Valve has announced it’s ending support for macOS for SteamVR.
SteamVR has ended OSX support so our team can focus on Windows and Linux.
We recommend that OSX users continue to opt into the SteamVR [macos] branches for access to legacy builds.
Users can opt into a branch by right-clicking on SteamVR in Steam, and selecting Properties… -> Betas.
Apple announced SteamVR coming to the Mac at WWDC in 2017, so support from Valve lasted for a mere three years. This shouldn’t come as a surprise though, since the macOS ecosystem simply isn’t geared towards gaming and VR in any way, shape, or form.
Most Mac users have to settle for Intel integrated graphics, and even the Mac users with a dedicated video card have to settle for subpar and overpriced AMD cards, since Apple refuses to support NVIDIA. On top of that, Apple has deprecated OpenGL and wants developers to use their proprietary Metal API instead. In a world where most game developers use DirectX or OpenGL/Vulkan, that just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
And let’s not forget that the writing is on the wall for macOS as a general purpose operating system anyway, since Apple will most likely use the move to ARM processors in Macs to further lock down macOS, making it more like iOS.
While macOS might be more popular than Linux in absolute numbers, the cold and harsh truth is that the Linux userbase simply has a far larger group of skilled developers, programmers, and tinkerers willing to put the effort into making non-native games work on Linux and to improve support for things like VR devices. These are exactly the kind of people Apple seems to have a deep-rooted disdain for.
Expect more of these kinds of announcements over the coming years, as game companies (and other developers) have to decide whether or not to support an isolated and locked down platform like macOS on ARM – a platform without first-party OpenGL or Vulkan support, with a steward actively pushing you to use a proprietary API that you can’t use anywhere else.
“since Apple refuses to support NVIDIA”
This has nothing to do with refusing to support NVIDIA.
It’s the result of NVIDIA beeing total dicks to their OEMs during bumpgate.
Im surprised that hp and Lenovo still put up with NVIDIA.
smashIt,
Nvidia are dicks, but regardless of that high end apple professionals have more to loose than nvidia if apple won’t support nvidia & cuda. I’m sure hp and lenovo are interested in these professionals.
So NVIDIA royally f*ed up 15 years ago and Apple still doesn’t want to forgive them? Is that what you’re saying? And it’s not as if NVIDIA deliberately screwed up OEMs or end customers (actually the end customers were punished a lot more than OEMs – many laptops died past warranty which meant OEMs were actually happy to offer new products to their customers).
Also please start counting the number of Apple f* ups so far. It’ll be more than one – I promise you.
In short: your theory doesn’t hold any grounds. Looks like you’re an Apple devotee and simply hate anything that’s not endorsed by the Apple HQ.
“Looks like you’re an Apple devotee and simply hate anything that’s not endorsed by the Apple HQ.”
WOW!
That’s something I would have never expected to read 😀
Thanks for the laugh 🙂
But here is a nice video for you about nvidia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE-YM_3YBm0
Thom Holwerda,
I was kind of surprised they didn’t put their weight behind vulkan, that would have been something many of us could get behind. Part of me suspects that apple wants to distance itself from portable APIs because they help users & devs treat mobile phones as generic commodities.
You’re probably going to get criticized for speculating, but there are some of us who feel there’s a good chance apple will impose new restrictions while making/keeping the x86 “pro” devices too expensive for most consumers.
I’m very glad Valve has invested so much in linux, it helps build up game catalogs that truthfully would otherwise be lacking. I’m not really sure why Valve would drop support for macs. Do we know how much revenue comes from macs versus linux (versus windows)?
https://www.quora.com/Video-Game-Industry-What-percentage-of-Valves-Steam-revenue-comes-from-Mac-users?share=1
I wouldn’t drop support for mac on mere speculation. It’s possible they have some privileged information on the upcoming macs the rest of us aren’t privy to, and this is the reason they decided it was a bad idea to continue support? Keep in mind that window microsoft announced it’s own platform restrictions Gabe Newell spoke out against them.
The problem on macOS is right out in front – Apple doesn’t care about the part of the games market that Valve is in, and makes everything hard, seemingly on purpose. On Windows and Linux for example, drivers are shipped by partners with patches for games. On Apple, they are not allowed to do so – and the drivers often become stale as a result. Which means games publishers have to work extra hard to support Apple’s platform. Who wants to do that for a diminishing market – and Valve is in a particular spot, because Apple wants to compete with their own App Store.
Given all these constraints, it makes perfect sense for Valve to not want to put in the extra effort in a performance sensitive area like VR. Now what Valve really needs is a headset that can compete with Oculus Quest…
Outside of macOS issues, I wonder if this is a bad sign for VR in general. I have played and love Half Life: Alyx – but I have to say, the nausea is real! That is the thing that will keep VR from every really shining.
