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16 inch MBP GPU vs M1 MBP
- Thread starter Xolp
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Take a look here for some good GPU benchmarks, mind you this is with the very expensive 5600M upgrade in the 16":
M1 MacBook Pro versus 16-inch MacBook Pro
real world speed test results for performance minded Macintosh users
barefeats.com
It's going to depend on what you do. Gaming performance is no contest, the dedicated GPU will definitely win. M1 is impressive for what it can do in a low power machine, but still can't quite surpass the 16" MBP. Of course the MBP also has a considerably larger display and better speakers. Personally, while the new shiny M1s are tempting, I'm holding out for models with larger displays and more GPU cores.
True.
I tried World of Warcraft on my i9 Macbook with AMD Radeon Pro 5500M and it went ok, but the fans were spinning up like a jet plane
That was the reason I got the Mac Mini M1 in the first place. On my Mac Mini it works great, and I don't hear anything from the fan at all.
The 8 core M1 GPU is somewhere between the 560X and 5300M but it sips like zero watts and doesn’t grill your nuts.
The 5300M is around 50% faster for all practical purposes than the M1.
It already has. The M1 is a 10W GPU that uses relatively slow LPDDR4 RAM, the 5300M is a 50W part with fast GDDR6 memory. Once higher-end versions of Apple Silicon come out (same generation, more processing units, faster RAM), it will easily surpass current AND and Nvidia GPUs at lower TDPs.
Thank you but when do you think Apple Silicon will surpass the 5300m from a performance perspective?
When Appel releases the next batch of machines with a larger SoC and 16 or more GPU cores. Probably autumn or earlier.
When do you think the 13inch macbook pro will have better graphics than the 5300? I play an opencl game which performs well on my mbp 16 but want to buy a mbp 13
A rumored new 14" (whenever it is released) should be at least on par with the 16" model. If you are talking about the current entry-level M1 machines, probably once M2 or M3 is released (so next year at the earliest).
I just got a base 7-core GPU Air and it's better than my 2018 15" MBP i7 with Vega 20 GPU I use for work.
I can play League and FF14 on the Air and it runs better than my MBP and it doesn't even break a sweat.
For reference, League dropped frames like crazy on my 15 MBP (down to 15 FPS in team fights) and I tried a dozen things I read online to fix it to no avail, even on the lowest settings. FF14 worked great for 10 minutes before throttling inevitably kicked in and made me switch to lowest settings and low resolution.
My main skepticism was around how well the M1 would actually handle my work (design and front end development) + personal use tasks and it blew me away. I read and watched tons of reviews, read all the different benchmarks and comparisons, but kept going back and forth until I just decided to see for myself.
If you're contemplating an M1, I suggest trying one out for a few days and seeing how it works for your usage and making a decision from there.
I can play League and FF14 on the Air and it runs better than my MBP and it doesn't even break a sweat.
For reference, League dropped frames like crazy on my 15 MBP (down to 15 FPS in team fights) and I tried a dozen things I read online to fix it to no avail, even on the lowest settings. FF14 worked great for 10 minutes before throttling inevitably kicked in and made me switch to lowest settings and low resolution.
My main skepticism was around how well the M1 would actually handle my work (design and front end development) + personal use tasks and it blew me away. I read and watched tons of reviews, read all the different benchmarks and comparisons, but kept going back and forth until I just decided to see for myself.
If you're contemplating an M1, I suggest trying one out for a few days and seeing how it works for your usage and making a decision from there.
