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The M1 graphics are really not that impressive at all

Cassandle said:
You've just compared a dedicated graphics card to an integrated graphics chip. It's not really a like-for-like comparison.
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Yes, but in an almost 10 year old system, and that dedicated GPU is literally the 2nd from the bottom gaming card they offer, with the lowest being the non-Super 1650. And Apple was touting this as a solid gaming chip, which it is, as long as you don't want to play anything more demanding that League of Legends.

Plus my entire system with GPU is worth about 300 US. And also consider that my system has PCIe 2.0, which is pretty slow compared to the throughput on these M1's.
 
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dmr727 said:
Don't really understand why you expected anything different from an integrated GPU...
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There are many dedicated GPU's out there that would be trounced by some integrated chips. The Intel 630 would beat anything below a GT 1030, as well as any AMD 6000 series from the same era. None of them are meant for gaming though. Apple was specifically touting the gaming performance, and the real world reality is that it's well below the low budget standard on the Windows side.
 
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Well, we knew this thing was essentially an A14, so we already had some idea of what it could and couldn't do. I figured it'd be similar to Intel's new Xe and AMD's Vega, which it ended up handily beating, so I was pleasantly surprised. I'd never expect to play current AAA titles on a chip designed to power a 3 pound notebook.
 
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To be clear... I'm not saying don't buy an M1 powered Mac, just not if you plan to game on it like Apple made people think they could. The CPU power is amazing.
 
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SOC wouldn't get a pass for slow drive reads so it "arguably" doesn't get to pull the "it's an iGPU" card either
 
dmr727 said:
Ah, I see. Yeah, Apple's definition of 'gaming' has always been lame. "Look how smooth the iPhone plays Angry Birds!" :)
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But even if it matched or surpassed my low end gaming PC, Mac is just not a good gaming platform to begin with. Maybe 6-7% of all PC games are ported to Mac, so not much of a selection.
 
timidpimpin said:
Yes, but in an almost 10 year old system, and that dedicated GPU is literally the 2nd from the bottom gaming card they offer, with the lowest being the non-Super 1650. And Apple was touting this as a solid gaming chip, which it is, as long as you don't want to play anything more demanding that League of Legends.

Plus my entire system with GPU is worth about 300 US. And also consider that my system has PCIe 2.0, which is pretty slow compared to the throughput on these M1's.
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The GPU is not 10 years old though. It's a modern (albeit low-level) dedicated GPU. So it's not a fair comparison against an integrated GPU.

Compared to integrated GPUs the results in the M1 are very impressive. And they bode extremely well for what Apple is likely to put in its higher specced devices.
 
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brianmowrey said:
SOC wouldn't get a pass for slow drive reads so it "arguably" doesn't get to pull the "it's an iGPU" card either
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Interesting point. Perhaps it's better to make a distinction between a GPU designed with power consumption in mind, rather than pure performance.

timidpimpin said:
But even if it matched or surpassed my low end gaming PC, Mac is just not a good gaming platform to begin with. Maybe 6-7% of all PC games are ported to Mac, so not much of a selection.
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Right - which is another reason why I didn't expect dedicated GPU like performance from the M1, regardless of how Apple marketed it.
 
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I got around 34000 from my previous RX580 eGPU... With a 19k value from the MacMini M1 integrated maybe I can live without the eGPU for my FCP use... It's outstanding vs the previous 630.
 
To compare the CPU performance though, the M1 is over twice as fast as my i7. The M1's are scoring around 7700 in the CPU test, vs about 3100 for my i7.
 
CC88 said:
I got around 34000 from my previous RX580 eGPU... With a 19k value from the MacMini M1 integrated maybe I can live without the eGPU for my FCP use... It's outstanding vs the previous 630.
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That shows that you lose performance with an eGPU. In a proper on board PCIe slot an RX 580 would get around 49-50,000.
 
timidpimpin said:
The M1 GPU is about 4x faster than the 630.
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Well, a 4x increase in graphics and 2x increase in CPU on the base M1 Mini vs the top 2018 Mini sounds like a pretty decent upgrade to me. :) I understand your point about how it compares to higher spec Macs, but we are in the Mini forum here.

I like what I've seen about these new machines, and someday it would be nice to have one. But I just dropped a bundle on a maxxed-out i7 Mini this summer and am still delighted with it. The new ones can't give me the Windows and legacy MacOS virtual machines that I need.
 
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My 2018 mini with a Radeon 5700 eGPU benchmarks at about 59000, but its real-world performance doesn't reflect that. Final Cut rendering still takes longer than it did with my 2013 Mac Pro. So I'm not too concerned about the graphics benchmarks. I'm more concerned with how the computer will perform when I actually use it. And so far it looks like the new mini's M1 is knocking it out the park.
 
For the heck of it, I ran Geekbench on my M1 mini. Proving that those scores are fairly meaningless, my current mini crunches through FCPX rendering in about half the time of my previous setup (with the 5700 Radeon).

GB-M1mini-CPU.jpg

GB-M1mini-GPU.jpg
 
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i use a sand hour glass timer for my late 2010 MacBook air GPU speeds
which is great, since I live within 13 miles to a sandy beach!
(that bike ride takes about an hour as well-all ways windy getting there!)
 
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What did you expect? For integrated graphics I think the graphics are actually doing really well. I've actually played some AAA titles with most settings set to ultra at 2560 x 1440. FPS around 15 to 20. And it doesn't even get hot. Not very impressive indeed, but bear in mind the M1 only has 8 graphical cores. Imagine what the performance will be like as soon as they start adding 16, 32, or 64 cores.
 
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timidpimpin said:
But even if it matched or surpassed my low end gaming PC, Mac is just not a good gaming platform to begin with. Maybe 6-7% of all PC games are ported to Mac, so not much of a selection.
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This is true, but also kind of a circular argument in the sense that if everyone just decides to buy a console or Windows PC for gaming, Apple never has any incentive to offer a better graphics card that's suitable for gaming. And game manufacturers won't bother trying to port games to OS X when they see the product line has no suitable GPUs.

It's personally frustrating because I really dislike consoles. Owned several and always disliked the game controllers as the only interface and the limitations on the types of games offered because they're all intended to work around that controller-centric design. I own a gaming Windows PC laptop, but would love to not have to maintain a whole separate PC for that (Windows updates all the time, graphics card driver updates, etc. etc.) There was a bit of a "golden age" of Mac gaming that took place, some years back, when companies like MacPlay and Aspyre really seemed to be making an effort to get good titles to the Mac. I paid the $'s for a Mac Pro tower, largely to be sure I could play games they released like Deus Ex, Batman: Gotham City, the Bioshock series, the COD titles like MW2 and MW3, C&C Generals, Stubbs the Zombie, etc. But that fizzled out ....
 
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If you're using an integrated GPU for gaming i'd perhaps re-consider if you're actually a "Gamer". I don't care what other integrated GPU's perform at, I just wouldn't game on one period.
 
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