I'll give my verdict after people receive their new Macs and run performance test over a variety of games at different settings.
The m5 will be faster but I will no longer believe anything that Apple marketing claims.
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M5 gaming
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I'll give my verdict after people receive their new Macs and run performance test over a variety of games at different settings.
The m5 will be faster but I will no longer believe anything that Apple marketing claims.
Let’s hope Andrew Tsai and MrMacRight don’t take so many ………………….long………………………….pauses.
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Nvidia don't sell a PC part that is lower because it not economical for them to compete against integrated solutions that come with the CPUs found in such PCs not because those integrated solutions don't exist or gamers never use them. Again, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm all sell such solutions at a variety of price points (with the first two making up almost all of them).
From what I can tell from steam hardware surveys that's about 10% of the market though naturally they don't necessarily represent the bottom 10% of performance since some people are rocking extremely old discrete graphics cards.
Basically, you guys keep misusing the word "low end".
Of course not?
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I have, in the past, argued that you can game on iGPU if you are willing to compromise. But that argument becomes subjective as everyone has a different threshold for playability. Your average casual gamer is probably not going to care that CP2077 plays at 15-20 FPS on low at sub 1080p resolutions. That gamer also isn’t buying a Mac to explicitly game either, it is a happy side effect (at least that is my assumption which may be faulty).Nvidia don't sell a PC part that is lower because it not economical for them to compete against integrated solutions that come with the CPUs found in such PCs not because those integrated solutions don't exist or gamers never use them. Again, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm all sell such solutions at a variety of price points (with the first two making up almost all of them).
From what I can tell from steam hardware surveys that's about 10% of the market though naturally they don't necessarily represent the bottom 10% of performance since some people are rocking extremely old discrete graphics cards.
Basically, you guys keep misusing the word "low end".
Of course not?
The folks that want a better experience are probably not looking at x86 iGPUs as the baseline. So folks jump immediately to the xx50 tier (or the same tier for AMD) as a minimum.
Based on what we know the M5 is a decent entry level (is this better than low end?) offering. I guess with every year since 2021 being touted as the year of macOS gaming I have become jaded. Maybe I would be more excited if I were new.
I can understand being jaded at the "year of macOS gaming", I stopped being optimistic 15 years ago
. I always believe in tempering expectations and if change happens, it occurs slowly (until it's quick). Apple, seems to be intent on building Macs than can game rather than gaming Macs. Which is fine, that's their business model. But that means if all you are interested in is GPU performance, naturally Macs aren't going to be great value relative to a gaming PC. That hasn't changed and likely won't for foreseeable future. I would argue that Macs are have good value (a few models even have great value) when compared to PCs with similar specs across the board, but that's a different argument.However, the base M5, in terms of its profile, is comparable to the integrated solutions from AMD, Intel, Qualcomm. It should fundamentally not be able to get anywhere close to a 5050 based on their respective sizes/power draws and it isn't design to. That's what the Pro-level GPU is for (and even they are pretty small) and, given these results, for the first time, Apple might actually have GPUs that compete here (maybe - gaming uplift will be closer to the 45% increase Apple talks about and the gaming performance has a lot further to go than Blender).
I came to the conclusion that I would need a Max powered MBP for it to be reasonable for gaming, however I'm simply not willing to spend over $4000 for a notebook just so it has a level of gaming capability. My current M1 MBP does all I need it to; my new gaming notebook has more performance than anything Apple currently produces.
Bottom line is once you're playing a game or using an application for that matter the focus is what's on the screen not the underlying OS. If Windows was problematic, it would be a different matter. I don't care for the data collection, equally that can be stopped, and all the providers do it.
Mac's are unlikely to be favoured for gaming due the high pricing and game studios want their games to appeal to the widest audience.
Q-6
Completely understandable, in my case, getting the M4 Max Studio made more sense financially, as I have limited mobility needs. A few years ago, that wasn't the case, but today I mostly work at my desk, and don't need to travel.
Hopefully Oliver at Digital Foundry will take a look too.
Only a week left until we start to see the real world performance.
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Well, I guess for the people running comparable settings, certainly good news. 🤣
-kp
How dare you.
Some days you gotta play a top-5-graphically-intensive-game on the smol iGPU you have in front of you.
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Keep in mind while we wait for M5 reviews that we already have reviews of the A19/Pro. e.g.:
Now these are complicated by the fact that the Pro devices got better cooling so increases for 50-60% in non-ray tracing games probably exaggerates what to expect from M-series devices with the same cooling. But ~40% is not unreasonable for some games.
