Apple has big plans for its Mac computers to carve out a larger slice of the half-a-trillion-dollar video games business, pairing powerful new chips with developer tools it hopes will attract the best and brightest.

Games are closely tied to the history of Apple’s home computers, but the modern Mac has largely abandoned the medium until recently. According to the latest data from Steam, the dominant PC games marketplace, around 96.5 per cent of players are on Windows. MacOS users account for just 1.5 per cent, with the remaining 2 per cent on Linux.

Apple wants to make the Mac as popular for gaming as it is for creative work.

From a macro view, addressing this will be vital for Apple for two reasons. First, video games are increasingly important both commercially and culturally, and help inform people’s decisions of what hardware to buy. Second, Apple’s computers are already bumping up against a ceiling when it comes to the creative professional market, having more or less dominated the segment. Video games will be integral to growing their popularity with a more mainstream audience.

Ever since the introduction of the first Apple Silicon chip for Macs, the M1, gaming has become a more prominent part of the company’s sales pitch and unveiling events. All the Macs Apple currently sells use Apple Silicon, with the M2 or M3 in everything from the MacBook Air to the desktop Mac Pro.

Doug Brooks, Apple Mac marketing manager, said this meant all new Macs were ready to provide great gaming experiences out of the box.

“I’m really excited about how much performance it’s brought to our very mainstream high-volume systems … like the new iMac or the 14-inch MacBook Pro,” he said.

“And as we continue to build more and more momentum with gaming, we are just going to find more users being able to tap into that horsepower.”

The M3 specifically, like the A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro, has several specific features that benefit professional modelling and graphics production but are also hugely beneficial for games. These include hardware ray tracing for more realistic lighting, mesh shading for generating geometry, and dynamic caching which lets the system more efficiently assign resources between the graphics, processor and memory.