Mac OS X version 10.0 (code named Cheetah) is the first major release of Mac OS X (later named OS X and then macOS), Apple’s desktop and server operating system. Mac OS X 10.0 was released on March 24, 2001 for a price of US$129.
Gaming on the Mac is terrible, right? That has been the consensus among gamers for a decade-plus—Ars even declared Mac gaming dead all the way back in 2007. But in reality, the situation has gotten better. And after Apple dedicated an unprecedented amount of attention to Mac gaming at WWDC 2017, things might be looking up for Mac gamers in the coming years.
When Apple announced new Macs and a major update to its Mac graphics API at this year’s developer conference, there was an air of hope amongst Mac gamers and developers. Gaming on a Mac may look more appealing than ever thanks to the introduction and gradual improvement of Apple’s relatively new Metal graphics API and a better-than-ever-before install base. On top of that, discrete Mac graphics processors have just seen some of their biggest boosts in recent years, VR support is on the way, and external GPU enclosures promise previously impossible upgradeability.
So gaming on the Mac is improving, but is it good or still terrible? Are we on track to parity with Windows? Speaking to game developers who specialize in the Mac about the state of Mac gaming in the wake of WWDC, Ars encountered plenty of optimism. Still, there’s plenty to be cautious about.
Decades in a niche
In gamer communities on forums and Reddit, Mac gaming is often the subject of jokes and snarky comments. Again, such snark was not always without justification. There just weren’t many good games on the Mac for years. Nevertheless, a few companies have continuously worked to fill the niche. Two in particular emerged as leaders in the marketplace—Aspyr Media and Feral Interactive.
Aspyr was founded way back in 1996, originally as a retail distributor. The porting aspect of its business came later, with the first game it ported in 1998—Eidos’ Tomb Raider II. Feral got started in 1996, too. And in addition to the Mac, Feral has ported games to Linux and iOS (it plans to expand to Android in the near future).
“We’ve dealt firsthand with all the big changes to the platform that have taken place over the last two decades,” Edwin Smith, Feral’s head of production, told Ars. He cited changes like the advent of dedicated graphics processing units (GPUs), the move to a UNIX-based operating system, and the transition from the PowerPC processor architecture to Intel.
PowerPC-based Macs in the '90s and early '00s used a different processing architecture from the Windows PCs for which most games were primarily developed. It didn’t help, either, that Microsoft’s Direct3D (part of the DirectX suite of APIs) became the industry standard graphics API. The cross-platform OpenGL API used in Apple computers struggled to keep up in the meantime. And frankly back at that point in time, Macs weren’t very popular, so the audience was small. It was abundantly clear to gamers that the Mac was not a competitive platform in the PowerPC days.
“In the years leading up to the transition to Intel CPUs in Macs, the porting process entailed converting games to run on PowerPC hardware,” said Smith. “This was difficult because the existing code was written with x86 architecture in mind, and since this didn’t always have a 1:1 relationship with how PowerPC architecture worked, we had some interesting problems to solve.”
Climbing out into the sun
Players using today’s Mac offerings live within a different landscape. Things became much rosier over the past decade for a number of reasons.
First, there was the switch to Intel. By adopting the same architecture used in most Windows PCs, Apple moved the Mac out of a software engineering wasteland. Second, Mac sales figures grew significantly at the same time. According to data aggregated by Statista, 3.29 million Macs were sold globally in 2004. By 2015, that number had reached more than 20 million.
“Apple today sells in a quarter what they used to sell in a year, so the total market opportunity has grown from what used to be normal,” Elizabeth Howard, vice-president for publishing at Aspyr, told Ars.
The hardware situation looked better, too. Macs enjoyed what Howard called a “halo effect” from the previous generation of consoles. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 remained gaming hardware standards for nearly a decade—longer than many other console generations. That longevity allowed the Mac’s laptop-grade graphics hardware to catch up to this industry standard.
“Most video games are developed with console or PC as the lead platform, and the system requirements are naturally targeted around what those platforms can handle,” she explained. “Since Mac is a downstream port of these versions, and Macs were well-aligned with last-gen console specs, we were able to easily move games from PC and console over to Mac.”
Finally, Howard and Smith cited the shift to digital distribution. While this was disruptive and concerning for the industry at first, it turned out to be a major boon for Mac-centric gamers.
“2011 was the last year Apple carried any physical game boxes in their stores,” Howard said. “There was a time we thought this would mean the demise of Mac gaming.” Within a few years, Apple was no longer shipping computers with physical media drives at all; the platform abandoned them more quickly than the PC market did. But rather than hurt Mac developers, it helped. Digital marketplaces like Steam and the Mac App Store “made it much easier for us to get our games to end users,” said Smith. “And as a result, our customer base has grown.”
Howard also sees the new marketplace as an improvement: “Digital distribution had a huge impact on our business. It’s obviously much easier for people to buy games, we had a big catalog to leverage with this new audience, and it’s much easier on cash flow with no cost of goods. It was a huge shift.”
