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?
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
#282As 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 B…
>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.
I think there's a segment of Mac users who own Windows machines exclusively for gaming. I think the value in these capabilities isn't that people will buy Apple Silicon machine primarily as gaming machines, I think the value is in enabling someone in the Apple ecosystem who plays games occasionally to opt-out of owning a Windows machine.
Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you are indeed doing AAA gaming, then you wouldn't have sufficient battery life without plugging in, or you wouldn't have sufficient performance.
Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 tim…
I actually added the 3060 bit myself lol, because yeah, that seems to be more like where it actually lands, more like desktop 3060.
edit: also desktop vs mobile is a factor here too... mobile 3070 is not the same thing as desktop 3070, and coming in at desktop 3070 would actually be fairly impressive. Mobile 3060, much less so.
Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mobile gaming and PC gaming are somewhat different markets. In particular, mobile game development companies don't have any choice but to work with Apple and Google, whereas AAA PC gaming companies have another outlet already. I like Apple and I like their products but I think if you talk to any sizable mobile developer they'd be able to tell you stories about the difficulties of working with Apple.
Don't PC gaming companies have only one real outlet (Microsoft) to work with? Not to be confused with distribution channels such as Steam.
Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 gamin…
Ok, uninstall Steam then, I guess? Games do currently exist on Mac, both in the App store and on Steam. It's just that there's a big swath of games that haven't been ported to Apple Silicon in particular, due to difficulty. I grew up playing games on the Mac, so I'm not sure what your point is.
Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP
#287Running 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.
Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh, why are you saying Apple could develop D3DMetal much faster because DXVK was MIT-licensed? Literally nothing would've changed up until now if DXVK had been GPL-licensed, the only difference is that now that they've made it publicly available, they'd have had to license D3DMetal under a GPL-compatible license. Where does the extra delay come in?
They can weaponize it against Valve. Helping displace steam for relatively little effort bumped it up in priority.
Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's neat and impressive, but that's all they have. They don't have a high end. For $3000 you can get a top end gaming PC. There's no amount of money you can spend on a Mac to equal that. I think you're missing the point that parent (and Siracusa) made - Apple invests a signficant into the software and graphics stack, only to fumble it at the last minute by not having high-end graphics hardware, and caring enough t…
Apple silicon wins on performance per watt but not in performance outright and suddenly everyone cares about power consumption. Whichever spec everyone's favorite fruit company excels at gets put on a pedestal.
but yea you can say the same thing about tons of brands. Last summer all the AMD fans were talking about 1€/kWh electricity and saying they were going to buy whatever dGPU was most efficient... when that turned out to be Ada by a country mile, everybody pivoted to whining about price and bought RDNA2 GPUs with half of the perf/w.
During RDNA2 everyone insisted that a 10% perf/w advantage for AMD was a buying point, back during the Vega years they insisted that a 2x perf/w disadvantage didn't matter. Rinse and repeat.
I generally think power matters when it rises to the level of a tangible difference... 200W difference between 4070 and 6950XT means the latter is really a non-starter even if it's 10% faster (at a 5% higher price), especially considering the big-picture featureset (DLSS improves both perf and perf/w). And really it matters more in laptops. You're right that Mac Studio/Mac Pro are not really a place where it hugely matters, but, in a laptop, the next-best thing would be a Ryzen 6800U which is about GTX 1630 performance, so 3060 performance in the same envelope is a big step upwards!
And really this "big differences matter, small ones don't" applies to most stuff in general. 5% this way or the other, who cares. That kind of thing is often less important than general UX/quality/features, I'll take a laptop that's 5% slower but way longer battery life or better screen/trackpad/whatever. When things start rising to the level of 25% or 30% difference in some spec, or in price... yeah that's immediately noticeable.
But yea I generally agree that desktops like Studio or outright workstations like Mac Pro are dGPU territory and people are generally not looking for a super efficient iGPU with 3060 performance. On the other hand, being able to talk to 192GB of VRAM is definitely novel, especially with large AI models being the talk of the town this year (and accessible to even the most casual of artists/developers), and the unified APU approach with uniform memory/zero-paging has other advantages for development too. AMD had a lot of this stuff hammered out 10 years ago, supposedly, and then... just never did anything with it, other than sell it to consoles. It's great for PS5 and Xbox, why can't I buy a PC laptop with 96GB of unified/uniform memory with 3060-level performance in a 25W envelope?
Really I think a lot of the people who have bought Macbooks recently are not "traditional" apple customers. The MBP and even MBA are legitimately really nice laptops with a good screen, good keyboard, good trackpad, good sound, etc. I have said before that I really think a lot of MBP customers would be interested in a "Macbook Tough" toughbook if they ever did that, although of course that's the most un-Jony Ives product possible.
There is a clear demand for a high-quality AMD-based non-GPU ultrabook using a 6800U or 7040U or whatever. Framework is the first company to even try, and they're using crappy 13" hardware on the upcoming AMD model while the market clearly wants more like a 15" or 16" (and their 16" will not have AMD boards). Why didn't anybody else do it first? Apple is catching on because they're filling a market niche that everyone else is ignoring, and they're not even really exactly filling it squarely, they just happen to be vaguely closer than the rest of the market.
And now that the nerd crowd has the hardware... the software is following. It's the same reason that CUDA has taken off while AMD's GPGPU programme has spun its wheels for 15 years, and the same reason AMD has good Linux drivers now. Give the nerds the hardware and innovation will follow - when they tinker they'll be tinkering with your platform.
Big missed opportunity for AMD, yet again. Or Intel, but, they're so far behind on APUs/integration that I think disappointment is basically the baseline expectation at this point. AMD had all the pieces, and yet again just chose not to do anything with them.
Re: Apple's game porting toolkit is fantastic. Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MBP
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mobile gaming and PC gaming are somewhat different markets. In particular, mobile game development companies don't have any choice but to work with Apple and Google, whereas AAA PC gaming companies have another outlet already. I like Apple and I like their products but I think if you talk to any sizable mobile developer they'd be able to tell you stories about the difficulties of working with Apple.
Most of the "sizable" mobile developers are entangled in the PC/Console game developers if in no other place than on the broad sheet with one generating revenue to pay for the increasingly expensive other. King is a part of Activision Blizzard (and a part of the pending sale to Microsoft). Zynga is a part of Take-Two (Rockstar/2K). Riot is obviously Riot. A half-dozen others are arms of Tencent in one way or another,…