Why is gaming on a Mac inferior to PC gaming ?

[trs96]

You might ask yourself, why doesn't Apple do anything to make gaming on Macs better ? I think it's mostly because high end PC gaming requires lots of airflow and cooling to disperse all the heat created when playing graphics intensive games. Thermal throttling of the CPU and GPU really hampers gaming performance. Name one Apple made Mac that has enough airflow and cooling ability for AAA PC games played for hours at a time. I can't think of one. All Macs have been notoriously bad at cooling. The new iMac Pro is a step in the right direction. The iMac Pro might be good enough, but who is going to game on a $5,000 + professional use machine that isn't optimized to play games ?

Apple already makes a huge amount of money on games and gaming. If you look at the revenue from gaming on iPhones and iPads and Android devices, it's a pretty large revenue stream already. Mobile gaming generates over 70 billion a year ! So why should they try to attract PC gamers who will just use Win10 anyway ? With the start of the ability to port iOS apps over to macOS in Mojave, you'll be able to do much more gaming on your Mac or CustoMac in a year or two. Finally, the last thing Apple needs is more money. They have over 243 Billion dollars of cash on hand and mostly all they do with it is buy back their own stock. (Which is spending money to make even more money !) Their market cap is now well over one trillion dollars. The largest valuation of any US company ever !

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Very good points.

Also a lot more development work is done on Windows drivers, just because it's the major desktop. Look at the Nvidia and AMD driver packages and all their optimisation settings. None of that is in the macOS drivers, only what's available in-game from the game devs.

Thermal issues are incredibly relevant. For years laptop manufacturers have just observed the thermal limits specced by Intel or AMD and simply ensured their systems run under these. That's not the same as allowing unrestricted performance from a properly aerated box, which is what a PC does. An easy comparison to relate to Apple hardware, despite the latter's superb engineering.