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.
It’s the 13” MBP. If you look at the metal overlay in the corner it shows the product name of the processor, and in this case, it’s the base M1 with 16GB of memory.
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…
I thought this was very insightful on his part - yeah this all sounds great, but so what? The Mac Pro is an empty box besides for Apple Silicon and a few fans. What are you going to put in there exactly?
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 gamin…
I don’t know, you say that but there are plenty of triple A games in the App Store and Apple did put in the effort into getting their game subscription to work on their desktops. Let’s be real, we might all be getting more work done as a result but that’s because Apple dropped the ball, hard. They came out with the metal api but refused to support any others, even letting open GL fester. The fact that they couldn’t k…
> there are plenty of triple A games in the App Store
Mobile AAA games in the iOS App Store, or desktop AAA games in the Mac App Store? There are some AAAs that work on a desktop Mac (e.g. Resident Evil Village), but it's not the norm at all. As for mobile ... modern mobile games can die in a fire for all I care (as they're 95% gacha nonsense).
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 gamin…
For a large number of customers, Macs play games just fine (you can get SimCity 4 for Silicon, heh). It's not the top of the line, but it covers a decent swath, even without doing emulation or translation.
For a large number of customers, Macs play games just fine (you can get SimCity 4 for Silicon, heh). It's not the top of the line, but it covers a decent swath, even without doing emulation or translation.
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".
The latest consoles are also running mid range cards from a few years ago and are doing just fine. They are running games at medium at lower FPS/resolution than PC so games will mostly continue to target and work well on medium hardware. High end PC gaming is the exception, not the norm.
The Mac audience is not trivial and has deep pockets so as long as porting games is fairly easy the it's an obvious choice.
why does it look laggy and verging on unplayable, i wonder?
Because they’re running it at Ultra on the lowest end hardware configuration, with an x86_64 to arm64 translation, and a shader translation and a windows api wrapper.
For comparison, the M1 was routinely benchmarked in NVIDIA 1050 TI to 1070 territory depending on the benchmark. This is only a few fps behind native.
I'm curious if Apple dropped the ball or if there is still something of an anti-gaming culture inside Apple since I know that the company was de facto anti-gaming in the late 90s going forward. In that era they actively killed off relationships with gaming companies, e.g. the game that eventually became Halo was originally a Macintosh exclusive. More recent things like the legal theatrics with Epic Games gives one a…
> In that era they actively killed off relationships with gaming companies, e.g. the game that eventually became Halo was originally a Macintosh exclusive. That was Microsoft's doing, not Apple's. Microsoft scooped up Bungie to make Halo an Xbox exclusive (at least initially). This purportedly angered Steve Jobs, who probably wasn't too into gaming himself but understood the appeal it might have to consumers.
That isn't the version of history I remember reading about Bungie, but I suppose there are probably differing viewpoints about it. In any case, I do know that John Carmack has said that Steve Jobs told him back then that he should stop working on games and work on operating systems instead, and that he generally did not like them.
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 gamin…
> It's funny, when people denigrate the worst gaming platform in the world as a "toy computer." Unless you're developing iOS apps or MacOS apps, it's pretty terrible as a work platform too. I guess iWork is OK, but no one uses it, so it's not helpful for collaboration. Maybe people use it for media production? Doesn't the big rendering still happen on Linux though, and hasn't windows caught up? Having said that, Mac…
I mean, you're kind of dead wrong? I've been using Macs for almost two decades at this point as a developer, and it's never kept me from getting work done. These days it's great having a powerful Mac, with the ability to use local machine learning models with relatively large amounts of VRAM (more than any consumer GPU, though inference won't be as fast as recent Nvidia cards). It's great at video editing, too.