Mesh shaders & ray tracing

The key technologies for the future of games on Apple devices

- Cliff Joseph

YOU WILL LEARN

About mesh shaders and ray tracing, and their use in games and computer graphics

Key fact

Most PCs designed for playing games have a main computer chip, known as the CPU (central processing unit), and a separate graphics card or GPU (graphics processing unit) that handles demanding graphics work. In contrast, Apple’s M-series of processors use a design known as SoC – System on a Chip – that combines multiple CPU and GPU cores in a single piece of silicon.

Key fact

Ray tracing and mesh shaders only arrived on the Mac with Apple’s M3 processor. However, many games do allow you to turn ray tracing off, so that you can still play the game on older Macs or PCs that doesn’t support it. Mesh shaders are more complex, though, and games like Alan Wake 2 will only run on PCs with graphics cards that specifically support that technology.

Apple’s recent investment in gaming has surprised many people, including old timers like yours truly who have been disappointed by Apple’s historic lack of interest in games. Cynics might suggest that this sudden enthusiasm for gaming has arrived just as Apple is looking for ways to boost sales of its expensive Vision Pro headset, but whatever the reason we should probably just make the most of it and hope that we can look forward to seeing more triple-A games arriving on the Mac at last.