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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

#161
post #98
post #8

Running at ~40 fps on M2 Max: https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpun...

So, you need to spend $3k to get playable framerates, which are possible with a 3060 laptop, maybe even a 3050ti, as they can do 1080p, this just seems to be 900p.

I play Cyberpunk with an aging AMD RX570, and get consistent rate of 45 FPS running at 3K with high quality settings.

I'm not an Apple fan, but have to admit that Apple chip is getting incredible frame rates, considering it has no discrete GPU.

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that Apple poured a lot of resources into making WebGPU happen. WebGPU is, in a great many ways, Metal but cross-platform. The way this pays off is if game developers start targeting WebGPU instead of Vulkan or DX12. That could happen since WebGPU is a meant to be a lot easier to code against than Vulkan. This effort to port DX12 can probably be seen as more of a hedge than anything else. They know that…

Game developers are not going to start mass adopting a JavaScript API.

WebGPU is not JavaScript only: https://eliemichel.github.io/LearnWebGPU/

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

#163
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's best GPU is close to a mid-range previous gen nvidia GPU? I'm sure it'll run a 4 year old game on medium settings great! But that's kind of the point, that it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry. Who's supposed to be impressed by getting middling performance on Death Stranding 4 years after it came out? Literal definition of "also ran".

The most used GPU according to Steam survey is the 1650 -- a low-midrange card from 2019.

Yeah and those people aren't going to pay significantly more money for a Mac M2 Max.

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

#164
post #25

From what I gather, Game Porting Toolkit is two things - a fork of Wine, and their own adaptation/extension of open source projects for DirectX compatibility. Some observations: Windows compatibility: * Windows platform compatibility is achieved with a slightly patched version of Codeweavers' Wine fork - virtually all of the hard work of Windows compatibility has been achieved by the Wine developers and Codeweavers a…

> The fact that D3DMetal.framework appears to support DirectX 9 and 10 is interesting.

Lots of popular games are DX9 or 10. Rimworld, for instance, is high in the Steam charts and is DX9.

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

#165
post #98
post #8

Running at ~40 fps on M2 Max: https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1435ukq/cyberpun...

So, you need to spend $3k to get playable framerates, which are possible with a 3060 laptop, maybe even a 3050ti, as they can do 1080p, this just seems to be 900p.

The point is that you'll be able to play games on the machine you already have. Yes, a PC with GPU is going to be better and people that are really into gaming will probably always opt for that. But there's a big casual market out there too.

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

#166

Keep in mind, it's getting 15fps at 1440x900. It's not saying that Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 is a great experience. It's merely pointing out that it's technically possible (which is a massive achievement).

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

it translates X86 to ARM, that's not free

High-end games makes ton of use of SIMD instructions to gain massive boost, I wonder if that's translated properly

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These GPUs aren’t too bad. Theoretically, M2 Max peaks at 14.4 teraflops, and 400 GB/s memory bandwidth. M2 Ultra is too new, but Apple says it’s GPU is 30% faster (probably 18.7 teraflops then?), and that it has 800 GB/s memory bandwidth. The numbers for M2 Ultra are comparable to some powerful GPUs. The theoretical TFlops number is close to Radeon 6900 XT and GeForce 3070, theoretical memory bandwidth is close to R…

Apple's best GPU is close to a mid-range previous gen nvidia GPU? I'm sure it'll run a 4 year old game on medium settings great! But that's kind of the point, that it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry. Who's supposed to be impressed by getting middling performance on Death Stranding 4 years after it came out? Literal definition of "also ran".

> Who's supposed to be impressed by getting middling performance on Death Stranding 4 years after it came out? Literal definition of "also ran".

Plenty of people are impressed at 3060/3070 performance in a 25W system-power envelope.

You literally can't even run the memory chips for a 3070 in that power budget let alone the whole APU.

Like I'd love to see the AMD equivalent APU to that "also-ran 3070 performance" macbook, please link a laptop with what you think would be comparable.

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

#168
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you won’t many cheaper 3 year old laptops running Cyperpunk 2077 on Ultra this well… name one.

Honestly, I wouldn't use the phrase "this well" non-sarcastically for ~15fps at 1440x900 like shown in the video.

this is on Ultra graphics settings.. not lot of laptop could even run it on Low

Cyberpunk is known to be a VERY demanding open world game

on lowest setting, this should probably be fine

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

#169
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's best GPU is close to a mid-range previous gen nvidia GPU? I'm sure it'll run a 4 year old game on medium settings great! But that's kind of the point, that it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry. Who's supposed to be impressed by getting middling performance on Death Stranding 4 years after it came out? Literal definition of "also ran".

The most used GPU according to Steam survey is the 1650 -- a low-midrange card from 2019.

A Nvidia 1650 is significantly cheaper also!

Upgrading from full-spec M2 Max to M2 Ultra costs $1200. Nvidia 1650 launched at $190 (inflation adjusted, $159 2019 USD).

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

#170
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…

> it can never compete with the gaming PCs which are far less expensive and far more powerfull graphics-wise

I don't think Apple is chasing the "dedicated gaming machine" crowd here. They want casual gamers to be able to load up a couple of games on the machine they're buying for non-gaming reasons. I'm exactly one of those people: I rarely play video games these days but when the pandemic hit I ended up installing Boot Camp to play COD:Warzone with friends. It was great (it performed... okay). I've since upgraded to a Silicon-based Mac so the door has closed on that. This toolkit is the means to reopen it. I'm not, and likely won't ever be, in the market for a gaming PC. I can't justify the purchase.

> And Apple also doesn't know how to keep relationships with the AAA developers

The App Store would beg to differ. I agree that historically they haven't been great at relationships with game developers but they're clearly able to maintain relationships with third party developers when they have the incentive.

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