CaptainN-,
The halflife series could use an ending. preferably sticking to it’s roots with a singleplayer narrative. But as I understand it valve makes so much more money with steam that there’s no financial motivation to invest in traditional games like they used to. The technology has advanced so much since the last episode. I haven’t seen the VR game and I’m not sure if it’s considered a sequel? I’m sure it’s very immersive due to the VR, but I doubt I’ll ever get into VR. Not that I was gaming much anyways.
I suffered from motion sickness at first, quite badly. I perservered though and don’t feel it at all now.
apple wants to distance itself from portable APIs
No, Apple actually has a nice, portable API. Obviously it is portable only between Apple platforms.
As a game developer, I’m pretty comfortable with Apple’s decision to only do Metal.
The fact is, the people nowadays do not need to touch low-level API at all. Use Unreal, Unity, CryEngine.
Those, who for some reason want it, are able to support one more API. Not a big deal.
viton,
Technically you have a point, it’s “portable” in the same sense that directx is portable to xbox, but it’s not a good choice if you don’t want to be locked to a specific vendor’s platforms. If you can’t port it to different vendors then it’s not portable in the sense that I meant it. Is metal even open source, or is it proprietary like directx?
Granted, we have 3rd parties to provide new abstractions on top of apple’s API, but I still think apple’s decision to not adapt the next generation open standard is a strategic move against open APIs.
Yeah, DX is portable between Windows and Xbox. These are the platforms Microsoft aiming for.
Metal is not open source, but the point is that Metal uses underlying mechanisms of Apple’s OS and Apple’s programming languages. “Open standards” are alien to Apple world. And vise versa.
viton,
That was sort of my point though, “Open standards are alien to Apple world. And vise versa.” because apple wants to distance itself from others.. They could support the next gen vulkan API or even position MSL as a multiplatform open standard. MSL is built on top of clang and LLVM, which allows for portability across numerous platforms. It’s less about technological incompatibilities and more about corporate politics.
I recently switched completely to Linux (PopOS!) for my beloved Yoga 730 15IKB laptop, and I’ll never go back to Windows, and I don’t even really miss macOS (and especially not the idiotic touchbar and nil-travel clacky stutteery keys of the MacBook Pro) though I still need it to be able to develop for iOS… Hopefully XCode on iPad OS will eventually not compleetely suck, and then I won’t need or miss macOS any more.
I will say though nVidia aree total dicks. That seems to be the primary reason I can’t use the far superior Wayland when I have nVidia eenabled (Xorg is slow/laggy, and apps like Firefox won’t enable GPU acceleration due to inconsistencies and security problems, etc.). I’m curious if AMD with a decent discrete Radeon chip is any better?
I will say though – gaming is absolutely amazing on Linux these days. I can even run many Windows games with minimal effort through Proton or Lutris – and most games run better under Linux – smoother, more responsive, etc. There’s no reason to stick it out on Windows any more.
(I’m typing this on a MacBook Pro – hence the double “e”s everywhere…)
mplayer/mpv has offered HW video acceleration using VDPAU for almost ten years now. Zero issues with it as well. But yeah, “bad” NVIDIA drivers and “bad” X.org. Doesn’t really help when you’re parroting something without knowing anything.
And I’m so sorry but I’ve been using Linux with NVIDIA GPUs since around 2000 and I’ve never experienced “slow/laggy”.
Instead of saying something disrespectful like, “Doesn’t really help when you’re parroting something without knowing anything.” maybe you could help me understand by sharing your knowledge. Why is hardware acceleration disabled by default in Firefox on Linux when using nVidia? Why can’t I use Wayland? Everything works great on the Intel GPU. What makes nVidia unique?
“I’m very glad Valve has invested so much in linux, it helps build up game catalogs that truthfully would otherwise be lacking. I’m not really sure why Valve would drop support for macs. Do we know how much revenue comes from macs versus linux (versus windows)?”
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This is nothing new. We saw this kind of stuff with the Amiga and Atari ST when they started becoming single purpose platforms, Atari ST with MIDI,Amiga with the Video Toaster.
Thom, it’s a little grating and obviously clickbaity, bordering on trolling, to state that macOS on ARM is a locked-down OS as if it’s fact instead of speculation.
Opinion can be expressed in declarative ways. Our culture has too many lawyers…
Mac OS is already fairly locked down. For example, on 10.15 Catalina in order to distribute binary software, I need to pay for a $99/year to get a developer id and submit each binary I want to distribute to be notarized by Apple. Otherwise, the user needs to authorize running the application with an admin level account. macOS is less locked down than iOS, but I would argue that macOS is already locked down. Considering that macOS is planing on eliminating python, perl and ruby from the default install, it will be even more locked down by default.
See https://developer.apple.com/developer-id/ and https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos_release_notes/macos_catalina_10_15_release_notes#3318248