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Yeah, I’ve basically been waiting for years for Apple to build a device they clearly have no interest in making.

I think M1 machines are not bad at all. And M2 is going to be better if A15 is to judge. A MacBook Air with M2 should be able to get almost to an RTX 3050 (35W) level of performance, which is good mid-range level and more than sufficient to play even the most demanding games (just not at highest settings). If there is a good jack of all trades chip, that's the M series.

P.S. For example, I've seen that Baldur's Gates 3 runs at ~50 FPS Full HD, high settings on the M1 Mini. That's not bad at all.
 
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And a complete lack of any games to take a fraction of that potential. It’s like owning a Humvee or Maserati but never leaving NYC. What’s the point as you’ll never push either anywhere close to their potential.
 
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Yes it is . That’s why Their still sold out because Sony is purposely not making enough of them.

….No, it isn’t. Just like the PS4 before it, they started profiting on each sale after 6 months…

and they aren’t purposely making too few, there’s kind of a big pandemic right now constraining supply lines and they’re STILL outselling the PS4 in spite of that.
 
Even though they are huge, they still have limited resources. They are investing those resources to create low power/high performance chips for one reason: to power stereoscopic rendering of two 8k displays while processing sensor input. Where, you ask, is that? It's right here:

This is the foundation for a much, much larger market that AAA games. It doesn't matter how it does it (maybe without raytracing or CUDA compatibility, who cares?), so long as it gets the job done. That is a good business decision, and Apple is right for pursuing it.

There is an interesting point about this: Apple's approach to variable rate shading (which is very different from Vulkan and DX12) is clearly developed with VR in mind.
 
I think M1 machines are not bad at all. And M2 is going to be better if A15 is to judge. A MacBook Air with M2 should be able to get almost to an RTX 3050 (35W) level of performance, which is good mid-range level and more than sufficient to play even the most demanding games (just not at highest settings). If there is a good jack of all trades chip, that's the M series.

P.S. For example, I've seen that Baldur's Gates 3 runs at ~50 FPS Full HD, high settings on the M1 Mini. That's not bad at all.
I don’t even care about the GPU, at all. As I explained elsewhere in the thread, I care about the upgraded keyboard and high refresh rate screen (for health and comfort reasons; I type a lot and get motion sickness pretty easy scrolling/editing on sluggish screens). Apple will only sell me the screen with the expensive GPU attached — in which case, it sure would be nice if I could get something out of it.

They used to sell the 15” machines without a fancy GPU for those who just wanted the bigger, nicer screen. I wish they still did. Or that the Mac was a viable gaming platform so I wouldn’t need a Windows gaming machine on the side.

Like I also said elsewhere, I’m starting to think hard about ripping my workflow out by the roots and replanting it in Windows. But, wow, I really don’t want to.

Lately I’ve been having to work more often on my undocked 2018 MBP and between the sluggish screen and failing butterfly keyboard, it’s not endearing itself to me. My plan was to buy a replacement, send it in for repair, and be rid of it, but it seems silly to pay so much for so much power I have no real use for.

Thus my griping about the sorry state of Mac gaming.
 
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You people fall for the dumbest marketing hype ever.
Gaming is for everyone. You can game on a pc with minimal specs and still enjoy the game. Apple is straight up not for everyone due to price. Please GTFOH with that nonsense if apple were to get into the gaming industry nonsense. They would price everyone out immediately.

Gaming consoles are designed to play video games. These new macs are designed for proRes content creation. They can also game with iOS games but we all know those games belong in the category of meh.
Some of my favorite games are on macOS too - Factorio, Stardew Valley, Terraria, Starcraft 2, Minecraft. People need to take these games into consideration when they claim macOS can't play games. All the kids and adults like me that play Minecraft are considered part of the "percentage of users gaming on Windows (or mac)". Yet people here just bring up Cyberpunk and Call of Duty. Gaming is more than just those two titles.
 
