M1 Support for Steam App. cmonnn

[YBYB]

Bring native M1 support for the steam app. These things are fast, why not support it, rust is playable through virtual machine, on a laptop with no fans, on battery power. Same with BeamNG, imagine how many customers steam would get if they expanded , also it would draw new games to support it...

[Cathulhu]

Up to the devs to port their games. Baldur's Gate 3 already has native ARM support and doesn't require Steam to have it.

So, that argument is out of the window.

There's a reason why many devs don't bother with Apple anymore. And the reason is Apple themselves. Their antics over the last few years did not exactly made devs jump up in joy.

[gilgamesh]

If you mean that Valve makes an ARM version of steam software, I think it will be very far-sighted, because ARM platforms of other systems will be easier to get ARM support in the future. However, in terms of necessity, in fact, the number of people using M1 chip computers is very small, about 1% of the total number of platform players.

If you mean that steam can better support pure ARM games, for the M1 platform, the ARM-compatible steam plug-in has actually been implemented in 2021 (for association startup games, display frames, input control, etc., which is essential for all steam games) This means that steam has allowed the upload of pure ARM version of Apple system games.

[aiusepsi]

Originally posted by gilgamesh:

However, in terms of necessity, in fact, the number of people using M1 chip computers is very small, about 1% of the total number of platform players.

1.11% of Steam users are using an Apple Silicon CPU. By way of comparison, 1.28% of Steam users use Linux, and 0.22% of Steam users use a 32-bit version of Windows. It's not impossibly niche compared to other things Steam supports.

Personally, I would be happy enough if they just shipped an arm64 version of the built-in browser component in Steam. The current situation is a worst-case scenario for performance; much of Steam's UI code is now in Javascript, which, for speed, the browser will JIT compile to machine code. The problem is, because it's the x86_64 version of the browser, it's JITted to x86_64 machine code, which Rosetta has to JIT again to arm64 machine code. This adds loads of overhead, and generate sub-optimal machine code.

If they shipped the arm64 version of the browser, the browser would emit optimal arm64 machine code to begin with.

[YBYB]

I should clarify, supporting all of apple silicone, there is a good audience behind that. I also understand apple does stuff that is unnecessary in some cases, but with the arm stuff, the way they laid out metal makes it mad efficient compared to other laptops, if it was supported, it would be a gaming champ. I'm also a nerd for it and do all my work on my laptop now, it would be nice if I could play a few games that ran native besides minecraft. Im also hoping linux gets hardware acceleration in some point in the future when it comes to apple silicone.

[Chicken Jockey]

Originally posted by Cathulhu:

Up to the devs to port their games. Baldur's Gate 3 already has native ARM support and doesn't require Steam to have it.

So, that argument is out of the window.

There's a reason why many devs don't bother with Apple anymore. And the reason is Apple themselves. Their antics over the last few years did not exactly made devs jump up in joy.

While it is true that it's up to developers to update their games, Steam itself doesn't natively support M1, and the translation through Rosetta is awful. Definitely understand that Mac represents a very small portion of Steam users, but given that some developers (like those of Baldur's Gate 3 and Factorio) are supporting ARM, you would think that Valve would be updating their application to make the experience more user friendly.

[Scott, President of Dominos]

Originally posted by Cathulhu:

why many devs don't bother with Apple anymore. And the reason is Apple themselves. Their antics over the last few years did not exactly made devs jump up in joy.

It’s just game devs you tool, which have never supported Mac very well. Pretty much every other software company that had Mac support at all has been porting/has ported their software.

[Chicken Jockey]

Originally posted by Makise Kurisu:

Originally posted by Cathulhu:

why many devs don't bother with Apple anymore. And the reason is Apple themselves. Their antics over the last few years did not exactly made devs jump up in joy.

It’s just game devs you tool, which have never supported Mac very well. Pretty much every other software company that had Mac support at all has been porting/has ported their software.

Apple is also partially to blame. Apple's refusal to adopt Vulkan and their push to instead use Metal has really continued to drive away game developers, rather than bring them to the platform.

[Scott, President of Dominos]

Originally posted by Chad:

Originally posted by Makise Kurisu:

It’s just game devs you tool, which have never supported Mac very well. Pretty much every other software company that had Mac support at all has been porting/has ported their software.

Apple is also partially to blame. Apple's refusal to adopt Vulkan and their push to instead use Metal has really continued to drive away game developers, rather than bring them to the platform.

I've said this in another thread, but pretty much every game engine that supports Vulkan also supports Metal. And engines that don't support Metal are typically DirectX only. The most popular engines used do have Metal support, like Unreal and Unity off the top of my head.

Game companies have never supported Mac well, even when it shared x86 and OpenGL with PCs, which it did for over a decade. Anyone with more than 10 years of memory knows this.

Could Apple theoretically make it easier to port games? Maybe, but even when Mac hardware was a different flavor of PC hardware it didn't work.

In any case, the few game devs I've spoke with say the primary reason is marketshare, none have named Vulkan as a core issue.