From the video above, we can see Death Stranding tested on the iPhone, but you'll notice Apple has allowed the wattage to go up significantly, by about 15%. Assuming that's all the new cooling and that Apple won't allow the M5 to be any hotter than the M4 at all and its linear (a lot of assumptions), then the M5 would still be about 40% more performant (the other two games, AC and RE get more like 20-25% above wattage). Further you can watch the video yourself for RT and other tests (and we already have a Blender result for the M5) that shows Apple has improved RT even more than raster performance. This should have no problem translating to the M5.
So again, why are people excited? Is it because the base M5 is now incredible gaming machine capable of playing AAA games at the same level as a discrete GPU? No.
But like for people who buy PC ultrabooks, premium or not, and game on them, improving performance of the base chip by this amount is ... well ... insanely good and not really a minor, "iterative" improvement.
Further for the Apple devices that do compete with discrete GPUs, like the Pro and Max, we can extrapolate what their likely performance figures will be and that's very exciting. Again, this won't turn Apple devices into the most economical gaming machines that are going to finally power the Mac gaming revolution. Heck, to that point many if not most games will have to be emulated and no matter how good Apple's CPUs or GPUs are or how well Apple can translate DX12 into Metal that will always cause a performance hit. And there are times where the native port is ropey enough that emulating the X86 Windows version of the game is actually the better experience.
But if the extrapolation from the A19Pro/base M5 to the Pro and Max pans out, then at least the hardware itself is not the limiting factor. The base will be likely (one of) the best ultrabook-class iGPUs out there and for those who want more serious GPU performance, the Pro will be capable of competing against the 5050/5060 mobile*, and the Max capable of competing against ... well in the video he goes all the way to the 5090 mobile*. Which is technically possible looking at the numbers from Blender and Steel Nomad, etc ... - again, most real world games, even if there is a native Mac port it will likely not have the same performance tuning as the PC version to put it mildly. So I'm not necessarily expecting the same comparators for games as in Blender or various graphics benchmarks which spend a lot more time optimizing for the Mac than most game developers ever will. The performance uplift might be the same, but an Apple device typically has further to go.
*important to remember as well there are a huge variation of differently tuned Nvidia graphics cards - there are 5050s that soundly beat 5060s or up (while drawing an insane amount of power) and there are 5050s that ... simply don't get anywhere close. Same for just about every class of Nvidia chip. So it's about comparing to averages or some reasonable selection.
Now these are complicated by the fact that the Pro devices got better cooling so increases for 50-60% in non-ray tracing games probably exaggerates what to expect from M-series devices with the same cooling. But ~40% is not unreasonable for some games.
From the video above, we can see Death Stranding tested on the iPhone, but you'll notice Apple has allowed the wattage to go up significantly, by about 15%. Assuming that's all the new cooling and that Apple won't allow the M5 to be any hotter than the M4 at all and its linear (a lot of assumptions), then the M5 would still be about 40% more performant (the other two games, AC and RE get more like 20-25% above wattage). Further you can watch the video yourself for RT and other tests (and we already have a Blender result for the M5) that shows Apple has improved RT even more than raster performance. This should have no problem translating to the M5.
So again, why are people excited? Is it because the base M5 is now incredible gaming machine capable of playing AAA games at the same level as a discrete GPU? No.
But like for people who buy PC ultrabooks, premium or not, and game on them, improving performance of the base chip by this amount is ... well ... insanely good and not really a minor, "iterative" improvement.
Absolutely.
Further for the Apple devices that do compete with discrete GPUs, like the Pro and Max, we can extrapolate what their likely performance figures will be and that's very exciting. Again, this won't turn Apple devices into the most economical gaming machines that are going to finally power the Mac gaming revolution. Heck, to that point many if not most games will have to be emulated and no matter how good Apple's CPUs or GPUs are or how well Apple can translate DX12 into Metal that will always cause a performance hit. And there are times where the native port is ropey enough that emulating the X86 Windows version of the game is actually the better experience.
But if the extrapolation from the A19Pro/base M5 to the Pro and Max pans out, then at least the hardware itself is not the limiting factor. The base will be likely (one of) the best ultrabook-class iGPUs out there and for those who want more serious GPU performance, the Pro will be capable of competing against the 5050/5060 mobile*, and the Max capable of competing against ... well in the video he goes all the way to the 5090 mobile*. Which is technically possible looking at the numbers from Blender and Steel Nomad, etc ... - again, most real world games, even if there is a native Mac port it will likely not have the same performance tuning as the PC version to put it mildly. So I'm not necessarily expecting the same comparators for games as in Blender or various graphics benchmarks which spend a lot more time optimizing for the Mac than most game developers ever will. The performance uplift might be the same, but an Apple device typically has further to go.