And all this has made the Mac a more vibrant gaming platform than ever before. Mac games have a substantially larger addressable market, the economics of scale are more favorable, and for a while, the hardware was in a sweet spot. With plenty of great games available on the Mac, gamer snark has been looking less and less applicable in recent years.
By Prince McLean
Friday, October 19, 2007, 07:00 am PT (10:00 am ET)
Friday, October 19, 2007, 07:00 am PT (10:00 am ET)
Desktop Exposé
In October 2003, Apple leveraged the graphics power behind its Quartz drawing engine to add Exposé features in the release of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Exposé animated all the open windows with a single click, either shoving them all out of the way to view the desktop, or shrinking them down to fit into the desktop view without overlapping. Another key press and the windows all resumed their former size and position. That made Exposé a complex combination of window management features that was easy to grasp and use.
Designer Arlo Rose, who along with lead developer Gregory D. Landweber, created a Mac OS theme skinning utility called Kaleidoscope, had earlier come up with the idea of skinning any given bit of information in the same manner as was popular to do with MP3 players of the time. Rose started work with Perry Clarke to build a system called Konfabulator for developing artistically skinned widgets to display information such as battery level, a calendar, or system resources. Using the network and a scripting later, Konfabulator widgets could also look up weather reports or webcams, and even serve as mini applications such as a calculator.
Konfabulator widgets (below) typically acted like desk accessories, mingling with standard application windows. However, after the release of Panther, Konfabulator's developers borrowed a page from Exposé to create a new feature mode that would bring all the open widgets to the foreground and dim everything else into the background at the press of a defined hotkey. Konfabulator called it Konsposé.
Konfabulator vs Dashboard
In the release of Mac OS X Tiger 10.4, Apple debuted a new feature called Dashboard (below) that did something very similar. Like the earlier scuffle between Watson and Sherlock, Dashboard overlapped in functionality with Konfabulator in a way that essentially rendered it obsolete, despite being implemented differently.
Konfabulator created its own runtime environment that launched widgets as JavaScript applications using an XML interface. That meant it was running in the background all the time to keep widgets updated. Konsposé was an optional feature for highlighting running widgets.
In contrast, Dashboard widgets were launched by the Dock. They were also normally sequestered to their own Dashboard environment, which worked very similar to Konsposé. That design limited the system resources Dashboard widgets would consume when they weren't in view.
Additionally, Apple's widgets were snippets of HTML styled with CSS and scripted with JavaScript. They are essentially just tiny web pages, making them easy to build and easy to test within a browser. The rendering of Dashboard widgets is performed by WebKit, the engine behind Safari. Because widgets are managed by the Dock, rendered by WebKit, and usually exiled away in the hidden Dashboard, there is little overhead imposed.
While Dashboard had the unfortunate effect of killing Konfabulator on the Mac, it was really the natural outgrowth of Apple's development of Exposé, the Dock, and WebKit. Konfabulator, while innovative and attractive, was a flawed design that hogged a lot of memory. Fortunately, Konfabulator found a buyer in Yahoo and went to work developing its widget engine for Windows users.
Searching for a Replacement
Dashboard didn't just kill Konfabulator. It also killed the web services end of Apple's own Sherlock. Rather than pulling up the Sherlock application to load a set of prebuilt web services channels, Dashboard allowed users a highly graphical way to lay out desk accessory style applets that did the same types of things. It could also call them up and dismiss them with an Exposé-style keystroke, rather than only run them within a Sherlock window.
Had Apple not 'interfered' in the markets for Watson and Konfabulator, Mac users would be today stuck with two poorly implemented, competing systems with a lot of overlap. Back in the mid 80s, Apple had attempted to maintain its Mac platform without encroaching on third parties, and instead pushed its own apps off into the Claris subsidiary. After ten years of letting third parties fight over shareware implementations of features Apple should have addressed itself, the company nearly died. It now thinks about itself first.
Like Exposé, Dashboard also highlighted the animated, fluid potential in Mac OS X's Quartz graphics engine. Widgets dragged into the Dashboard sea ripple, and individual widgets are configured by touching an icon that flips them around to reveal configurable settings.
The other half of Sherlock, related to local file search and content indexing, remained as Sherlock's iconic magnifying glass under the name Spotlight. Apple's existing V-Twin search engine had shown up in Panther as the Search Kit, but it was further overhauled in Tiger to enhance its performance and add Google-like search syntax and phrase based searching. Back in March of 2002, Apple had hired Dominic Giampaolo, an architect of the advanced BeOS file system. Giampaolo worked to build similar metadata indexing features into the new Spotlight.
On page 4 of 4: New Desktop Features in Leopard: Spotlight; New Desktop Features in Leopard: Dashboard; and Other New Desktop Features in Leopard.