Apple’s Future of Mac Gaming: Advanced Chips and Developer Tools Revolutionize Gaming Experience

Apple’s been on a roll since ditching Intel chips for its own silicon. The Mac has been experiencing a powerful renaissance, with better performance, efficiency, and graphics across the board. It’s no secret that Apple’s been focusing on gaming, and the community’s been growing like crazy. We’ve seen more AAA titles launch on the Mac, often alongside their PC counterparts. Even Apple’s given gaming a spotlight during its keynote addresses, including the annual Worldwide Developers Conference, where it introduced tools native to macOS that make it easy for games to arrive.

As a result, gaming on the Mac has gotten a significant boost, and it just keeps growing. To dive deeper into the recent news around Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit 2, the impact of the M3 family of chips, and the state of gaming on the Mac, I chatted with Leland Martin of Apple Software Product Marketing and Doug Brooks of Mac Product Marketing.

One thing’s clear: developers and studios won’t come to the Mac without the necessary hardware performance. Brooks says Apple’s goal was to deliver a balanced system, with a great CPU, GPU, and unified memory bandwidth to ensure that SOC performs well across all dimensions a user cares about. Gaming hits this sweet spot, needing power from all three – CPU, GPU, and memory – whether you play on a Mac, PC, or console.

With the rollout of Apple silicon, starting with the Apple M1, Apple leveled the playing field across the Mac device lineup. Whether you buy a MacBook Air or a Pro, the performance has a high baseline thanks to Apple’s chips. This is vastly different from when Apple used Intel, where you really needed a Mac with a discrete GPU to deliver good gaming performance. For someone buying a Mac, that meant buying only higher-end models.

But with Apple silicon, Brooks says every Mac can play the latest demanding games. That’s a fundamental change to its approach. The approach has remained the same throughout Apple’s generations. With the jump from the Apple M1 to Apple M3 platform, Brooks says the chips took the largest leap forward in graphics architecture ever for Apple silicon in a generation. The Apple M3 GPU delivers modern features that many of the newest games use to create more realistic environments, including hardware-accelerated ray-tracing, dynamic caching, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading.

These capabilities aren’t reserved for the M3 Pro and M3 Max chips, though – they’re available on any M3 chip, including the mobile chips in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Brooks says it wasn’t something they started on the high end and trickled down; they’re just really excited about bringing those technologies to the entire M3 family.

For the player, macOS has a handy built-in tool – Game Mode – that automatically boosts performance. When you open a game, background activity is minimized to ensure lower latency and smooth frame rates. Martin said it’s achieved by giving the game being run the highest priority on the CPU and GPU.

Regarding connectivity with either AirPods or wireless game controls, Apple is working some magic behind the scenes. With audio, Game Mode works to lower latency, something I got to demo, and it does make a difference, especially if the developer also adopts Apple’s Spatial Audio standard. Imagine hearing footsteps around you or being able to track an enemy before they appear – that’s the possibility.

With game controllers, Martin explained that Apple has doubled the Bluetooth polling rate to effectively cut input latency in half. Again, this is another cool demo I got to experience side by side, and it could make or break gamers completing a task. Game Mode is currently on the Mac, but it will arrive on the iPhone and iPad with iOS 18 and iPadOS 18.

Apple is also offering a Unified Gaming Platform, which allows you to start a title on the Mac, save it in the cloud, and pick it up on your iPhone or iPad, or vice versa. Brooks called out Apple’s unique fundamental value proposition within the market, as Apple silicon is the base architecture across the device portfolio. The software platforms – macOS, iOS, and iPadOS – share so many critical frameworks like Metal. It really simplifies and makes it much more efficient to bring a title to all these devices.

That’s a key advantage in Apple’s eyes, delivering a better experience for the user and the game studio. More widely, though, if Apple continues to offer these enhancements on the consumer side and the developer side, we might see larger games arrive.

It’s a trend that Martin called out – AAA studios are already recognizing the rapidly growing opportunity with the Mac, and we’re seeing more and more these types of games coming to the platform, including Frostpunk 2 and Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Further, Apple has been rolling out and updating the tools for developers, including Game Porting Toolkit 2 and Game Mode, annually.

Given that some AAA games, like Resident Evil and Death Stranding Director’s Cut, are already available on Mac, iPhone, and iPad, Martin’s idea of a changing gaming landscape isn’t fantasy. He believes we’re entering a world now where it will just be impossible to forget your favorite game console, because you have it with you.

That’s the real strength and what’s unique about playing games in the Apple ecosystem, where not only can you play across these devices, but you can also buy them just once and play it across all three. Titles released on the App Store can be purchased for iOS, iPadOS, and Mac. Further, Apple will soon allow developers to reduce game file sizes to let you install with less space and even support an external disc as the install location.

Brooks agrees with the notion of a bright future and compelling offers for both players and developers but also mentions the commonality across Mac, iPhone, and iPad right now in that they’re all capable of playing these latest advanced games, and it’s a really exciting offering to be able to go there with us.

I’ve seen the democratization of capabilities across the Mac, evidenced by the Apple M3’s graphical performance from the MacBook Air up the line. It’s also more evident with the iPad, and considering that the iPhone 15 Pro Max with the A17 Pro can also handle these titles, one could argue that with future generations, even more folks will be able to play and save games across Apple devices.

That’s something to get excited about! While Apple has already delivered a lot of momentum and progress for developers and players alike, gaming on the Mac still feels like it’s growing, and it’ll be an essential area to watch as more titles are ported and released natively. It’s a very bright future, and it’s evident that more studios are coming on board.