Future for Mac games in M1 era

[Homy]

Never.

Can't wait for benchmarks though. At some point they claimed 7x faster than Intel iGPU?!? That would be disappointing. Their "x-times faster than" was a mess to be honest. They also played the power card again, showing that Notebooks with dGPU are still faster, but require more power. Question is, how much faster are they? Are they talking RTX5000? 3080? 3060? Curious to see real work benchmarks. We already know the M-series is fantastic when it comes to power consumption.

The Unity-guy was funny though, he looked like "They can't have UE5, so they had to invited me instead". 😂 What the "showed" was more like the usual tablet/phone games based on Unity.

On a side note, looks like the 16" comes with a 140W power supply. That's more than the old 16" Intel + AMD GPU. 😲

A very interesting thing is the number of execution units. It's huge compared to M1.

M1: 16 billion transistors, 128 execution units, 2,6 TFLOP, 200 GB/s memory bandwidth
M1 Pro: 33.7 billion transistors, 2048 execution units, 5.2 TFLOP, 200 GB/s memory bandwidth
M1 Max: 57 billion transistors, 4096 execution units, 10.4 TFLOP, 400 GB/s memory bandwidth

Apple graphs compare the M1 Pro and Max to Lenovo Legion 5 82JW0012US with RTX 3050 Ti M 4 GB and Razer Blade 15 Advanced RZ09-0409CE53with RTX 3080 M 16 GB.

In their graphs M1 Max performs better than 3080 M!!

 

[diamond.g]

Never.

Can't wait for benchmarks though. At some point they claimed 7x faster than Intel iGPU?!? That would be disappointing. Their "x-times faster than" was a mess to be honest. They also played the power card again, showing that Notebooks with dGPU are still faster, but require more power. Question is, how much faster are they? Are they talking RTX5000? 3080? 3060? Curious to see real work benchmarks. We already know the M-series is fantastic when it comes to power consumption.

The Unity-guy was funny though, he looked like "They can't have UE5, so they had to invited me instead". 😂 What the "showed" was more like the usual tablet/phone games based on Unity.

On a side note, looks like the 16" comes with a 140W power supply. That's more than the old 16" Intel + AMD GPU. 😲

Yeah I thought the Unity thing was interesting, especially considering Unity's HRDP setting leaves out things like Ray Tracing (I guess if you believe the docs it leaves all AMD hardware out as well) on macOS. I suppose we will know more when the hardware comes for folks next week.

I would be curious to know how much faster Metro Exodus Enhanced is (no more of this Medium/Low garbage Ultra settings or bust!!!), same for SotTR. Is Genshin Impact available for the Mac yet?

 

[diamond.g]

A very interesting thing is the number of execution units. It's huge compared to M1.

M1: 16 billion transistors, 128 execution units, 2,6 TFLOP, 200 GB/s memory bandwidth
M1 Pro: 33.7 billion transistors, 2048 execution units, 5.2 TFLOP, 200 GB/s memory bandwidth
M1 Max: 57 billion transistors, 4096 execution units, 10.4 TFLOP, 400 GB/s memory bandwidth

Apple graphs compare the M1 Pro and Max to Lenovo Legion 5 82JW0012US with RTX 3050 Ti M 4 GB and Razer Blade 15 Advanced RZ09-0409CE53with RTX 3080 M 16 GB.

In their graphs M1 Max performs better than 3080 M!!

Are you sure your EU count is right for M1? Shouldn't it be 1024?

 

[Homy]

Are you sure your EU count is right for M1? Shouldn't it be 1024?

 

[GrumpyCoder]

Apple graphs compare the M1 Pro and Max to Lenovo Legion 5 82JW0012US with RTX 3050 Ti M 4 GB and Razer Blade 15 Advanced RZ09-0409CE53with RTX 3080 M 16 GB.

Where do you get this info?

Here's what they showed:

Still showing better performance for "High-end PC laptop graphics". But of course it's meaningless without specifying what it actually is.

 

[Homy]

Where do you get this info?

Here's what they showed:
View attachment 1870037
View attachment 1870040
Still showing better performance for "High-end PC laptop graphics". But of course it's meaningless without specifying what it actually is.

Both in the youtube video at the bottom of the screen and on Apple's website. Yeah, better performance at 165W compared to 55 for M1 Max.

 

[Homy]

Where do you get this info?

Here's what they showed:
View attachment 1870037
View attachment 1870040
Still showing better performance for "High-end PC laptop graphics". But of course it's meaningless without specifying what it actually is.

Better than Razer with 3080 M:

 

[diamond.g]

View attachment 1870020

So they changed what the call an execution unit going from M1 to M1 Pro? Or are we confusing ALUs? @leman

 

[GrumpyCoder]

Both in the youtube video at the bottom of the screen and on Apple's website. Yeah, better performance at 165W compared to 55 for M1 Max.

View attachment 1870043

Ah, I missed that, thank you. So it is a little slower than the MSI then. Still waiting for some real world benchmark and see how it will perform in the end.

 

[diamond.g]

Ah, I missed that, thank you. So it is a little slower than the MSI then. Still waiting for some real world benchmark and see how it will perform in the end.

It is a shame UL hasn’t ported Firestrike or Port Royal to Mac yet. We are stuck with GFXBench (bleh) and Wildlands as tools for cross comparison for Rasterization performance.
Though for the actual MacBook Pro target audience they really only care about compute (GeekBench) performance. So 🤷🏽‍♂️

 

[maflynn]

So now that there is "suitable" hardware wonder how long/if the "big" publishers will get on board with brining "Traditional" AAA games over to the Mac.

