Unless you count making a large chunk of their users happy, which they clearly don’t.
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M1 Max Chip May Have More Raw GPU Performance Than a PlayStation 5
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I'm a bit late to this post but I have a few questions:
1)What's the big hoopla that the GPU performance is so much better than the regular M1 or Intel Macbook Pros? I can see some Macbook Pro users wanting to do professional video editing but wouldn't the vast majority of pro video editing Mac users want an iMac with a larger screen?...or are these professionals dumping thousands into multiple external displays attached to their Macbook Pros because the iMacs have some kind of display and/or GPU performance limitation?
2)I'm curious why Apple didn't release an M1 Pro/Max that had more CPU cores. There have been 16 mobile CPUs for quite some time now that are obviously aimed at pro users for about $1500 in the Wintel world. Me? My need for crunching power is CPU, not GPU. I'm really not running video intensive apps nor am I pushing to displays above 1920x1080.
3)Is the M1 Pro simply the M1 but with 2 more CPU cores (and various more GPU cores)? Not that Apple would admit it, but I didn't see any clear definition of the M1 vs. M1 Pro in the Youtube video beyond cores and transistors.
Overall I'm curious why Apple is stressing the GPU performance so much. I'd love to hear some real-world, detailed examples of why/how/when all the extra 16/24/32 GPU cores are going to help.
1)What's the big hoopla that the GPU performance is so much better than the regular M1 or Intel Macbook Pros? I can see some Macbook Pro users wanting to do professional video editing but wouldn't the vast majority of pro video editing Mac users want an iMac with a larger screen?...or are these professionals dumping thousands into multiple external displays attached to their Macbook Pros because the iMacs have some kind of display and/or GPU performance limitation?
2)I'm curious why Apple didn't release an M1 Pro/Max that had more CPU cores. There have been 16 mobile CPUs for quite some time now that are obviously aimed at pro users for about $1500 in the Wintel world. Me? My need for crunching power is CPU, not GPU. I'm really not running video intensive apps nor am I pushing to displays above 1920x1080.
3)Is the M1 Pro simply the M1 but with 2 more CPU cores (and various more GPU cores)? Not that Apple would admit it, but I didn't see any clear definition of the M1 vs. M1 Pro in the Youtube video beyond cores and transistors.
Overall I'm curious why Apple is stressing the GPU performance so much. I'd love to hear some real-world, detailed examples of why/how/when all the extra 16/24/32 GPU cores are going to help.
Looking at Apples different "tests" it is actually fun to see the Adobe Photoshop test.
32-Core 2.1 x
16-Core 2.0 x
So that tells me that Adobe is not very good at multi-threaded GPU development
(Which we already knew)
To compare - Affinity Photo
32 Core 4.5x
16 Core 2.9x
Increase there is much more in line with "normal" expectations
32-Core 2.1 x
16-Core 2.0 x
So that tells me that Adobe is not very good at multi-threaded GPU development
(Which we already knew)To compare - Affinity Photo
32 Core 4.5x
16 Core 2.9x
Increase there is much more in line with "normal" expectations
It will hold 10.5TFLOPS sustained just as much as an RTX 3090 can hold it's advertised 35.5TFLOPS sustained... which means basically never.
These peak throughputs represent ideal circumstances of what the shader cores can do. To achieve them you need to give each of the shader cores a multiply+add operation every single cycle (a multiply+add counts lie two flops but it's actually one operation on modern GPUs, so you can compute maximal throughput as 2*number of cores*clock). You are never going to reach them in real world because real world algorithms do not consists of perfect chains of multiply+add — it's a mix of various operations, waiting for data and various other delays.
In real-world stuff, M1 GPU delivers probably somewhere around 1TFLOPs on average, while an RTX 3090 delivers 10TFLOPS (or even less, depending on how much integer operations you have there).
My only issue with that is a company like blizzard with billions of dollars can afford to pay a couple engineers to port their games to Mac… the fact that they drop Mac is not about money. It’s about mindset… longtime Mac game dev no longer cares about Mac. They only support M1 WoW because they don’t want to piss fans off.. but they don’t care about Diablo 2 fans etc
I hear this and sounds good on paper. Yet iOS is where the money is for devs vs android which has the market share.
It stands to reason devs would want to target mac users who also tend to spend the most. So I don’t think it’s demographics. It’s more likely the hassle. And the fact that macs had poor gaming hardware in past.
If there’s a pool of mac users out there dying to game then you’d think just even one showcase game would make some money. Built for m1 pro and max. Have to be patient because the transition just started.
You took the words right out of my mouth.
I did order a 14", 32gb, 2tb, Max 24 core yesterday.. BUT..
The 'retro' 2009 look, the feet, the HDMI are all negatives to me.
The notch is nothing that bothers me in any big way. Perhaps it even is setting the stage for future models to get FaceID and Apple wanted to get the notch design in place for that path.
