It sucks when you want to port an app to iOS, or an application to MacOS and find out "oh... I need to have a Mac to compile to these platforms.. and there's no way to otherwise test.."

Meanwhile, with android you can just run an emulator.

I do too! Minecraft and Factorio for sure. BG3 is underwhelming on my M1 MBA, even with the extra RAM, but I mostly use GeForce now for games. I found an adapter from Cable Matters to get that sweet 120Hz at 4k through HDMI. It looks amazing on my TV. The company provides some alternative firmware you can put on the USB-C dongle to make it work, though you need a Windows machine to upgrade the firmware.

I really have no interest in getting another laptop or building a gaming PC I will ignore. I can't justify it. This thing is light, has amazing battery life, and runs everything I need it to. I have a console for other games. If the game isn't on console, osx, or GeForce Now, I just won't play it.

I do agree with some of the others that it would be nice if they got on the Vulcan train.

But why? Why would you buy a Mac twice the price for gaming when you can buy other cheaper gaming brands?

You said it right, Apple doesn't care about gaming, and so are their customers.

Apple would not move a finger without return.

I did a ton of years ago, using wine bottles to run pirated windows games... ran like shit on my macbook

Nanosaur is the last game I played on Mac back in like 2001 on an iMac.

Mac users are different from others, they don't buy overpriced machines just for gaming. They buy a Mac for the workflow and ecosystem, not for gaming.

Valve saw that, and decided not to waste money on the Mac market.

Apple always makes decisions based on the revenue, Valve did the same for once.

Sure, metal offered significant improvements over opengl when it released, but now that vulkan exists apple doesn’t have any more excuses.

Source 1 engine games like half life are running atm via box_x86

Games "tend" to dominate a single, or very few cores. With modern PCs having 4 or more. You can push an isa-translator off on to a low power core. Since it won't be a constant, heavy lifting task. Then push the translated instructions through your high performance cores. Your biggest penalty on that will generally be a small bit of latency.

Your biggest hit will likely come from having to wrap graphics APIs. But again, that hit is generally what it takes to do the same under Linux with wine/proton.

But as long as your CPUs can push the instructions fast enough. Your data bus can manage the data transfers in a timely manner. And your graphics subsystem can handle the load. It's a doable task.

It's very similar to emulating retro systems in a number of ways.