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Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

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Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#261

Post by tstrimple »

jeroenhd wrote: post #144
veselin wrote: post #128

I find the article quite informative. Yes, M2 and the other chips are completely different products with different goals. If one wants to say that something completely trumps the other, it will be wrong. But here is what is visible: The M2 core is probably in the same ballpark as Zen 4 core, likely a tiny bit below. That may become very tiny if Zen 4 core runs at lower frequency to equalize the power. This doesn't ac…

Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their gaming related advertising. Sure, you can do 1080p gaming with the highest SKU, but you're paying through the nose if you bought an M2 to play games. It seems strange to me for Apple to advertise something they haven't exactly mastered yet on stage. Maybe they have some kind of optimization up their sleeves that will roll out later? I can imagine Apple co…

With crossover and Apple's latest release of gameportingtoolkit I'm able to maintain over 120FPS on ultra settings at native resolution on Diablo 4 with my M2 Max MBP. It was fair to be skeptical before that release this week, but there's plenty of evidence out there now that Apple silicon can handle gaming just fine. Other users are reporting 50-60 FPS with ultra settings on their 6k Studio displays.

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#262

Post by avidphantasm »

daviddever23box wrote: post #241

I watched the first three Mad Max films last night, in one sitting...while there is certainly an argument for absolute performance over time, it's becoming a lot more difficult to justify the power consumption of the current Intel (and, to a lesser degree, AMD) offerings, especially for sustained personal productivity and burst compilation tasks. We cannot speak of performance without the per-watt quotient. Battery l…

Yeah, my reaction the whole time to reading OP is, “now do performance per Watt…”

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#263

Post by avidphantasm »

jeroenhd wrote: post #162
rbanffy wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The M2 GPU is in the same league as a 300$ mid-range nVidia card It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool. I did a quick comparison exercise - I priced two workstations with similar configurations, one from Dell, the other from Apple. While there are x86 (and ARM) machines that'll blow the biggest M2 out of the water, the prices, as far as Apple can go, aren't much different. https://twitter.com/0xDE…

If you buy anything labeled as "workstation", you're paying twice the price already. The article describes the M2 being blown out of the water by a 4080 and a 13900KS. That's about $2000 + RAM, motherboard, and power supply. Plus you can use the built in GPU in your CPU for acceleration things like transcodes. You can get a pre-built gaming PC with a 4090 for about $4000, that'll crush the M2 in compute if you use an…

You’re forgetting the benefit of everything just working and never having to thinking about effing with drivers ever. To me, it’s priceless. Anything truly performance bound (CPU or GPU) is going to be done on HPC systems, not on a fake Windows “workstation”.

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#264

Post by littlestymaar »

jml78 wrote: post #223
littlestymaar wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not familiar with DLSS at all, does it requires developers to do something in order to take avantage of it too? I had imagined it was automatic but then again I know nothing about it beyond the marketing pitch to consumers.

Yes, games have to do work to support DLSS. I am not knowledgeable enough to know how much work it is but I have played games that didn’t initially support it but eventually released an updated that added support. There are also multiple “levels” for DLSS in games that support it, eg. Quality, performance, etc

Thanks

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#265

Post by aunty_helen »

daviddever23box wrote: post #241

I watched the first three Mad Max films last night, in one sitting...while there is certainly an argument for absolute performance over time, it's becoming a lot more difficult to justify the power consumption of the current Intel (and, to a lesser degree, AMD) offerings, especially for sustained personal productivity and burst compilation tasks. We cannot speak of performance without the per-watt quotient. Battery l…

The ultra isn’t in laptops. The ultra in the Mac Pro starts at 7 grand, if you’re going to pay a 4 grand premium, is 200$ of extra power over its lifetime really that important?

I have a m2 Max, the battery life is awe inspiring. M2 ultra doesn’t best the competition for its use case.

