Manueverability matters less when you can fire a missile that will hit your opponent before they even know you are in the airspace.

Like I’m not trying to say the F35 is perfect, its far from it…

… But dogfights almost never happen anymore.

Air to air combat is basically # of missiles, range of missiles, threat detection/target acquisition vs stealth cpabilities.

And as we are seeing in Ukraine with drones, its very likely to become … nearly Battle Star Galactica (Newer Reboot) style realtime cyberwarfare battles.

Like, if we ever get to the point of ‘Space Battles’, they’re gonna be as much remote hacking contests as they involve any kind of physical weaponry.

So basically, its enshittification.

… but with a multi role stealth aircraft.

Its very funny to me that all the people who make all the decisions and rules around how software should work… are finding out that when everything hss software in it, well, everything has software in it.

Personally I’m waiting for more custom ROMs or whatever for cars.

Oh yeah this car is unlocked, you just actually get all the features, no need to pay Ford or GM or BMW on an perpetual basis for your heated seats.

Well I mean such data does exist, or easily could, assuming its possible to just turn on an FPS counter in a game on a Mac, or overlay one, and I don’t really see any reason why it wouldn’t be possible to run at least basic benchmarking on the same game on Win/Lin/Mac.

Many games just do those things inside themselves in either a benchmarking mode, or have a console command that will display basic info like FPS.

I don’t have a Mac though, and Mac users broadly don’t appear to be interested in even basic benchmarking.

But also haha no I would not be surprised that using a KVM switch is generally a giant goddamned hassle and its generally easier to just have a few devices you move around, I have discovered that as well!

See I just grew up as poor white trash in the US.

I guess just more technically inclined than much of my fellow white trash?

But yeah, exactly… why pay for something you can get for free, safely, if you know what you are doing?

You do it because you either really, really want to support a particular game or developer, or, as Steam/Valve has been saying for like 20 years now… because the version that you are paying for is actually substantially better, is substantially easier to access.

Basically, if official market prices are so high that the risk and hassle of using a gray or black market is less than the differential between gray/black market price snd official price… you use the gray/black market.

This is a pretty well understood concept in actual, academic economics, but in the US we have an insanely corpo/finance slanted public representstion of what ‘economics’ even is.

If the fundamental framework of IP laws and market practices is inherently biased against the consumer… obviously, people are going to broadly not like that, and other people are going to just skirt around them…

The main difference between the US and Russia in say, the 90s, is that everyone in the US knew they were destined to become a millionaire (economy doing quite well) where in Russia, things were just generally being gutted and sold for scrap, under the table (economy doing quite bad).

Its the Always Sunny in Philly scene, oh you’re new poor, its easy to tell… see, we’re old poor, we know how to do this.

I’d say there is a reasonable likelihood that the broad, ongoing economic collapse of living standards for 90% of Americans will lead to a cultural tone shift.

What is the Russian term, schmekalka, something like that?

Basically: Coming up with an improvised solution based on what you already have, as opposed to figuring out how to buy some new thing for the task?

A lot of the US is going to have to think a lot more like that, otherwise they’ll just become literal debt slaves.

Like, shit, I still refuse to pay for any fixed location internet plan that charges for datacap, data limits. This is now common and widespread in the US, but is completely bullshit and unjustifiable from an actual ‘what does this cost the ISP’ perspective.

We largely lost that fight over a decade ago, but I’m still pissed about it.

Boomer behavior would be much more like being on a bus or train and taking a phone call on speakerphone.

Or just watching a video of playing music full blast without a headset or ear buds.

Which is actually something that is common amongst zoomers, very common the closer they are to an alpha.

As well as just being a shit disturber live streamer, and also streaming and driving a car at the same time.

… So yeah, I don’t think the brainrotted zombies understand ‘societal norms’ very well.

Right, as evidenced by the Stop Killing Games movement getting over a million EU citizens to do a direct democracy, all on a shoestring budget, setting up multiple NGOs to counter lobby gaming lobbyists, and pursuing a broad swath of legal avenues to secure better consumer rights and/or actually have existing consumer protection laws actually be enforced, around the planet.

Oh, wait, no, thats nothing like just whining and then acquiescing.

Sure, yeah, there are a lot of hypocritical whiners.

But there’s also a lot of people who are a bit more serious.

