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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

#211

Post by ohgodplsno »

hedora wrote: post #185
nightski wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think you'd be surprised. I just checked, and my desktop gaming GPU is only 31% faster than that nvidia, and I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro M2 Max. I bought the laptop and the video card because they are quiet and their price/performance is better than the high end stuff anyway. I just tried running steam on the macbook, and was very disappointed. My Linux gaming desktop will live on for another few years, I gues…

Rosetta translation + D3D12OnMetal (which developers aren't allowed to use to publish their games, so you'll have to do it on your own and work with a subpar version) will happily eat that 30% difference. Not to mention the massive changes that drivers bring, where Apple will never either want or be able to do as much work as Nvidia does.

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

#212

Post by boringg »

christoph wrote: post #49

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…

This is an actually interesting use of the headset. Price tag at this state to high for most users -- but imagine it dropped down to something reasonable. Throw in your favorite game and the immersive experience would be pretty slick.

You are definitely correct -- they are opening the door for gaming on that system though they are doing it quietly not to get competition up in arms.

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

#213

Post by llm_nerd »

madeofpalk wrote: post #110
Const-me wrote: post #95

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".

>it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry

Apple seems to be doing okay. I mean, a magnitude more people game on iPhones than game on PCs.

Apple is trying to support ancillary gaming for users who chose their platform for other reasons. That's it. They aren't targeting the 1200 watt, 12-fan 4090 PCMR sorts. And that's okay.

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

#214

Post by ranger_danger »

yreg wrote: 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…

> how much effort Apple puts into this

how much did they actually put into it? as far as I know this is mostly just WINE with an Apple logo on it.

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

#215

Post by mrtranscendence »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #199
Yujf wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they need to most powerfull gaming hardware? Maybe just the fact that it might get reasonable to play most games on a macbook is enough to get people who also want to game to buy a macbook instead of a windows laptop. And maybe this is enough to get developers to consider mac. They do not need to compete with nvidea for the top of the line

Yeah, high end enthusiast hardware is in fact pretty niche, and I say this as someone with a 5950X/3080Ti tower. The vast majority of people playing games are doing so on pretty old/average hardware, a bar which is met and exceeded by several M-series Macs.

High-end hardware is niche, but the state of AAA game performance these days ... ugh. I can't even get a stable 60fps on Jedi Survivor with my 5800x/3080 Ti rig, even with lower settings. How bad is it on something like a 1060?

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

#216

Post by ohgodplsno »

senttoschool wrote: post #73
yreg wrote: 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…

> Like how does all this Metal, compile-your-shaders, port-your-games stuff even get budgeted, when it's eventually dead on arrival? iOS gaming is the biggest and most profitable in the world. In fact, iOS is bigger than PS5, Xbox, and PC gaming. iOS uses Metal. Apple Silicon is mostly just a scaled up iPhone SoC. Macs basically get most things funded by iOS. The Game Porting Toolkit is the first Mac-only gaming tool…

Microtransaction ridden mobile gacha games where Apple takes 30% aren't exactly the target when you translate D3D12 to Metal for your desktop platform where Apple takes nothing. In practice, it is doomed to be a solution that plays the games you bought on steam 5 years ago, or run games like cyberpunk on medium 900p on your multiple-thousand dollar machine.

Apple gaming will not take off until game devs target Apple's devices, and Apple burned those bridges a long time ago.

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

#217

Post by eliasmacpherson »

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #183
eliasmacpherson wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This not only does DX12 -> Metal, it also does X86 -> ARM, and still manages to give you decent performance if you lower the graphics settings, you can manage easily 30fps, wich is enough on a laptop, considering it runs with a battery So for 2020 laptop chip, it's pretty great achievement I'd say! I don't know of any project that does X86 -> ARM this well

don't confuse Rosetta with this game porting toolkit.

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

#218

Post by heyoni »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #204
heyoni wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I misspoke. A handful of triple A games. Most of which don't perform so well even on high end intel machines due to thermal throttling.

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

#219

Post by emn13 »

paulmd wrote: post #167
madeofpalk wrote: post #110

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".

> 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" mac…

The M2 Max is closer to the 3060 than it is to the 3060 Ti, let alone 3070. And those numbers are quite possibly overly optimistic; workloads essentially never reach peak tflop, and I would not be surprised if practical workloads are better matched to nvidia's architecture than apple's, if only through sheer industry momentum (But that could go either way).

While the perf/watt is impressive, apple is also using 4 times the number of transistors on TSMC's latest process - and the comparison here is samsungs 8nm, I believe. It's not really all that impressive that that huge silicon investment has some results...

It's a tantalizing hint at what might be possible, but as it stands, I'm not really all that impressed, personally.

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

#220

Post by mrtranscendence »

dahauns wrote: post #122
aurareturn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 3dMar…

> 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.

Yeah, on synthetic benchmarks a higher-end MacBook Pro GPU compares favorably with recent Nvidia laptop cards (say, 4070 or so). But in games that drops off dramatically ... more like a 3050 or 3060 at best.

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