The Medium Mac Review - The Most Demanding Port Yet

[@mojoblues66]

2:12 this appears to be a memory issue. The game is using 7.36 GB of memory of the 8 GB M1, so it is constantly swapping to disk, hence the drastic fps drop.

[@MrMacRight]

I think you're right. Sorry I was wrong about the game using up to only 8GB too.

[@thunderofgr]

This is a great video covering all of the key aspects of how a port runs. Love it. Thanks!

[@AchakBrooks]

Nice, occasionally do these types of vids when your up to it. I like/appreciate the observations you give on the software and hardware interaction. Also the assumptions of “why” I find it valuable in understanding what stage of development the tech is in and how it is being applied so far.

[@gatesroyale]

yet again another flawless video. Thank you for working so hard to bring these videos to us. Wish nothing but health and blessings for your life.

[@Slurkz]

Great video, especially the new style. Thanks Stewie! 💜

[@jvlppm]

I wonder if Sonoma has performance improvements on gaming since it has the Gaming mode, where the OS gives the highest priority to the running game and practically disables background OS tasks, if I understood correctly by their presentation. I’ve read people saying it enables Gaming mode automatically when it detects a Gaming controller but that doesn’t seem too right for me, I don’t know if you have to enable it manually for playing with keyboard and mouse, if it detects there’s a game running by other means or if you can tell the Gaming mode is active, I would like to know more about it.

[@mojoblues66]

I wouldn't put too much hope into it.

[@harveysmith4424]

I understand the complexity of this game but it feels super off they would let this release in the first place at all. Just not a playable experience for the majority of devices it would be played on.

[@justdude404]

Same thing on PC. The only way to have stable performance even on powerful PCs - lock fps on 30, just like on all 3 consoles.

[@almahin4861]

Thanks for showing gameplay of base m1 that’s really helpful for me.

[@jedimindtrickonyou3692]

Thanks for making this video, you saved me the time of downloading and trying to run this on my M1 MBP, which clearly isn't up to the task. This game even makes my 4070 desktop struggle, 2 scenes being rendered side by side is just massively demanding.

[@thekenty]

This game initially launched as a timed exclusive for Xbox Series S / X, and was one of the very first games to NOT support last-gen Xbox One and One X, apparently because the SSD was essential in order to have the seamless transitions to spirit world. So I was expecting performance to be not great on the lower end Apple Silicone Macs... but not this bad! I played it on Series S which has 10 GB unified RAM/VRAM and as far as I remember, it was a fairly solid 30 fps throughout, however the DRS apparently drops the resolution to sub-HD 648p in the split screen sequences...

[@acronychal767]

Great video! I like this format, keep it up! I actually am a bit surprised at how well it ran considered how demanding the game is and how it doesn't seem optimized well. The fact that it can even start on an M1 is cool. I bought this game and have a 16GB M1 Air and an M1 Max MBP. I might give it a shot on my Air just for fun and then compare it with the M1 Max. I'm old and I remember when 30FPS was the holy grail of gaming. Nowadays what is considered good is very different!

[@Lowest_Levels]

The new style format is better insomuch as it seems more well rounded to cover many aspects of the ported game. Would be nice to include M1 pro or Max as many people jumped onto the silicon wagon in the first pro line go and could possibly represent a far greater number of viewers than those who have moved into the M2 line later on. Not sure of this but I'd still imagine it's a sizeable group.

[@danielktdoranie]

Love your videos bromingo

[@AndyEatsCocoa]

Liking the new style

[@RiccardoMerloVegan]

I hope it is an issue and a fix is coming. PS: using MetalFX up scaling should be the norm since at high res and preset it is quite identical at native res

[@danielktdoranie]

Really not into horror games myself. Looking forward to the Death Stranding port

[@cloudGGs]

They need to bring Overwatch to Mac.

[@surfntrucks]

My eyes go right to that bright window or bright white board every time it goes back to the talking head shot.

[@MrMacRight]

Good feedback. It's a curtain

[@NotSasiOp]

How to get game porting toolkit in m2 apple silcon😢

[@bemacbe]

Good job. Hey how are you doing this morning?! Have a nice day.

[@DavideDavini]

I like this format as well. It feels more “personal”, if that makes sense. Cheers.

[@jimmyzbike]

Well damn. I had hoped

[@ayushs_2k4]

Please use M1 Pro also

[@untitledsurfer8503]

I like the new video style, and I also liked the previous style. Do whatever you like the most!

[@disgustingdust1584]

Hello. At the moment we are in the early days of Apple silicon. It's been, what, three years, we have the M1 and M2, and possibly M3 round the corner. Developers are only now seeing the potential of the hardware and Apple is finally pushing gaming on their platform. Hopefully we will see a resurgence of developers for Mac return, or at least game developers who understand the hardware and software to bring more games to the Mac platform, AAA or Indy. Your final point, that "the Medium" is running on Metal 2 is probably correct. As the game porting tool requires OS Sonoma. I am guessing Sonoma is the next big step in Metal 3 engine and gaming optimisation. We can only wait and see if OS Sonoma makes a difference.

