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I don't follow how Rosetta 2 supporting Mac games from the x86 era is going to "shrink" that number.

macOS x86 games + macOS arm64 games == same number of games. Whats the loss angle here?


I think what they meant to say was that Rosetta 2 is going away in the future, leaving only native AARCH64 binaries compatible


All the other x86 games that can run on Mac through Rosetta.


If anything it's an example that games can be amazing on macOS, if developers take the time to learn and use the system. WoW on macOS is a far superior experience to WoW on Windows.


By what standard is it superior to WoW on Windows? Starting from the available hardware, the Windows world is far superior for WoW resulting in better visuals and more consistent fps which is a good start of having enjoyable experience.

Also I really can't think of the way Mac's mouse settings in WoW work better than the Windows ones. Scrolling, mouse movement are all having more settings under Windows to customize them compared to the experience on Mac (even with all the tools such as Mos to help with the bad external mouse handling in Mac).

So what exactly is so superior? I play WoW on both platforms and when I have a choice (that is, when playing at my home desktop - on my summer cabin I only have the Mac option) it's always the Windows one I select. It's nice that it works in Mac so I can play everywhere as I only have Mac laptop, but the sometimes weird graphics bugs, worse performance and odd issues with rendering displacing my WAs and other stuff just doesn't inspire confidence in Mac gaming compared to using Windows. And the mouse movement.. ugh.


Heh, I play mmos in a window if i play them.

WoW on Linux with wine used to be a superior experience to WoW on Windows. Because the system didn't lock up for half a minute when I alt-tabbed.

[Haven't played WoW in a long time though, maybe in Windows 10 and up you have an easier time alt-tabbing between heavy 3d apps.]


Borderless window (fullscreen) is now the norm for over a decade, alt-tab is instant in this mode. You’re stuck at whatever resolution you have your desktop but most games now have a render scale option.


Apple literally published a 200 page guide on arm64 which I linked above, they've contributed low level optimizations and tunings to NumPy, Embree and Blender to name a few projects.

They clearly are helping. Perhaps you've not noticed?


They're not publishing any docs about the GPU portion. See: the rest of the thread currently. They give you the Metal API (only designed for Apple OS'es), and that's it.

In contrast, AMD and Intel publish GPU documentation.


Honestly no reason the majority of this wouldn't apply to "non Apple" arm64. It's sort of like being worried about AMD x86 vs Intel x86. It mostly doesn't matter, except in some cases where it does, but you don't set out to say "I don't want to learn Intel x86, only AMD x86"

You learn arm64, then you can worry about if you need to deal with implementation specific ISA quirks.



It was a reference to Arthur C. Clarke's book, "2010: Odyssey Two" https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/992255-all-these-worlds-are...


May want to review https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/cpu-... for additional details…


I strongly second the recommendation! Apple's CPU optimization guide is great and not just for their own CPUs but for anyone interested in ARM64(ARMv8, Aarch64, however you call it) in general. It's one of the best written manuals I've read on this topic (which is few but still), with great visualizations and should be accessible to a person even with little low-level knowledge.

(the original comment does not mention but, to be specific, this is about this document: https://developer.apple.com/download/apple-silicon-cpu-optim...)

Should you want to play with SIMD but are a little intimidated - Swift and C# and offer convenient "platform-agnostic" SIMD abstractions, and C# also has NEON/AdvSimd intrinsics in the form of "plain" API calls e.g. `AdvSimd.AddPairwiseWidening` for more direct control (I'm biased on this subject as, while I like Swift, using Xcode and surrounding tooling is sad and less convenient, and the support for Linux/Windows is not there yet).


Have you done anything interesting with what the guide has shared? I see people talking about how it's amazing but... where? in what?


Unfortunately no, not after I read it at least. But I wish it was there a year earlier or so - would prefer it to reading ARM's SIMD&FP documentation. It mostly helped me better understand ARM's strided simd loads and stores (scatter/gather) and shuffles, to verify previous data from https://dougallj.github.io/applecpu/firestorm.html, improve overall mental model and was just pleasant to browse through with all the visualizations.



Nice table of contents.


It’s good so much attention is being given to arm! Apple also recently released more details on optimization

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/cpu-...


Thanks for this link; did not realize that they did this.


https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/cpu-... might be a better link to use since it does not require auth and will allow people at a glance to see what the content might be about.


Apps installed via MAS and packages are pre translated (at install time)


So is this a little bit like Android apps being translated into Java Byte Code at install?


It’s the other way around: an intermediate state of compilation is uploaded (basically the internal state after all non-machine-specific optimizations have been done, like hoisting invariants out of loops, etc). The App Store finishes compiling with the flags for the various CPUs supported (iPhone 6, iPhone 12, etc).


I guess the market will decide how much it values that feature? Choice is good.


But the environmental cost of disposal isn't factored in the price, so that doesn't work.


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