Apple's upcoming Scary Fast event could lay ground for frighteningly good AAA gaming prospects on M3 Macs

Apple's upcoming October 30 "Scary Fast" event on Halloween eve has everyone talking about what hardware announcements to expect. In all likelihood, we might see the debut of the M3 chip but the prospects of a refreshed MacBook Air 15, Mac Pro, or the Mac Studio at this moment seem quite low. That being said, there's also a good possibility that Apple spend some time emphasizing on Mac gaming.

MacRumors speculates that developments in Apple-sphere so far point to indications that we may get to hear some AAA gaming news on Macs during the keynote. Apple alluded to the Game Porting Tookit back during WWDC 2023 in June. The Game Porting Toolkit apparently simplifies the task of porting Windows games to macOS. macOS Sonoma also comes with a built-in Game Mode that prioritizes CPU and GPU performance while reducing Bluetooth and input device latency.

During its iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max announcement last month, Apple stressed a lot about the capabilities of the A17 Pro's GPU and its ability to perform hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The company touted the arrival of AAA titles such as Resident Evil: Village, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Assassin's Creed Mirage, and Death Stranding to iPhone 15 Pro models. The M3 chips could inherit the A17 Pro's GPU prowess and harness that for AAA gaming on the Mac as well. Resident Evil: Village is already available for Apple silicon Macs and will launch on the iPad and iPhone on October 30.

Capcom, and possibly Sony, could take the stage to announce additional Mac games. This could be one reason why Apple has chosen to stream the Scary Fast keynote at an odd time of 5 PM PT, which coincides with Capcom's business hours in Japan.

All this is still speculation, and we will eventually know what's on Apple's mind come October 30, but AAA gaming on the Mac is not out of the realm of possibility at this moment. Who knows? Apple may be even working an Apple TV-like game console box.

Of course, other factors such as Apple's ability to incentivize devs to port their game to the Mac, the efficacy of the Metal API stack vis-à-vis DirectX or even the PlayStation's libgnm, and market factors that determine the RoI of developing a macOS port will all play a role in determining the success of Mac AAA gaming.

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