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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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The PC industry is no longer driven by desktops; laptops have taken over long ago. There is a gaming PC crowd, but that is a small captured audience who wants performance, wattage be damned. Apple is selling around 80% laptops versus desktops, and the rest of the industry is something like 77%. The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race doesn't mean it should automatically be entered into the desktop GPU race, whe…

> The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race

Fact? Which Apple chips are outperforming the laptop 3070, much less the current-gen mobile 4090?

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

#272

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!

I also have a gaming desktop and a Macbook Pro, but I wish I didn't have to have a gaming desktop because I much prefer Macs and MacOS and I wish Apple was interested in competing. Then, they dedicate a segment to 'gaming on mac' to brag about porting a 4 year old game to the Mac.

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

#273

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.

I do not understand. The picture you link clearly does not cut off that way: if it were the case, the curves would be about to cross at the cut, or maybe I am missing something?

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you think that ? I am asking as someone who is working in gamedev. They built Game Porting Toolkit.

The toolkit is not part of Apple platform apparently. It is a development tool that can be used to evaluate porting no more no less. I see no changes in the platform itself.

Including things in the platform is a double-edged sword; the platform has different compatibility policy from windows, and old games typically do not get updated with mandated platform changes (such as a requirement for 64-bit).

Swift developer were upset by concurrency because the language’s deep integration with the platform meant the best features were (for a while) only accessible for apps targeting the latest platform versions exclusively.

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

#276

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…

There are rumors floating around that macs are dropping support for discrete GPUs.

Maybe Apple has set their sights on Nvidia's AI market.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's being run through several layers of emulation. Of course it's going to be slow.

Wine + DXVK disagrees. Graphics API emulation doesn't necessarily provide worse performance, in fact DXVK often wins against raw DirectX 9/10 and sometimes even DirectX 11. VKD3D performance is pretty awesome. Not sure how much of the bottleneck here is because of Rosetta though (i.e. cpu-bound) although I suspect not much really.

Unless it is running a JIT internally as part of the game engine, Rosetta should take the whole executable and rebuild it ahead-of-time.

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

#278
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…

And every 2-3 years they throw-out whatever that huge investment was for a new incompatible project.

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

#280
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

Don't tell IBM they are doing it wrong: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/301863-ibm-our-mac-usi...
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