<Removed. I was wrong >

you think a AAA company is going a ton of money to make a mac version when Apple's only "capable" machines are two high end laptops meant for professionals?

 

[Homy]

They only compared their GPU to an integrated GPU (and we don't even know which one). They didn't mention any ray tracing, or specifics on the GPU power other then generic terms and how much less power it consumes.

Didn't you bother to read all the info? They didn't only compared to iGPU. The Razer and MSI they compared to have 3080 M 16 GB.

 

[maflynn]

Didn't you bother to read all the info? T

Nope, I didn't know they're was info to read. I only saw the presentation

 

[Homy]

Nope, I didn't know they're was info to read. I only saw the presentation

I literally posted the info above your post.

 

[Bodhitree]

Well this is the thing. If you look at the price points its clear that a MacBook Pro with M1 Max and 32 cores of GPU is not meant to be a consumer device. It's not going to compete with Steam Deck or the PS5, its nowhere near the same price class and therefore the market for the number of games sold is not going to be interesting to games publishers, hence there won't be parity in dev resources. Thats the basic equation.

Now an M1 Max Mac mini at say 1200 dollars might change that some.

 

[maflynn]

I literally posted the info above your post.

And I literally didn't see your post - so shoot me

 

[diamond.g]

<Removed. I was wrong >

you think a AAA company is going a ton of money to make a mac version when Apple's only "capable" machines are two high end laptops meant for professionals?

CDPR made Cyberpunk with a game engine that can really only be taken advantage of with a high end card. We all know that the high end card market (on Desktop or Notebook) is very small compared to the overall market, yet they spent resources to take advantage of it anyways.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

It is a shame UL hasn’t ported Firestrike or Port Royal to Mac yet. We are stuck with GFXBench (bleh) and Wildlands as tools for cross comparison for Rasterization performance.
Though for the actual MacBook Pro target audience they really only care about compute (GeekBench) performance. So 🤷🏽‍♂️

It's too early to say. There's already a thread in the AS forum pointing out the obvious, in some areas it exceeds the 3080M, while in others it's only half the performance. We'll have to wait and see what "real" benchmarks tell us. I have no doubt however they will be stronger on video/photo editing performance as that's the primary market Apple is targeting. Everything else is a bonus.

you think a AAA company is going a ton of money to make a mac version when Apple's only "capable" machines are two high end laptops meant for professionals?

I don't think it's changing anything. macOS market share among gamers is still too low for manufacturers to bother. We'll see what happens in the future.

Right now, that 32-core GPU machine doesn't seem so bad, as Nvidia is pretty much sold out. However, considering normal (non chip shortage) pricing, the $3299 price tag doesn't seem so good. I think that's the cheapest config available for the 32-core GPU version.

I'm more curious now what's going to end up in the next MacBook Air. I find the new design horrible, so there's hope for the next MBA. If they then add full Linux support in a VM + eGPU passthrough so I can use Nvidia GPUs, it's a sale. I just can't do without Nvidia software/tools, sorry. Whatever Apple offers, it's just a bonus for me at this point. Oh and no MacMini Pro... that darn 2 monitor limit on the current one.

 

[l0stl0rd]

Never.

Can't wait for benchmarks though. At some point they claimed 7x faster than Intel iGPU?!? That would be disappointing. Their "x-times faster than" was a mess to be honest. They also played the power card again, showing that Notebooks with dGPU are still faster, but require more power. Question is, how much faster are they? Are they talking RTX5000? 3080? 3060? Curious to see real work benchmarks. We already know the M-series is fantastic when it comes to power consumption.

The Unity-guy was funny though, he looked like "They can't have UE5, so they had to invited me instead". 😂 What the "showed" was more like the usual tablet/phone games based on Unity.

On a side note, looks like the 16" comes with a 140W power supply. That's more than the old 16" Intel + AMD GPU. 😲

140W might be to charge it to 50% in 30 min

 

[leman]

Careful with that comparison with the 3080 though. It’s likely pro software performance, not games. In games the Max should be somewhere between 3060 and 3070 (mobile).

 

[leman]

CDPR made Cyberpunk with a game engine that can really only be taken advantage of with a high end card. We all know that the high end card market (on Desktop or Notebook) is very small compared to the overall market, yet they spent resources to take advantage of it anyways.

Cyberpunk could run on M1 without problems (just not on highest settings) if they bothered to port it to Metal.

 

[diamond.g]

Cyberpunk could run on M1 without problems (just not on highest settings) if they bothered to port it to Metal.

I mean it “runs” on a Xbox One, so I would hope the M1 (with twice the power) could cope, lol.

Or to put it another way. Metro Exodus on the Mac comes with a whole other rendering engine that you pay for but cannot use even though Apple has been selling hardware (3 months) and has an API for it (2 years).

 

[Homy]

So they changed what the call an execution unit going from M1 to M1 Pro? Or are we confusing ALUs? @leman

So that was per GPU core apparently, which I didn't know but now they showed a total number instead, hence my confusion. You were right about 1024 (128x8).

 

[diamond.g]

So that was per GPU core apparently, which I didn't know but now they showed a total number instead, hence my confusion. You were right about 1024 (128x8).

No worries.

 

[ErikGrim]

<I was wrong >

For posterity.