Alternative outcomes:

Gaming bifurcates.

Indies and certain AAs aim for the ‘good ending’, realize fancy graphics are not only harder to produce, but you’re actually just shooting yourself in the foot in terms of potential customers.

AAA on the other hand continues to double down and enshittify, figure out new ways to turn gaming into leasing and renting.

… but, as always, mostly marketing, ad campaigns, paying off “journalists” and “influencers”.

3rd potential outcome:

Something akin to lan parties/netcafes/arcades recurs.

Rent out a space, run a local to global network solution and also a miniature rendering farm.

All the actual PCs (or maybe VR headsets) are connected to cheap, thin client local machines that are then networked to the mini rendering farm.

4th potential outcome:

… nobody can actually stop people from emulating or running old, good games. ‘Piracy’ becomes as normalized in many other parts of the world as it is in Russia currently.

Hrm.

Ok.

FPS? No idea. I don’t play games for the visuals at all, and if you gifted me a high end gaming PC I still wouldn’t. It’s not a question of superiority or inferiority, it’s just down to taste.

So as I said, we would seem to agree that Mac Gamers do not have very high graphical standards, compared to PC/Linux/Console gamers.

Like uh, let me put it this way: Calling 40 FPS in Cyberpunk 77 ‘good’ at 1080p is an actual joke to me.

I can do better than that on my Steam Deck at its native resolution, and … thats a portable device.

‘Good’ to me would be over 60 fps at 2K / 1440p, like an average around 75 fps.

I’m not trying to say that games must have absurdly good graphics to be a good game, hell no, far from it.

But… when you’re actually just talking specifically about advanced graphics … it seems that you, a Mac Gamer, just don’t consider them much.

So your standards there are lower, because you just don’t value them as much.

Like how you could compare two cars for practical usefulness, and conclude car A is an overall better choice, but if you’re specifically talking about which car can go from 0-60 faster, well now car B is a the clear winner there.

… I don’t have BG3, and I tried to look up comparative numbers for BG3 on a Steam Deck, turns out Larian just actually released a Linux native version that’s significantly better than the Proton/Windows version, for Steam Deck users.

https://sportsrant.indiatimes.com/gaming/baldurs-gate-3-steam-deck-performance-guide-september-2025-update/articleshow/126670240.html

So if I had the game, what I would do, on a Deck, is up a few more of those settings from low to medium, get to a generally stable FPS just above 45, instead of aiming for 60, and then the Deck OLED at least will let you lock the frame rate at 45, but the refresh rate at 90, so in most games that are not quite fast paced, that’ll basically just ‘feel’ like 90 fps most of the time.

So you end up with a $550 portable machine that can, at least at its native settings, outperform your admittedly signifcantly older, but $1100 2017 iMac, by way of running basically mostly medium settings with a few at low.

Adjust for inflation thats like uh, Steam Deck for about $585, iMac for about $1450. And you put aftermarket (Or is it more like Bonus with Macs?) ram in it as well.

I dunno, I’m not trying to sound like an ass, I’m trying to do actual comparisons of some kind, but you don’t know the FPS, didn’t indicate a resolution…

Which again, makes sense in as much as: You don’t care that much about those things.

But its hard to do graphics comparison without such info.

I really would like an actual answer here… maybe there is some kind of way to run a graphically advanced/demanding game on Mac?

https://www.macworld.com/article/2852664/cyberpunk-2077-ultimate-edition-review.html

The game includes presets that adjust graphics settings for different Mac models, and there are some useful support pages for the Mac version at support.cdprojektred.com, which will help you to get the best performance from the game. I got a steady 40fps when running the game at 1,920 x1,200 resolution on my MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro chip, so you don’t need the latest, fastest Mac models to get good performance.

Apparently Mac Gamers do not have the highest graphical standards, if… 40 fps at basically 1080p x 1.1 counts as ‘good performance’.

You’re giving the guy a lot of grace.

Yep, I am.

I haven’t read every other response in the thread.

I dunno, he was able to admit a fault to me, that’s much better than I usually get in such a conversation as this.

I mean, Proton is also open source and… its basically a giant extension/revision of WINE.

So, my guess would be that MacOS (OSX?) is so significantly different than most Linux distros, that you’d pretty much have to develop it to work with Mac libraries, whereas its currently developed and tuned to work with Linux libraries.

