[lazypenguin]

As far as I’ve seen, Apple is to blame here as they usually make it harder to target their platform and don’t really try to cooperate with the rest of the industry.

As a game developer, I have to literally purchase Apple hardware to test rather than being able to conveniently download a VM

[jjtheblunt]

for games, how would you test in a VM, when games so explicitly want direct hardware access?

i am obviously misunderstanding something, i mean.

[zulban]

I run Linux and test my Windows releases on a VM. It works great.

Sure, I'm not doing performance benchmarking and it's just smoke tests and basic user stories, but that's all that 98% of indie developers do for cross platform support.

Apple has been intensely stupid as a platform to launch on, though I did do it eventually. I didn't like Apple before and now I like it even less.

[lazypenguin]

I develop a game that easily runs on much weaker hardware and runs fine in a VM, I would say most simple 3D & 2D games would work fine in a VM on modern hardware.

However, these days it's possible pass-through hardware to your VM so I would be able to pass through a 2nd GPU to MacOS...if it would let me run it as a guest.

[Liquix]

on linux, KVM provides passthrough for GPUs and other hardware, so the VM "steals" the passed through resources from the host and provides near-native performance.

[neogodless]

I'm not a subject matter expert, but I do find it a little odd to read the second half of that. I'd expect, beyond development/debugging, there's certainly a phase of testing that requires hardware that matches your target system?

Like, I get if you develop for consoles, you probably use some kind of emulation on your development workstation, which is probably running Windows. Especially for consoles like XBOX One or newer, and PS4 or newer, which are essentially PCs. And then builds get passed off to a team that has the hardware.

Is anyone developing games for Windows on Apple hardware? Do they run Parallels and call it a day? How is the gaming performance? If the answers to those 3 questions are "yes, yes, great", then Apple supports PC game development better than they support Apple game development?

[throwuxiytayq]

> Like, I get if you develop for consoles, you probably use some kind of emulation on your development workstation

I don’t think anybody does this. I haven’t heard about official emulators for any of the mainstream consoles. Emulation would be prohibitively slow.

Developers usually test on dedicated devkits which are a version of the target console (often with slightly better specs as dev builds need more memory and run more slowly). This is annoying, slow and difficult, but at least you can get these dev kits, usually for a decent price, and there’s a point to trying to ship on those platforms. Meanwhile, nobody plays games on macs, and Apple is making zero effort to bring in the developers or the gamers. It’s a no-chicken-and-no-egg situation, really.

[lazypenguin]

Basically you are correct, MacOS has to be treated like a console in that way. Except you get all the downsides of that development workflow with none of the upsides. The consoles provide excellent debugging and other tools for targeting their platform, can't say the same for MacOS.

For testing, I can do a large amount of testing in a VM for my game. Maybe not 100% and not full user testing but nothing beats running on the native hardware and alpha/beta with real users.

Also, since I can pass through hardware to my VM I can get quite good performance by passing through a physical GPU for example. This is possible and quite straightforward to do on a Linux host. I'm not sure if it's possible using Parallels.

[whatever1]

You do it for Xbox and PlayStation and Nintendo.

[cesarvarela]

I'm sure you literally purchased Nvidia hardware for game development.

[stronglikedan]

A component is much cheaper than an entire dedicated system (which would of course contain a similar component).

[cesarvarela]

I don't know; a 5090 costs about 3k, a 5070 about 500. You can either buy a MacBook Pro or a Mac Mini. Seems reasonable.