*important to remember as well there are a huge variation of differently tuned Nvidia graphics cards - there are 5050s that soundly beat 5060s or up (while drawing an insane amount of power) and there are 5050s that ... simply don't get anywhere close. Same for just about every class of Nvidia chip. So it's about comparing to averages or some reasonable selection.
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It's a good point, but I think there are two things to consider here.
1. Many Mac users have a separate device for playing games, but would ditch it and use their Mac as a main gaming device if it had the software compatibility. And since the device would be pulling double duty in that scenario, they would probably be more inclined to splurge for higher configs.
2. There could potentially be a lot more people who would buy a Mac instead of a Windows laptop if it was able to play the games they wanted to play.
As always, it's a chicken and egg thing, but I think there is a lot more money to be made both by Apple and publishers/devs than people think.
Macs being able to play most games, combined with how performant Apple silicon is getting on the GPU side, would be the final nail in the coffin for Windows which continues to own goal itself.
Final nail in the coffin is a bit of an exaggeration (unless you mean just for people who already want out) - Windows is still 80-90% of the consumer market, bigger for the gaming crowd, and they'd have to do more than even what they're doing to drive that to extinction - again, unless I misunderstood and you were just talking this being the final nail for Mac people with one foot out the door who like to game.
In that vein, yes improving Apple GPUs and gaming experience (that requires software and nice APIs with nice documentation and developer support too - Apple has to work on some of those) would be great for those who want already want to use a Mac and not feel they have to get a second machine just to get reasonable game performance. I agree, that's still big.
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Yeah that's what I meant, sorry.
But I do still think there is a fair amount of people who are vaguely interested in Mac, and a fair amount of people who are really sick of Windows and only using it because they're gamers. It's a juicier section of people than most tend to admit.
If we believe the steam stats, that conclusion seems sus, as the number of mac gamers on that platform hasn't broken 3% in a very long time. But I like your optimism.
I am one of those people who just got tired of the shenanigans that MS pulls, but there are much cheaper alternatives for people to game on then a mac. I can see the steam deck picking up more people for this very reason, unlike the mac, they have access to a huge library of games and the hardware is so much more cheaper then a mac. While the M4 Mini can be bought between 500 and 600, the base model M series chip just doesn't cut it for game performance, I tried gaming on a M4 Pro Mini and was dissatisfied that I returned the mini and bought the Studio (which by the way I love).
You can make a case for and against those numbers, I can see the numbers not moving, simply because the sheer lack of actual games available for the mac - not the cheap crap that has seemingly filled steam these days, but actual AAA type games that people are playing. Also for steam, there isn't any sort of motivation to report low mac numbers, so I don't think its an overt action.
On the other hand, mac marketshare has steadily increased since 2020, and its hard to imagine that this has not had any impact on steam stats. I do wish steam would get their act together and fix the reporting aspect of their survey so the numbers could be more trustworthy.
🤷♂️ Even though macOS marketshare has trended upwards since the introduction of Apple Silicon, the steam survey results have not tracked with it.
I hope that the M5 base will appeal to developers for porting games over.
I think things will be positive, I'm really curious to see how gaming is between the M4 and M5.
I'm much less optimistic, I think that very comment was made when the M4 came out. It represented between 20 to 30% performance improvements over the M3, yet we had not seen much of anything.
If you are already always going to own a computer, and you want that computer to be a Mac, then you're already buying it. The fact it can game means you don't have to spend extra money on a separate gaming device.
Hypothetically of course, if the Mac was compatible with most of the games you wanted to play.
Seeing the scaling with AC:Shadows, Control, CP2077 would be nice. Would like to see native before enabling upscaling.
Yes and no. I see your point and I'm not disagreeing but the issue is, what class of Mac will be capable of playing games? For me, I bought a M4 Pro Mini at 1,300 (give or take), it was incapable of handling AAA titles adequately. So much so, I returned it, and bought the M4 Max Studio. I'm not a hardcore gamer but the performance was so bad, I felt compelled to buy the next more expensive model. Now don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the M4 Max Studio, its by far the best computer I've owned but if the Max or ultra are needed for many of the new demanding games, that doesn't bode well
This is where the M5, and how we see actual performance gains. Can the M5 (non-pro, non-max) handle AAA titles.
Definnitely, I hate when companies use upscaling and then tout how great their GPU performance is - I'm looking at you Nvidia.
I'm perfectly fine on my M3 Pro. And we're now seeing such gains in GPU performance that the M5 base model is a better gaming chip than the Pro from just a couple years back.
I'm sure the M5 Pro will outperform the M3 Max as well.
The GPU improvement is actually quite substantial.