Out of genuine curiosity:

What is the most graphically complex game you’ve got working on a Mac?

FPS?

Resolution?

Hardware?

No, you basically cannot use Proton on Mac to anywhere near the degree it currently supports games on Linux.

Long story short, they differ a lot.

Think of like… a bear, dog, and cat all have a single common ancestor if you go back far enough.

… But they are significantly different from each other in a wide variety of ways.

It seems that there are some semi-comparable ways to do more gaming on a Mac.

1. Dual Boot Asahi Linux, then use Proton from Asahi, running Windows games via Proton on Linux, on Mac hardware.

https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2025/02/07/proton-asahi-linux-mac-gaming-tutorial.html

Seems to technically work, but basically to me it sounds like where Proton on non-Mac baremetal Linux was around 4-5 years ago, ie, theres a lot of work to be done, but, some things work reasonably well.

2. Port the game to Mac yourself with the Mac game porting toolkit.

https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/

Somewhat hilariously to me, many Mac/Tech media sites have described this as ‘Basically Proton for Mac’, which uh, no, its not, not even close.

Proton takes Windows hooks and calls and translates them in realtime to execute in realtime on a Linux system. Only non instant thing is building up a shader cache, but I’m pretty sure you do that on Windows too.

This… is porting a game.

Granted, it is impressive that any kind of automated tool/system like this even exists at all, but uh, this is more like a guided recompiling of the entire game binary to something that will run natively on a Mac.

So that is… not any kind of a realtime translation layer.

As best I can tell, results for how well it actually works are roughly:

Most of the time it does produce a valid, working game binary, but performance is often terrible for more graphically complex games.

I guess if any Mac users have more info or corrections to this, I’m all ears.

I know much more about linux and windows than Mac, so I may be missing something or innacurate.

I would assume, though I could be wrong, that by not challenging it, they either tacitly conceeded the point, or, perhaps did not even mean to say it in the way they said it, with the meaning/implication that phrasing has, as they have said English is their third language, not their first.

I didn’t expect to catch one in the wild, but evidently they just can’t help themselves.

Sure, yeah, there’s a test.

Papers please!

Mhm, I see, yes, voted for the child murdering rapist pedophile conman.

Ah.

Not a great look.

Anyway, you’e been expelled from the ‘Leftism Understander’ class due to being an obvious idiot troll, please collect your things or they will be equitably redistributed amongst the remaining students, according to their need.

Well its not like you’d have any understanding of what is or isn’t really leftist.

Here’s a hint:

Opposing massive government handouts to huge megacorporations.

Opposing biased legal standards and tax structures that massively favor the wealthy being able to accumulate more wealth, at the expense of the poor.

Opposing idiotic broad general tariffs that have historically and are currently exacerbating an ongoing Great Depression.

But, fascists love doing all those things, because they are economically illiterate and/or openly, brazenly corrupt.

And now, for more vocab, if you oppose these fascist policies, you are now anti-fascist, otherwise known as antifa.

But fascists cannot comprehend the idea that anyone could disagree with them, and also have the gall to continue being alive, so they label everyone who does as a terrorist, and have lately started executing such people in the street.

Ok.

I was talking about 2020.

The one before the one you are talking about.

Also, most ‘die hard leftists’ were disgusted by Kamala’s pro-Genocide stance… the Dems did basically everything they possibly could to obfuscate and deny and/or justify that, leftists were fucking furious about it.

And a pretty good deal of actual leftists were saying ‘all these economic numbers that politicians and the media are touting are bullshit, they’re incomplete, they are not reflective of reality’.

And well now we have all the job revisions and yep that was correct, I think the BLS has now ‘un addded’ something like 2-3 million jobs between 2022 and present.

You’re conflating liberals and leftists, which betrays that you have no idea what a leftist is.

Its liberals that fall in line with standard corporate Dem talking points.

Leftists tend to challenge and critique them.

Any time!

Thanks for appreciating my data dump lol.

I mean, I thought this was common knowledge, but apparently it isn’t.

I’m also an autistic data analyst type of person, so I just … actually do consume data and reports and such basically for fun.

But anyway yeah, the entire right wing narrative on this is wholly ass backwards and based on not just lies, but a literal inversion of reality.

Fascists gonna fascist.