Some of my favorite games are on macOS too - Factorio, Stardew Valley, Terraria, Starcraft 2, Minecraft. People need to take these games into consideration when they claim macOS can't play games. All the kids and adults like me that play Minecraft are considered part of the "percentage of users gaming on Windows (or mac)". Yet people here just bring up Cyberpunk and Call of Duty. Gaming is more than just those two titles.

The funny thing is that when one says something like that they start coming with "but Macs don't play AAA" games. Then you say, well, there is Metro, there is Baldur's Gates 3 (both games that costed millions and millions to make), and then the reply is "oh, but that's not AAA games". I mean, what am I supposed to reply to that? If it's not some crappy EA shooter than it doesn't count or what?
 
The funny thing is that when one says something like that they start coming with "but Macs don't play AAA" games. Then you say, well, there is Metro, there is Baldur's Gates 3 (both games that costed millions and millions to make), and then the reply is "oh, but that's not AAA games". I mean, what am I supposed to reply to that? If it's not some crappy EA shooter than it doesn't count or what?
I dunno I would argue that Mac users (for Metro Exodus) are missing on a newer engine and features they paid for when they bought the game.
 
The funny thing is that when one says something like that they start coming with "but Macs don't play AAA" games. Then you say, well, there is Metro, there is Baldur's Gates 3 (both games that costed millions and millions to make), and then the reply is "oh, but that's not AAA games". I mean, what am I supposed to reply to that? If it's not some crappy EA shooter than it doesn't count or what?
Yep. I gave up on Call of Duty years ago. Cyberpunk looked interesting but after the disaster of a launch, I lost interest. But I guess its just not gaming or you are NOT a gamer unless you play Call of Duty?!

With the same line of thinking, you are not a gamer unless you play Spider-Man. So if you have an Xbox, you aren't a gamer?! Or Xbox can't play games because PS4 has exclusives? We are essentially mentioning "Windows exclusives" here just like consoles.
 
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Cyberpunk looked interesting but after the disaster of a launch, I lost interest.

I played Cyberpunk on Geforce Now and it was a big disappointment for me. Such tremendous potential, completely squandered by bad management decisions. It would have been a very beautiful game if they didn't decide to put in elements of everything that has been even remotely popular... and that awful main story that just didn't make any sence...
 
I think the one thing we haven't seen with all of this is Apple's competition and how they'll respond.

No doubt Apple's M1 Pro and M1 Max is going to spur new innovation at their rivals Intel, Samsung, Nvidia and Qualcomm. With Nvidia's upcoming acquisition of ARM and Samsung's Exynos-AMD RDNA2 chips currently being developed, it's going to be interesting to see what we'll have in store for mobile/PC gaming for the next few years.

Also Nvidia have already made some sort of preview of an ARM-Nvidia hybrid gaming laptop here. So ARM-supported games may be coming faster than you think > https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-arm-gaming-laptops/
 
Yep, they had no reason to before. Maybe now the developers will.
Nope. Nothing has changed from their perspective. The divide between Macs and PCs has only gotten wider since the switch to ARM. PCs aren't going anywhere. You want to play PC games... Yep, get a PC.

You want evidence of the decline... just look at Blizzard's support of the Mac platform as of late. It's at an all time low.

Sorry folks, no matter what is under the hood in a Mac, it's not going to change the gaming landscape in your lifetime... unless you make the games yourself.
 
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It’s indeed supported in their API, but it’s not hardware accelerated. Apple chips don’t have dedicated hardware to accelerate the BVH instructions for ray-tracing.
Sounds like Apple has some incentive to do hardware accelerated ray-tracing. Wonder when that will happen. In M2 perhaps?
 
Any thoughts on the release schedule going forward? Next year will reportedly see an 'M2' MacBook Air. Does that mean we can expect an M2 Pro and M2 Max by the end of 2022? The Mac Pro and larger iMacs are also due next year. What's in them?
 
