I'm reading the Ultrafusion description and besides all the talk what I can think of is: NUMA?
Apple M1 Ultra
661–670 of 855 posts
Re: Apple M1 Ultra
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the market this is aimed at, performance per watt is really irrelevant. Performance per dollar or just outright performance are far more important the vast majority of the time. That's how we ended up with 125w+ CPUs and 300w GPUs in the first place.
There are dedicated ML cards from Nvidia for that, far most powerful than a 3090, so that is indeed true. But PPW is never irrelevant when someone is doing things at scale, so the question becomes: who is doing this for money but somehow not at scale?
The cost of powering my 3090 for a year is now more than the cost (RRP) of a 3090.
Re: Apple M1 Ultra
#663Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that Geforce RTX on cloud is prohibited by Nvidia.
How do they functionally do that? I googled and found this?: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/rtx-server-gaming/ Honestly asking because I’m kind of out of the nvidia loop at the moment.
Technically: the driver detects if it is run in a virtualization environment, it is at least able to detect KVM and VMware. On the upside, it's relatively easy to bypass the check.
Legally: I assume no cloud provider will assume the legal risk of telling their customers "and here you have to break the EULA of the NVIDIA driver in that way to use the service". In Europe where the legal environment is more focused on interoperability, this might not be as much of a problem, but still it may be too much risk.
Re: Apple M1 Ultra
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cursory look gives you a ~$3500 price tag for a gaming PC with a 3090 [1], vs. at least $4k for a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra. Roughly the same ballpark, but I wouldn't call the M1 Ultra more affordable given those numbers. 1. https://techguided.com/best-rtx-3090-gaming-pc/#:~:text=With... .
Hahaha good luck getting your hands on a 30xx series card though. Here in Australia, 3090’s go for close to 3k on their own.
Here in UK it's not a big deal. Subscribe to discord alerts for FE series drops, last 3090FE drop in February the cards were in stock for a full day, at RRP(£1399). I got a 3080 drop at RRP this way too(£649).
But even ignoring the FE series, the prices have already crashed massively, you can get a 3080 AIB for less than £1000, and 3090s frequently appear around £1500-1600.
Re: Apple M1 Ultra
#665It’s funny how during all the years that PC elitists turned their pince-nez’ed noses up at Macs and pooh-poohed Apple, the biggest factor holding Macs down turned out to be the commodity PC chips. :)
Re: Apple M1 Ultra
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their GPU claims weren’t accurate though. The M1 max doesn’t have real world performance anything like the 3070 as claimed.
On raw Metal performance, yes it does get the same performance. The benchmarks showed this. The problem was the implication that you'd get 3070 gaming performance. That was never going to be true because of the un-optimisation tax for games on Mac. There doesn't exist a AAA game built for Metal and the Mac. The closest are games like World of Warcraft, Divinity Original Sin 2 – and even they are just "good ports" not…
pushing all this to "un-optimization tax" is an easy pass on apple.
- nvidia really is a software company, it's the running joke in the industry. when you buy a nvidia gpu, you pay for the drivers & the frameworks (cuda, dlss, optix, ..). Apple does close to nothing there, they support Metal and CoreML and call it a day, you can decently lay some of the blame at their feet
- the workloads in games can vary a lot, vertex/fragment shaders imbalance, parallel compute pipelines, mixed precision (which the M1 gpu does not do), .. So another explanation is that you can get some 3070 parity on a cherry picked game, like a broken clock is right twice a day, but that does not make it generally true. Objective benchmarks have put the M1 gpus way slower than 3070 on average, and software support seems like an easy but false distraction given the Proton tax on Linux (which is not 30/50%)
- the M1 gpus are lacking a ton of hardware, matrix mul, fp16 again, ray tracing, VRR probably (not sure about this last one). These are used by modern games or applications, you may find a benchmark which skip them, but in the grand scheme of things it's something that the M1 gpu will have to emulate more often than not, and this has a cost
Waving all that as "the GPU is about the same speed" is technically wrong, or not really backed by facts at the very least
Re: Apple M1 Ultra
#667Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cursory look gives you a ~$3500 price tag for a gaming PC with a 3090 [1], vs. at least $4k for a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra. Roughly the same ballpark, but I wouldn't call the M1 Ultra more affordable given those numbers. 1. https://techguided.com/best-rtx-3090-gaming-pc/#:~:text=With... .
> Cursory look gives you a ~$3500 price tag for a gaming PC with a 3090 That 3500 is for a DIY build. So, sure, you can always save on labor and hassle, but prebuilt 3090 rigs commonly cost over 4k. And if you don't want to buy from Amazon because of their notorious history of mixing components from different suppliers and reselling used returns, oof, good luck even getting one.
And there is usually a premium for small form factor prebuilts
Re: Apple M1 Ultra
#668This is insane. They claim that its GPU performance tops the RTX 3090, while using 200W less power. I happen to have this GPU on my PC and not only it costs over $3000, but its also very power-hungry and loud. Currently, you need this kind of GPU performance for high resolution VR gaming at 90 fps, but its just barely enough. This means that the GPU will run very loudly and heat up the room, and running games like HL…
I play Rust (the game, not the language) with decent graphics on an M1 Air with no issues other than heat, which an external fan quickly mitigates. Really looking forward to Apple's VR offering after seeing the performance of their compact SoC
But Rust runs even on intel integrated graphics without any problem (HD4000)
Re: Apple M1 Ultra
#669This is insane. They claim that its GPU performance tops the RTX 3090, while using 200W less power. I happen to have this GPU on my PC and not only it costs over $3000, but its also very power-hungry and loud. Currently, you need this kind of GPU performance for high resolution VR gaming at 90 fps, but its just barely enough. This means that the GPU will run very loudly and heat up the room, and running games like HL…
The problem is, last time I checked, you're not able to really make use of it for gaming. Obviously MacOS doesn't run all that many games compared to Windows and now Linux (with Proton, or to be honest quite possible even without), and something like parallels can't take advantage of the M1's power.
Not to say it'll never happen, but its not a done deal basically, and to my knowledge the process hasn't yet started
Re: Apple M1 Ultra
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too bad that historically Apple has not given any attention to Mac gaming.
Part of Apple's historic MO has been to not invest in areas they don't see themselves having a competitive advantage in. Now that they can make gaming happen with a very low wattage budget they may well try to enter that space in earnest.
This has been always very strange for me. Apple chips used in smartphones were very consistently near the top of the pack even in terms of GPU performance, and unlike their Android counterparts, they rarely throttled, and could deliver said perf with decent battery life.
Yet the iOS 'gaming' scene, despite being one of the major revenue drivers, consists mostly of low-quality F2P games.