Apple never really cared about gaming, until they saw that most of AppStore revenue is actually coming from games, rather than all other apps combined. And then they they created Apple Arcade to earn some extra revenue from that.
I think Apple underestimated the amount of people that game on their computer and the huge potential the Mac has to grow if it were a decent gaming machine. Apple could have easily released a separate MBP with specific variation of M1 made for gaming. For example 32-cores GPU paired with 6-core CPU in 14 inch design and black aluminium finish could be a killer option for many, especially if it is below or around 1799$ price tag and include lifetime subscription for Apple Arcade. Include native ARM support for Steam's 20 most played games, and you have the best gaming laptop on the market. Instead, Apple focuses on video/photo/sound editing software that are used only by a fraction of total users.
I think Apple underestimated the amount of people that game on their computer and the huge potential the Mac has to grow if it were a decent gaming machine. Apple could have easily released a separate MBP with specific variation of M1 made for gaming. For example 32-cores GPU paired with 6-core CPU in 14 inch design and black aluminium finish could be a killer option for many, especially if it is below or around 1799$ price tag and include lifetime subscription for Apple Arcade. Include native ARM support for Steam's 20 most played games, and you have the best gaming laptop on the market. Instead, Apple focuses on video/photo/sound editing software that are used only by a fraction of total users.
Then what is the point of this discussion? If iOS is where all the games are, there is no reason to keep mentioning AAA gaming on Macs because AAA gaming is dying? Macs already can run iOS and iPad apps natively, so it can run those games if the developer just enables the option. Even the Mac mini has a better GPU than the iPhone.
Price * watts / teraflop might be a better metric than their power efficiency metric. Just saying.
I am not a console gamer, but I can see most teenagers in my family abandoning consoles for a gaming windows rig. They love Macs for productivity but can’t play games on them. Now with M1 Pro and Max processors. Apple has an opportunity to get in that market segment with a new Mac Mini. They would also benefit getting more teenagers into the Apple ecosystem.
More TF than PS5, but not a single M1 native game (except iOS games)
World of Warcraft has been native M1 since somewhere around last December or January.
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Probably because it would make for a niche laptop. The 10 cores on the M1 Pro/Max already are as fast as enthusiast-level 10 or 12-core CPUs, so that's quite some performance you are getting in a laptop.
Another problem might be yields. I have no idea about these things, but I was told that GPU clusters, by the nature of their transistors, tend to have less mistakes in the silicon during chip production. I don't know how this works so please take this with a big grain of salt.
M1 Pro is M1 with for more performance cores and two less efficiency cores, yes. I mean, this has not been 100% confirmed, but it's fairly certain at this point.
A lot of workflows are GPU-focused nowadays. Apple is positioning these machines as creative pro workstations. They are also very good at doing stats and machine learning of various kind, if your software supports Apple Silicon.
Not sure how you can prove this statement.
I mean they’re selling Macs with zero issues, so apparently they are keeping their users happy.
Don’t confuse complaints in a forum to real life users.
So please give me your detailed explanation. As i’ve said earlier I would love to see big budget games on the Mac. This is not about hardware but rather userbase and the PC has that advantage. If people want to game on a laptop you can spend thousands and buy an Alienware.
I think the problem is that the pool of Mac users that want to game is smaller than those users think, just very vocal. I’m sure Apple has better data than forum users on the interest in gaming on Mac… Gaming on Mac is only relevant if you can convince people that are already gamers to switch to Mac. And that requires products with a performance to price ratio that will cannibalize the lucrative high end market.
I don't see why they would, even if thee chips are as powerful or more powerful, they still need to develop the game for it.
Ultimately how big will the pool of people who want to play on M1 Macs be that do not already have a console or windows pc? As it stands barrier to entry for a M1 Pro machine is $2k, so it's likely that those people have the cash to have a secondary machine that is gaming capable anyway.
Seems like by the time we get there cloud gaming might be more robust as well.
Explanation on what? I’m just pointing out that your comparison is irrelevant.
I mean, when they showcased one of the iPhones running the unreal engine back in the day, that was really impressive since no other smartphone at that time was that powerful. Plus it held the promise that with such an engine we could have console quality games on our phones. A Switch has less power and runs very nice games.
Now running DOTA or LOL at 120 fps does NOT impress. If Apple came with a AAA that was a similar visual showcase, blowing all the competition, then it would be a true feat. Something that would get a solid 60PFS in a RTX game like the Asus ROG G15.
If Apple could get me this laptop with good game support and without the fugly design or the usual shortcomings of these PC gaming laptops, I would sell my kidneys in a heartbeat. (with that caveat that there would not be many heartbeats left for me after that...)
Are you suggesting that Apple buys every single game studio and forces them to make games for Mac to make their user happy? That's quite radical