They used to sell the 15” machines without a fancy GPU for those who just wanted the bigger, nicer screen. I wish they still did.
Actually, the configuration system is much better than it has been for many years, and reminds me very much of the system they used back in the naughties (3 "tiers", and customization in each one). But to address your complaint; you can configure the MBP with 16, 24, or 32 GPU cores, so while the 16-core could still be "fancy", I suppose, it's not like you're forced into the 32-core. I'm in audio, so I configured my machine with the base, 16-core GPU, 32GB memory and 2TB storage. Pretty much my ideal machine. Add in the very fair trade-in value they're offering for my 2019 16" MBP, super simple trade-in process, and 12 months 0% financing, and this may be the least painful Mac purchase I've ever made.
 
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I don’t even care about the GPU, at all. As I explained elsewhere in the thread, I care about the upgraded keyboard and high refresh rate screen (for health and comfort reasons; I type a lot and get motion sickness pretty easy scrolling/editing on sluggish screens). Apple will only sell me the screen with the expensive GPU attached — in which case, it sure would be nice if I could get something out of it.

They used to sell the 15” machines without a fancy GPU for those who just wanted the bigger, nicer screen. I wish they still did. Or that the Mac was a viable gaming platform so I wouldn’t need a Windows gaming machine on the side.

Like I also said elsewhere, I’m starting to think hard about ripping my workflow out by the roots and replanting it in Windows. But, wow, I really don’t want to.

Lately I’ve been having to work more often on my undocked 2018 MBP and between the sluggish screen and failing butterfly keyboard, it’s not endearing itself to me. My plan was to buy a replacement, send it in for repair, and be rid of it, but it seems silly to pay so much for so much power I have no real use for.

Thus my griping about the sorry state of Mac gaming.
If you get motion sickness that easily, one would think your choice of games would quite limited on either platform, but I digress.

Also, I don’t think your going to find a satisfactory experience with any of those high refresh rate laptop screens as the cost of those are typically higher since they’re attached to “gaming” laptops.

Is the iPad Pro 12.9” not a viable option for the amount of writing you do or are the tools just not there? Certainly they might not be, but thought I would throw that out there.
 
While you are partially right, I believe the M1 Max wouldn't need as much heatsink as a PS5 or XSX, given that the ARM M1 CPU/GPU generates less heat than an x86 competitor (which is what the consoles use).

The Vega comparison isn't really that straightforward. Yes, Vega had more TF than a PS5, but it's also older tech, which the M1 is not.

But I agree that while 10.5 might be a peak performance, I don't believe it'll hold that sustained... I would bet that if you 100% push the M1 Pro, it will kick the fans hard on the 16 inch but keep running at 100%. The M1 Max might throttle a bit. Maybe to 9TF or something like that. Which would still be pretty great, given the size of the damn thing.

Regardless, Apple made a really good SOC. The M1 was already amazing and the M1 Pro and Max do not dissapoint. Interested to see how future M2's and M3's will be.

For me personally, I'm a software dev and I don't play on a Mac so if I had to buy a mac (I don't, I have a company provided 13'' Pro with the M1) I would go for the M1 Pro with 32Gb of RAM. No need for extra GPU power, but I would love some more RAM.

Ok, serious question: why more RAM? I keep hearing Apple and at least a few technical sites saying that you don’t need as much memory with Apple’s ARM architecture, and I understand the basics of SOC and the tighter integration of CPU, GPU, and memory but everyone I know STILL wants more memory, and if I was to buy a MacBook today I would want 64 and grudgingly settle for 32 GB memory.
 
Any thoughts on the release schedule going forward? Next year will reportedly see an 'M2' MacBook Air. Does that mean we can expect an M2 Pro and M2 Max by the end of 2022? The Mac Pro and larger iMacs are also due next year. What's in them?
M2 MacBook Air is expected in Q4 of 2022. A larger sized iMacwould most likely have the same M1 Pro and Max options and an Apple Silicon Mac Pro is goi g to have something altogether different, probably based on M1 Pro, but with way more CPU cores and GPU cores.

I would not expect an M2 Max/M2 Pro until 2023.
 
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