. A pretty big chunk of the games on Steam, including many of the high profile games, were available on OSX. Dropping 32-bit support set things back immensely, however. With that one decision, Apple made the number of games available to OSX users a small fraction of the amount that was available before.

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jsheard ◴[04 Aug 23 13:40 UTC] No.36999888[source]▶
It's probably only a matter of time before Apple drops support for OpenGL and/or x64 binaries, which would wipe out another whole chunk of Mac gaming history.

PowerPC binaries are no longer usable, x86 binaries are no longer usable, I don't see why they wouldn't do it again in the name of streamlining the platform.

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als0 ◴[04 Aug 23 13:52 UTC] No.37000042[source]▶
> x86 binaries are no longer usable

What do you mean by this? Rosetta 2 is very fast and it runs a lot of x86 apps well.

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1. jsheard ◴[04 Aug 23 13:55 UTC] No.37000097[source]▶
I meant x86 as in 32-bit Intel, as opposed to x64 or x86-64 or AMD64 or whatever you want to call it.

Catalina ended support for 32-bit binaries even on Intel Macs, and Rosetta2 could never run 32-bit code.

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2. n6h6 ◴[04 Aug 23 18:23 UTC] No.37003798[source]▶
> or whatever you want to call it

I feel for you lmao. Technology naming conventions are a shitshow, and CPU architecture is no exception.