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Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

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Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#122
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But Apple does ship powerful GPUs. In fact, the M2 Max is probably the most or second most powerful GPU on laptops. But games aren't optimized for Metal nor ARM, so they run slower than Nvidia laptop GPUs. The most powerful iGPU likely. It still won't come anywhere close to high-end dedicated laptop GPUs in the vast majority of benchmarks regardless of how much optimization you throw at it - that's just falling for…

> The most powerful iGPU likely. It still won't come anywhere close to high-end dedicated laptop GPUs in the vast majority of benchmarks regardless of how much optimization you throw at it - that's just falling for marketing / hype. In applications that actually use Metal natively, Apple Silicon GPUs do compare favorably to Nvidia laptop GPUs while using drastically less power. So no. It isn't just hype/marketing. Ev…

>In applications that actually use Metal natively, Apple Silicon GPUs do compare favorably to Nvidia laptop GPUs while using drastically less power.

Is that really the case? I'm not being facetious here, I'd really like to see more useful datapoints. There aren't many benchmark comparisons out there that strive for actual useful comparison, especially outside synthetic stuff with questionable applicability like 3dMark.

And for the "drastically less power" claim...it really doesn't help that most benchmarks are with decked-out "Gamer" machines using the highest available TDP configuration, despite most GPUs having their sweet spot significantly below - especially Ada Lovelace seem to scale down really well (from what I've gathered, still 60-70% performance at 60W compared to 150W with 4080 Mobile, for example).

>Even if you look at the raw technical specs of the M2 Max GPU, it's comparable to Nvidia laptop GPUs - with the exception of ray tracing.

The specs put it roughly between GA106-GA104/AD107-AD106 respectively, and I'd expect it to land there in the general, adequately optimized case.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can pair your XBox or Playstation controller with an iPad.

Those are terrible controls for most of games.

You can pair a mouse and keyboard with an iPad too. You can even plug them in…

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#124
post #34

As John Siracusa discussed on this week's ATP[0], it's incredible how much effort Apple puts into this considering the result. Apple built it's own little parallel gaming stack world that works really well on their hardware and the hardware is also amazing for the power envelopes it is wrapped in. But then Apple doesn't ship devices with actually powerful GPUs, so it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are fa…

Personally, I appreciate this effort, not for AAA games, because I never bought a MacBook expecting it to be able to...but for much more casual or lower poly games that are available on Steam for Windows users only, because it's too hard to port. There's tons of sub-AAA games that could easily be ported and enjoyed on a modern M1/M2 Mac.

Speaking only for myself, I use Macs to get work done. The lack of games is actually a plus, as I can get compulsive with games.

It's funny, when people denigrate the worst gaming platform in the world as a "toy computer."

People get Macs, that want to get work done. As noted previously, there's really nothing that can beat a well-built PC gaming rig.

I don't really think Apple has ever cared about the Mac as a gaming platform, and the low-key hype around these technologies shows that. These almost seem like "developer 20% projects," compared to the big stuff, like visionOS.

That said, I think that Apple wants iOS/iPadOS/visionOS to be gaming platforms, so they do dedicate a lot of resources to that.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#125

Fantastic would be 25fps, this isn't there yet.

That is on an M1 laptop. No dedicated GPU, not even an M1 Max. Just plain M1. Of course, it's not running super fast on Ultra settings, but imagine how slow it would be on a comparable Intel laptop with onboard graphics eating through your battery. Especially considering it only costs $1,299, which is not a lot for this kind of performance. And then it's not even an x86 CPU, for which Cyberpunk was developed. So yes,…

If you want to set the bar that low for fantastic, be my guest. Fps per dollar, any metric I can think of is lousy. You've not convinced me. Was impressed by Rosetta, but not this game porting toolkit, for the record.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if there are no changes made to the game whatsoever, then it has to be using Rosetta. Fantastic would be DXVK approximate levels of performance hit. This is far short of that.

DXVK does not support DirectX 12, and does only half of the job, missing the CPU instruction translations.

I was referring to the performance of DXVK not its feature support. Expecting DXVK to do Rosetta itself is beyond ridiculous.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#127
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all things blizzard Recent Blizzard games (Diablo 2 Ressurected, Diablo 4) require DirectX 12 and aren't natively available for macOS.

Overwatch before that too. Its surprising how on one hand a huge effort is put into World of Warcraft running smoothly on macOS (they always implement all the new Metal features with every expansion and it was the first native Apple Silicon game) but completely abandoned macOS for new titles.

Blizzard since mid to late 2010s is basically a different company from the one that pumped out Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo. The old company’s dead.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure - Apple's marketing claimed that the M1 was beating top end PC parts. This isn't even close.

> I'm not sure - Apple's marketing claimed that the M1 was beating top end PC parts. This isn't even close. Your statement is quite misinformed. First, this is the M1. Not M1 Pro. Not M1 Max. The M1 is almost 3 years old. Second, this is being translated from DX12 to Metal and also x86 to ARM64. Yes, both the CPU and GPU layers are being translated. Third, Apple claimed that the M1 Max was the most powerful GPU on la…

This is not the M1. You can’t configure a MacBook Pro 16 inch (stated in the tweet) with anything other than an M1 Pro / M1 Max, or M2 Pro / M2 Max on the latest models.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#129

This is the entry level M1. 15fps at 1400x900 isn't great (or even playable), but it's very impressive that it runs at all without any changes, let alone on ultra settings.

This is not the M1. You can’t configure a MacBook Pro 16 inch (stated in the tweet) with anything other than an M1 Pro / M1 Max, or M2 Pro / M2 Max on the latest models.

Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP

#130

This is total speculation on my part, but I do wonder why Apple have suddenly got this out the door to developers right at the same moment their headset is announced. They’ve never seemed very interested in this section of the games market before. I wonder if this could be the first building block of allowing existing modern 3D games to play in some kind of new semi immersive way inside. I’m imagining playing an FPS…

VR’s biggest use case is gaming and Apple is so far away from gaming, they’re not in the same universe.

If they want people to game on their headset - they need devs to port their games over.

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