Do macs really have GPUs though? Or are they like intel integrated graphics?
Yes they have GPUs.
Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves
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Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves
#12The high pixel response time on macbook displays means you'll want an external monitor for multiplayer shooters etc., which most gamers are already fine with, but annoying if you want to game while travelling.
Not a “Gamer” so I’m always surprised small things like this make a difference. As a rule of thumb, what is a minimum frame rate a game needs? From there how much does each extra fps make a difference, and at what point do you hit diminishing returns?
It depends wildly on the type of game.
e.g. if you're playing a single player turn-based strategy game, you might be taking a few seconds between each decision & UI interaction. Some hard turns you might step away from the computer to think things through for minutes without touching the controls. 30fps for a game like that could be fine. 15-20fps might even be fine, especially if the game engine manages to avoid adding unnecessary input latency & is able to process input events at a faster rate even if the render runs at a low framerate.
If you're playing competitive FPS games, where reflexes matter, you'd want to get input, network & video latency as low as possible, within reason. Not high-frequency trading low. I have no idea at what point it stops making a competitive difference. If you have +100ms more latency than I do, I suspect that'd give me a noticeable advantage. If you have +10ms more latency than I do, I'm not sure that matters.
Dan Luu wrote an article about input latency [1] in 2017 where he measured latency by running experiments pressing a key & measuring how long it takes to see a response on the screen. New computers from 2017 would have around 70ms-170ms latency, depending on the model.
Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves
#13Isn't the translation layer going away soon though?
Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves
#14The example they give is a frame rate boost on GTA V - a game released 16 years ago.
Yeah, but at 176 FPS, at first glance it seems competitive with the abilities of some fairly recent dGPUs from nvidia/AMD, though obviously we don't have benchmark-level details here.
I think this is an article allowing quiet optimism rather than all-out celebration.
Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves
#15Do macs really have GPUs though? Or are they like intel integrated graphics?
You might want to not only re-evaluate what you consider a real GPU, but also take a look at what the latest Intel integrated graphics is capable of (Panther Lake laptop chips with 12-core GPU chiplet fabbed by TSMC). Intel is still way behind NVIDIA and AMD in the discrete graphics card market, and their drivers don't have the decades of accumulated hacks to work around badly-written games, but their good iGPUs aren't a nightmare of incompatibility and missing features like they were 15 years ago.
Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves
#16I don't think the Game Porting Toolkit is useful these days:
LLMs one-shot ports from one graphics API to another.
Just like programming languages, graphical API choice is irrelevant now.
Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a “Gamer” so I’m always surprised small things like this make a difference. As a rule of thumb, what is a minimum frame rate a game needs? From there how much does each extra fps make a difference, and at what point do you hit diminishing returns?
It depends wildly on the type of game. e.g. if you're playing a single player turn-based strategy game, you might be taking a few seconds between each decision & UI interaction. Some hard turns you might step away from the computer to think things through for minutes without touching the controls. 30fps for a game like that could be fine. 15-20fps might even be fine, especially if the game engine manages to avoid add…
I very much don't trust that article as a baseline. YMMV but I measured with a 240hz camera with a mid-high tier computer and a 144hz monitor in 2018 and a nice computer w/ 165hz in 2025 and I never got the huge latencies he experienced, I had click to photon of something like 10 frames max, so 42ms, with the average IIRC being closer to 5 frames.
Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves
#18I don't think the Game Porting Toolkit is useful these days: LLMs one-shot ports from one graphics API to another. Just like programming languages, graphical API choice is irrelevant now.
You're going to need a source for an LLM one-shotting a port of a AAA title from one graphics API to another...
Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves
#19This, once again, misses the elephant in the room.
The fact is simple, there isn't enough of a Mac gaming market for the game developers to go through the effort.
The hardware has been good enough for a while now.
I'm not saying this will never change but the developers that shipped games on PC and Mac report something along the lines of 6-11% of users use a Mac. That isn't worth the effort unless you have a very strong IP and you've already targeted the switch2, the PS5 and XBox.
Re: Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves
#20Isn't the translation layer going away soon though?
Rosetta will go away. Game support won't.
"Starting with computers using macOS 28, Rosetta functionality will be available only for certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks."
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527