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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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree: comparing Rosetta plus the graphics API translation layer, with DXVK, which only accomplishes the latter, is ridiculous. Here is what you said, though: > Fantastic would be DXVK approximate levels of performance hit. This is far short of that.

Rosetta is a known quantity of approximately 20% of a drop. DXVK can do about a 20% performance drop in certain situations, and perform better than that in others.

This is at about 50% performance drop translating DX12 to Metal, on top of the drop from Rosetta.

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it when anchored to energy consumption? Sure you can put a powerful GPU in a laptop and make it effectively anchored to wall plug...

That's already true of the M1 Max. At maximum power from CPU+GPU it will barely last an hour. Edit: I wrote Ultra, but I meant Max.

That may be true, but in practice I get faaar better battery life out of my M1 Max than I would out of a laptop with a mobile 4090.

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

#223

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".

I feel like you've got a chip on your shoulder about this for some reason

I've got a gaming desktop and also a MacBook Pro. If the next time I go on a trip, I'm able to play some games in my hotel room on (gasp) medium settings, with a device I already own, that I probably was already going to bring with me, that's a positive thing!

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

#224
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?

their Survivor bias of the “control the whole stack” philosophy.

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

#225
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…

I think this is an example of how ideas about what people really consider important are skewed by marketing. The gaming market is HUGE. How big is the premium, chasing-that-last-quarter-percent-by-spending-twice-the-money market comparatively?

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

#226

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.

They did, although the graph cuts off just before the 3090 takes the lead and goes beyond. https://cdn.videocardz.com/1/2022/03/M1-vs-3090.jpg Frustrating they're being this misleading when M1 is outstanding for it's own reasons, but 3090 eats it alive in the workflows it excels in too. Perfect machine would be both those chips in the same box tbh.

[deleted]

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

#227
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but how can you stick a gtx 3090 in a Mac?

In the new Mac pro..

The new Mac Pro that, despite having PCI Express slots can't be used to add discrete GPUs to the system for graphics tasks.

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

#228
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 30% faster hardware is running Linux. The main reason I'm disappointed with steam on MacOS is that only a third of my library works at all, and that the stuff that does run is hit or miss, performance wise (especially the indie / casual games, which this hardware should laugh at).

Also, another 25% of my library actually was ported to MacOS, but it is 32 bit only, so it won't run on an M2. (Also, typing that sentence was painful.)

I guess if I want to run the vast majority of the MacOS software that I have ever purchased on an M2, my best bet is to install Asahi, and use the Windows ports under proton. Lame.

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

#229

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".

I feel like you've got a chip on your shoulder about this for some reason I've got a gaming desktop and also a MacBook Pro. If the next time I go on a trip, I'm able to play some games in my hotel room on (gasp) medium settings, with a device I already own, that I probably was already going to bring with me, that's a positive thing!

They should’ve showcased a game that’s actually new and not just a port.

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

#230
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> guess iWork is OK, but no one uses it, so it's not helpful for collaboration You realize Microsoft Office has been on the Mac since the mid 80s right? > Maybe people use it for media production? Uhh yes?

Microsoft Office has always been sub-par on Mac, and I haven't worked at a company that uses it for collaboration for over a decade. (Sure, there's the occasional person that actually needs VB macros under Excel, or prefers powerpoint, but there's no reason for me to run it.)

I know you can use them for media production. Looking around, it sounds like they still own the low-end with iMovie, but it gets questionable as hardware requirements increase. I guess it's a viable platform for that.

I know a lot of CAD software is missing MacOS ports, so they seem to have lost that market.

Anyway, I'll continue to think of my laptop as a dumb terminal with a good hypervisor bolted on the side.

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