[@B.D.F.]

Apple Silicon is starting to feel like the new PS3 Cell processor: Nobody seems to know how to optimize for it! Tons of memory/bandwidth, lots of computational power, but an unfamiliar pipeline. I bet half the silicon isn’t even being touched, like early PS3 games (especially ports).

[@thekenty]

Games built in Unity tend to run well on Apple Silicon

[@drzeissler]

they should have canceled this one and made native arm64/ports of the older games that do not work on AS instead!

[@drzeissler]

@@ehtasam806 This is the old dilemma in deluxe version...yes ARM has good gfx-cores but these do not compete with mid/high pc-cards that need tremendous amount of power to generate high framerates in high resolution. Older AAA Games would be very nice on AS. Wolfenstein, Doom 2016, COD-Series, FarCry, Crysis...why do they not exist...not all suffer from the 64bit apocalypse... I see NO! progress on apple within gaming-market. the devs ignore mac and apple is not willing to finance porters to do some older AAA game ports.

[@woodkid5719]

I thought you are Hamish from Epic NPC Man from VivaLaDirtLeague

[@axelgenus]

I struggled playing this game 4K@60 on my PC (Ryzen 5950X, Radeon 6900XT) so I am not really surprised it runs poorly even on a MacStudio M1 Ultra (which I own). Honestly I am kinda puzzled why they even ported a game like this which is _very_ demanding.

[@stupidvolvo]

saved me $20, cheers :>

[@theparents23]

Wen FIFA 23 please. Great job ❤

[@drzeissler]

welcome to mac-gaming 2023! casual gaming on apple-arcade with games that look like 2010 and would run on intel-igp no native AAA arm64/metal ports available, some of the very view that are available have massive issues like this one. great!

[@astenxxx8930]

Devs don't know how too optimized game that is a problem not a hardware or software

[@sn-xc7rv]

Honestly i don’t know why Apple is sponsoring these ports of graphically demanding games. Most of the mac userbase is M1 / M2, so such games are very difficult to run on those systems anyway. Why don’t they help with the more popular indie games?

[@MunkFano1]

The developers didn't bother optimizing at all... how sad

[@gatesroyale]

looks like a good game but man that frame rate sounds horrible.

[@mhossein6413]

I thought the bad porting situation that pc games have is not a thing in mac anymore because developers are collaborating with apple...

[@einerus]

It seems apple is two chip generations away from catching up to gaming capabilities.

[@Kylo_Ren_2033]

This game on PC can bring the RTX 3090 to its knees. Luckily, the RTX 4090 finally conquered this game.

[@黄小婷-c1o]

The game also sucks on pc, but I think the next Baldur's Gate 3 and Death Stranding will be well optimized

[@EverydayMacofficial]

The game has terrible performance even on monster PC with 3090. Watch Digital Foundry's review. It gets 40-50 in dual screen mode at 1080p.

[@merdoderdoo]

This game has optimization issues and demands too much performance even at Windows with great graphic cards. I don't know why they decided to import such game to a Mac. It was bound to f up from the start. No one really liked this game too so I'm really curious what they were thinking when they were putting all the hard work to this. It didn't sell enough for Windows, it's not going to sell much at Mac.

[@jihadrouani5525]

Yeah that was terrible, Apple's lack of AAA experience is showing here big time with such inconsistent frame pacing...

[@elie3423]

Face reveal :o

[@MrMacRight]

I've shown my face many times

[@BomberCrab]

So it runs worse then Borderlands 3?

[@moisterrific]

unoptimized port

[@MrLocsei]

A badly optimised game, nothing more. The graphics is not *that* amazing looking as to warrant such a sluggish performance. Not sure where the devs who ported this are wasting the rendering resources, but something's not quite right with this port. It just does not make sense.

[@MrLocsei]

even the base model M1/M2 machines have enough GPU firepower to render this level of graphics "realism" at. a locked 60 fps. Just a bad bad port - no excuses.

[@AlijahSimon]

I personally did not like the format of this video. I don’t want to see anyone’s face at the beginning of a video where I’m trying to find out information. I like when you start with b roll of the game and get right into the intro like you normally do with nice graphics and editing.

[@simply6162]

i would change the title to "The most unoptimized apple silicon game yet"

[@staraffinity]

Wow, adding GPU cores (or CPU cores for that matter) doesn't seem to do much. Especially surprised by the lack of difference going from 38 cores on M2 Max to 64 cores on M1 Max - didn't do much, did it. 🫤