The new M3 family of chips continues Apple silicon’s tremendous pace of innovation. M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max are the first chips for a personal computer built using the industry-leading 3-nanometer technology. With a faster, more efficient next-generation GPU, these chips deliver the biggest leap forward in graphics architecture ever for Apple silicon. Featuring a breakthrough technology called Dynamic Caching, the GPU allocates the use of local memory in hardware in real time so only the exact amount of memory needed is used for each task. This dramatically increases GPU utilization and performance for the most demanding pro apps and games.
The GPU also brings new rendering features to Apple silicon, including hardware-accelerated mesh shading for greater capability and efficiency with geometry processing, enabling more visually complex scenes. And hardware-accelerated ray tracing comes to the Mac for the first time, enabling games to render more accurate shadows and reflections to create more realistic environments.
Daniel Howley for Yahoo Finance:
Apple has been a force in the gaming industry for years. But it has largely kept the effort centered around its iPhone and iPad. But now the company is making a play for a larger slice of the $183 billion video game market with the launch of its latest MacBook Pro and iMac laptops and desktop.
Part of Apple’s marketing campaign for the MacBook Pro and iMac, which hit the market Tuesday, focuses on their ability to handle games like “Baldur’s Gate 3” and “Lies of P” thanks to their new, more powerful M3 chips. And it’s further burnishing its gaming bonafides via ongoing relationships with Capcom, the company behind the “Resident Evil” series, as well as legendary game developer Hideo Kojima, the person behind the “Metal Gear” franchise and “Death Stranding.”
[I]f Apple continues to push gaming on the Mac and reaches out to more developers in the coming years, it could eventually serve as a viable alternative to Windows PCs.
MacDailyNews Take: After so many starts and stops, Apple is “the Boy Who Cried Wolf” when it comes to Mac gaming. Hopefully, this time they’re dedicated to the long haul because consistency over a period of years is what it will take to convince developers and gams alike that Mac gaming is finally a real thing.
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[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
As a game developer, I couldn’t agree more.
They don’t sell enough Macs to interest the AAA developers. They can fix this with money. Either buy a big studio or create their own team who can do a lot of the work to help port the big games.
Steve Jobs said when you’re beaten in a certain technology leapfrog to what’s next. He also said skate to where the puck is headed. I expect Apple to own 3-D gaming on the Apple Vision Pro.
It looks like they’re much better poised than ever in the gaming market, but even with the advances in hardware aren’t they still going to hit a hard limit to what can be done on their devices?
I don’t game anymore but aren’t fat gaming laptops with big fans and heatsinks, not to mention water-cooled PC gaming towers still a thing? Apple’s hardware-software interplay and chip advances can go a long way towards bridging the gap but it seems like they’re making a play for the intermediate gamers that aren’t focused on playing at maximum framerates. Maybe that’s the bigger market?