Tonight I was truly intrigued by some of Apple’s product announcements and one announcement that caught my attention was Apple now kind of leaning towards gaming on its desktop computers. Isn’t this surprising? Does Apple finally care about desktop gaming again?
Virtual Reality. Steam. Unity. Unreal. External graphics.
They’re not words you’d usually expect Apple to utter during the Mac portion of a press conference — the company has all but ignored desktop gaming for years. But it just announced it will natively support all of those things at the 2017 Worldwide Developers Conference.
Apple is now working with Valve to bring the Steam VR platform to its desktop computers. It showed off an official Star Wars virtual reality demo on stage, one where a presenter used the HTC Vive headset and motion controllers to create a VR scene, manipulating TIE fighters and summoning Darth Vader.
Where did Apple get a computer powerful enough to run such a demo? Well, it turns out the whole demo was running on a new iMac — and there’ll be a couple of ways for an iMac to reach that level of potency.
For one, there’s the just-announced iMac Pro, which will be available with AMD’s new Radeon Vega graphics — and up to a ridiculous new 18-core CPU.
Apple will offer its own Thunderbolt 3 enclosure with an AMD Radeon RX 580 (a VR-capable card, I might add) to developers building for Mac.
In addition, Apple says it’s working to bring the Unity and Unreal 3D game engines to MacOS.
Before you get too excited, do note that Apple didn’t explicitly say the word “game” during this segment of the press conference. The tech might be aimed at 3D content creators instead of gamers, who need more powerful hardware and VR headsets to best develop their games, movies and other forms of media. (Those folks complained about VR support being absent from the last MacBook Pro.)
Still, Apple did introduce these things at a developer conference. Developers are the target audience. Perhaps Apple will talk about gaming a bit later on.