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#266

Post by pornel »

GeekyBear wrote: post #252
jeroenhd wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their gaming related advertising. Sure, you can do 1080p gaming with the highest SKU, but you're paying through the nose if you bought an M2 to play games. It seems strange to me for Apple to advertise something they haven't exactly mastered yet on stage. Maybe they have some kind of optimization up their sleeves that will roll out later? I can imagine Apple co…

> Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their gaming related advertising. The issue is that people compare games running under emulated x86 and emulated graphics APIs, when making claims about what the SOC is capable of. There's nothing wrong with knowing how well the SOC performs when emulating games, but if you claim to be talking about what the SOC can do, then include the performance of native…

Apple's x86 emulation is otherwise very impressive, and not many games are bottlenecked on the CPU, especially at high resolutions.

Bigger overhead for AAA games is likely due to emulation of DirectX or Vulkan on Metal, but that's just Apple's stubborn choice to have it that way.

In the end, none of that matters. I won't be playing Cyberpunk at 14fps, without RTX, and comforting myself that the SoC could do maybe 28fps without emulation. Lower-tier Nvidia cards perform better, even when paired with slower CPUs.

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#267

Post by jerrygenser »

eikenberry wrote: post #218
jerrygenser wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your gaming PC you likely don't even need a current gen chip. You are probably fine with a 5600 for most games unless you NEED high FPS on certain games and have a monitor with 244hz refresh rate (or you won't even get the frames) Gaming is mostly about GPU (if you're casual gamer and want to run 1440p) but if you do need cpu and high refresh rate then you're likely hardcore FPS or RTS games and you're running at…

> For your gaming PC you likely don't even need a current gen chip. Many gamers, like me, probably also use their display for things aside from gaming. For non-gaming computer work I like 4K w/ a high (120hz ideally) refresh rate for well rendered text and smoother movement. But as I also then want to use this monitor for gaming, I need a gaming system that supports this. TLDR; you might need a current gen chip for r…

My 49 inch 144hz monitor ran fine for this exact use case when I had an amd 3600 and Nvidia 1660. Is your work use case somehow more demanding than gaming?

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#268

Post by avidphantasm »

jeroenhd wrote: post #178
kitsunesoba wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool. I wonder if given roughly equal power to the GPUs in current gen consoles (PS5/XBSX), it'd yield some advantage in porting console games since those consoles also have a large shared pool of memory (16GB), and neither AMD nor Nvidia want to give up using VRAM as an upsell.

With the M2 Ultra prices, it'd be cheaper to buy a 4090 than to go the Apple route. With the M2 pro you'll probably still be better off with a 4080 unless you really need more than 16GB of VRAM. I don't know the M2's efficiency for things like machine learning, but the M1's machine learning performance seemed to have been beaten 4-5x by the 3060Ti so I'm pretty sure "more VRAM" is all it's got going for it in ML task…

Cheaper in terms of money, but in terms of time? I have a hard time justifying anything that requires configuration and dicking around. I’m a grown-up and don’t have “free time”. I need things that just work. For me, that’s not Intel and Windows or Intel and Linux. It’s macOS, which is the only true workstation platform left.

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#269

Post by menus »

IneffablePigeon wrote: post #107
kayson wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people really care about efficiency for plugged-in devices? There is the environmental factor, but there are people on 100% renewable a too...

I bought an m series device to replace my windows desktop mostly for efficiency reasons. It saves me hundreds a year in electricity costs at the moment (quite literally, I calculated it beforehand and checked real usage afterwards). It also means my office is now silent and cool. It’s a big QoL improvement for me.

Was cost of the device also taken into consideration in your overall cost calculation? What was the cost of your Windows desktop and what was the cost of your M series device you replaced it with?

Have you ever upgraded any components of your Windows desktop (RAM, GPU, CPU, motherboard) or did you discard the entire thing?

Re: Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs

#270

Post by cbsmith »

avidphantasm wrote: post #262
daviddever23box wrote: post #241

I watched the first three Mad Max films last night, in one sitting...while there is certainly an argument for absolute performance over time, it's becoming a lot more difficult to justify the power consumption of the current Intel (and, to a lesser degree, AMD) offerings, especially for sustained personal productivity and burst compilation tasks. We cannot speak of performance without the per-watt quotient. Battery l…

Yeah, my reaction the whole time to reading OP is, “now do performance per Watt…”

The chips it is being compared to are a year older. If there wasn't an advantage somewhere, it'd be an absolute failure.
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