‘Resident Evil’ developer: Apple Silicon Macs can handle high-level PC games

With the power of Apple silicon, users experience incredible graphics performance on every Mac. And now, tens of millions of Macs with Apple silicon can run demanding games with great performance, long battery life, and breathtaking visuals. Developers continue to take advantage of Metal 3, bringing exciting new titles to Mac, including DEATH STRANDING DIRECTOR’S CUT, Stray, Fort Solis, World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, HUMANKIND, Resident Evil Village: Winters’ Expansion, The Medium, ELEX II, Firmament, SnowRunner, Disney Dreamlight Valley, No Man’s Sky, Dragonheir: Silent Gods, and Layers of Fear.

To make it easier to port games from other platforms to Mac, Metal introduces a new game porting toolkit, eliminating months of upfront work and enabling developers to see how well their existing game could run on Mac in just a few days. It also dramatically simplifies the process of converting the game’s shaders and graphics code to take full advantage of Apple silicon performance, significantly reducing the total development time.

Ben Sin for Forbes:

At last year’s WWDC… Apple announced the highly popular Capcom game Resident Evil Village would be ported over Macs and run on Apple’s M-series silicon. The game launched for Macs last October, and drew rave reviews for its graphics, gameplay, and how the game was able to run so smoothly on Apple’s M chips, which are built on entirely different architecture from the processors powering video game consoles and Windows computers.

The fact that Apple’s tiny M chips can power graphically intensive games like Resident Evil Village as well as Windows computers or Sony’s Playstation 5 console is impressive, because the latter’s computing parts are far bulkier and have dedicated graphics cards.

Tsuyoshi Kanda, a Capcom producer who was in charge of developing Resident Evil Village for Macs, told me in an interview that the porting process went surprisingly smoothly.

“The RE [Resident Evil] engine was initially developed [years ago] with Windows architecture in mind, so when I was tasked with porting it to Apple silicon, I thought it would be really challenging,” he said. “But it went surprisingly smoothly, thanks to the unified memory of Apple silicon.”

Unified memory is the technology that allows multiple processors to access the same memory location at the same time. This differs from most Windows machines which have separate RAM (Random Access Memory) set aside for CPU and GPU. Apple’s chips doing everything in one unit is more energy efficient and faster.

Kanda, who has been with Capcom since 2002 and has worked on the last several Resident Evil games, also credited MetalFX, Apple’s graphics upscaling architecture, for allowing the graphically intensive game to run at a high framerate for a wide range of machines, from the brand new and professional-grade Mac Studio, all the way down to the three-year-old (and relatively low-priced) M1 MacBook Air.

“MetalFX allowed Resident Evil Village to pull off tasks similar to Nvidia’s machine learning DLSS,” Kanda added, referring to AI-powered graphics that are found in high-end graphics card for Windows computers.

MacDailyNews Note: macOS Sonoma also introduces Game Mode, giving players an edge when performance is measured in milliseconds. Game Mode delivers an optimized gaming experience with smoother and more consistent frame rates by ensuring games get the highest priority on the CPU and GPU. Game Mode also makes gaming on Mac even more immersive — dramatically decreasing audio latency with AirPods, and significantly reducing input latency with game controllers like those for Xbox and PlayStation by doubling the Bluetooth sampling rate. Game Mode works with any game, including all of the recent and upcoming Mac games.

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