Apple is continuing to promote its Mac, iPhone and iPad platforms as viable gaming alternatives to both devs and AAA gamers. In a new interview, the company has highlighted what it has done to lay the groundwork to make Apple devices more attractive for gaming along with what the company thinks give it some unique advantages.
Apple is once again touting AAA gaming on the Mac, along with the iPhone and iPad in a fresh interview, this time with Inverse. There have been some notable titles that have landed on Apple’s platforms in recent times, and coming directly from the original game developers themselves – not via a third-party port as has been the case for AAA games that have made it to Apple’s platforms in the past. New titles on the Mac, iPhone and/or iPad include Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4, Lies of P, No Man’s Sky, Baldur’s Gate 3, Grid Legends, and Strays with other titles like Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Death Stranding among others coming soon.
In the interview, Apple’s reps highlight a few things that have changed on the Apple landscape that has made bringing AAA PC gaming titles across to its platforms more attractive. Firstly, Apple’s transition to its custom Arm-based silicon for its Macs has been a key catalyst for change. With Apple’s three established platforms all utilizing the same underlying architecture, it means that developing for one of its platforms makes it easy to port games to the other two platforms, opening up a very large potential market in the process. With the launch of the A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro series, and the M3 chips in its new MacBook Pro models, Apple introduced integrated GPUs with hardware accelerated ray-tracing, mesh shading, and Dynamic Caching capabilities – all of which are gaming focused technologies.
Apple’s Metal technology has been in place for some time now, giving developers more direct access to its GPUs full processing potential as well. More recently, Apple added MetalFX, a framerate and image quality upscaling framework based on, as Notebookcheck exclusively revealed, AMD’s FSR tech. Apple also introduced a new Game Porting Toolkit that makes it significantly easier for game devs to port their titles from PCs to Macs. The latest version of macOS Sonoma also has a new dedicated Game Mode, further optimizing system resources for maximum throughput while also doubling the Bluetooth sampling rate to reduce input lag from wireless controllers.
Another key benefit for gamers who own more than one Apple device is that devs have so far been offering their titles as a universal purchase through Apple’s digital stores. This means if you buy it for the Mac, it will automatically be available for a user’s iPad and/or iPhone at no additional charge. Resident Evil Village, for example, supports saves across Macs, iPhones and iPads as well, which is also another attractive potential selling point for gamers who choose to use Apple as their gaming platform of choice.
Of course, Apple is hoping that its efforts pay off, and that the Mac combined with the iPhone and iPad are considered serious gaming platforms. Speaking to Inverse, Leland Martin, an Apple software marketing manager offered these comments:
It’s really about being proactive in a number of critical areas. There’s now tens of millions of Apple silicon Macs out there and growing, and now with iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max, every iPad with an M1 chip or later, that number becomes even larger of an opportunity. We’re innovating at this tremendous pace. When you look at this from a macro level, it becomes much easier to see how all these pieces are coming together in a way that hasn’t happened before.
Related Articles
Sanjiv Sathiah – Senior Tech Writer – 1431 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2017
I have been writing about consumer technology over the past ten years, previously with the former MacNN and Electronista, and now Notebookcheck since 2017. My first computer was an Apple ][c and this sparked a passion for Apple, but also technology in general. In the past decade, I’ve become increasingly platform agnostic and love to get my hands on and explore as much technology as I can get my hand on. Whether it is Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, Nintendo, Xbox, or PlayStation, each has plenty to offer and has given me great joy exploring them all. I was drawn to writing about tech because I love learning about the latest devices and also sharing whatever insights my experience can bring to the site and its readership.
Sanjiv Sathiah, 2023-12-30 (Update: 2023-12-30)
