The creator of Metal Gear Solid was very enthusiastic. “I’ve been a hardcore Apple fan ever since I bought my first Mac in 1994,“, he explained. “It’s an old dream to see my team’s excellence come to life on Mac“. To celebrate, Death Stranding Director’s Cut will be heading to the Mac OS later this year (without further details). Pre-orders will open soon. Kojima says his studio “actively working on Apple ports of all [leurs] future titles.“After breaking free from PlayStation exclusivity, Kojima Productions continues to sail towards new horizons…
The Big Apple
Kojima will be in good company because Apple intends to inflate its playful catalog manu militari. After Resident Evil Village on October 28, 2022 and No Man’s Sky, freshly released on June 1 on Mac, will come various games such as The Medium, Elex II, WoW Dragonflight or Humankind. And, of course, the Winters extension for REVillage.
The MacOS Sonoma will also embed the “Game Mode”, a feature that will give priority to video games over CPU and GPU activity. Clearly, as soon as we launch a Solitaire or a Death Stranding, all the resources of our bike will be mobilized to optimize the experience. This will be accompanied by a software optimization of Bluetooth to reduce latency with Xbox and PlayStation controllers; in turn, your AirPods will also benefit.
Under the hood
On the software side, Apple relies on the Metal 3 API, unveiled last year. She’s already purring No Man’s Sky. Quite unknown, since confined to Macs (which are not so much the bastions of gaming), Metal 3 reduces loading times and ensures the raytracing. Its MetalFX Upscaling function also improves visual renderings while reducing the machine load with large bursts of temporal anti-aliasing and spatial upscaling. As a bonus, a brand new Gaming Porting Toolkit will soon facilitate PC-Mac ports, in particular by optimizing textures and shaders for the Metal API. Smoothing the edges is crucial to convince developers to turn to the Mac: very often, the costs and time of ports are considered excessive in relation to the expected financial returns.
Finally, for the more fortunate among us, Apple has also unveiled its “mixed reality” headset, the Apple Vision Pro, which will actually be the first “space computer” in history. It is completely autonomous, with its own battery, and will cover your eyes with a transparent glass plate divided into two ultra-high-resolution lenses – 23 million pixels per eye, better than 4K.
The Vision Pro will run under visionOS, a dedicated operating system that will allow us to control our applications by finger and eye. And it’s not an expression. Basically, the Vision Pro does not use a dedicated controller. Sight, gestures and voice are enough to manipulate it. However, we can connect any controller to it to enjoy more than 100 Apple Arcade games, as well as the vast majority of the iOS and iPad catalog. Infant rate: $3,499. Released in early 2024 at Uncle Sam.