8 core M1 is 21,000 Geekbench
5300M is about 28000 Geekbench but much higher watts
Apple can easily touch 30-35000 Geekbenches with the 16”
With non-M1 Macs, you always had the option to use Bootcamp and enjoy greatly improved gaming/GPU performance just by using Windows. This is gone now. When just running a different OS on the same hardware gives you 50%+ improvement is performance, the neglect and lack of care is pretty hard to overlook. GPU side of things always seemed pretty ignored by Apple. It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation, where GPU drivers/support/implementation is bad in the MacOS, so nobody bothers bringing their games/software over or putting any effort into optimization, which makes things seem even worse. Even a good GPU is a constant work in progress in reality, where optimizations are constantly being shipped to users via drivers and it's not unlikely companies will offer a driver update just for a single new game release, with more following in weeks after delivering optimizations or resolving bugs and compatibility issues. This is just not how Apple has approached things so far, with the drivers being baked into the OS and even major GPU bugs commonly being completely ignored for the whole lifespan of machines (see MBP16). Furthermore, Apple has shown to be extra hostile to GPU users by deprecating OpenCL and OpenGL, which are used by like 90% of software employing GPUs on Macs and making any GPU development even more inaccessible, still not sure what they were thinking there.
I really hope Apple turns a new leaf here and puts some more work into the GPU side of things, but it'd require a major commitment and change. Just adding a few cores isn't enough. Otherwise the AS GPUs might stick to looking okay in benchmarks and stay basically useless outside that.
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Sorry, but what does it help you when no software supports it and it can't even run a single high-res monitor properly (LOL, forget about 2)?
From the desktop PC side, I'm painfully aware of the NVidia vs AMD GPU battles, where AMD kept shipping solid hardware, but continuously dropped the ball on the software/drivers side. People would even meme about "AMD FineWineTM", because their cards would famously only start showing the true potential of the hardware after a year or 2 of driver updates. Intel also had many hiccups recently, with their new Xe graphics and drivers, even though they've been in the iGPU business for ages. In any case, NVidia completely dominated both on the software support side and is now the GPU of choice for ML/AI stuff in desktops and data centres. It's just not that easy and Apple has a massive hill to climb. Hardware specs and cherry picked benches are not enough.
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MacBook Pros clearly have issues with thermals and throttling so it's not just graphics. Even in Windows boot camped I experienced frame drops in League of Legends of all games. There's also the issue I ran into with Big Sur where booting Windows gets randomly stuck in an infinite error loop which fixes itself when I try again later. Not an ideal experience.
I understand why no longer having the boot camp option would rub some people the wrong way but personally I make it a rule to not do more than light gaming on my Mac.
In regards to OpenCL/GL, that's dumb but it just looks like their strategy to try and move people to Metal.
With all that said, I don't care about playing Cyberpunk on max or high and I don't expect Macs to ever be able to do that. That's why I have a console and that's why the M1 is so great for my needs and why I suggested the OP to test it out for their personal use cases because they may end up being pleasantly surprised as well.
Yep, it was a really
Deprecation of OpenGL was urgently needed and I completely disagree with you that it was a hostile move towards the GPU users. First, OpenGL is a terrible API by today's standards. It does not offer any performance guarantees and it's very design goes agains the basics of modern GPUs. OpenGL games were doing OK-ish in Windows mostly because of awful driver-side hacks for popular games, but that is not something that is possible on macOS because again, no incentives for GPU partners to improve their drivers. Second, OpenGL drivers are extremely difficult to write, which agains does not help with neither stability nor performance. Third, OpenGL is notoriously difficult to use for developers. It might look simple and neat when you do a "basic triangle" tutorial, but try writing a semi-complex rendering engine that has to work on multiple GPUs... you will quickly run into GPU-specific quirks that you have to work around, debugging is beyond awful — in short, it's bad, really bad. And finally, fourth: OpenGL might have been deprecated, but it has not been removed. Apple provides a legacy wrapper that implements OpenGL on top of Metal, which ironically enough makes OpenGL implementation on M1 more performant and less buggy than ever.
In short, if you are serious about GPU programming, you do not use OpenGL in 2020. There is just no reason and no excuse. There is a reason why the state of Mac gaming has improved in the last couple of years — games started using Metal, which improved the stability and the performance massively.
The quality of Apple Silicon drivers is much better than any third-party drivers before it. It's very obvious when playing games on M1 for example. A typical occurrence with Mac gaming were sudden FPS dips — even with a fast AMD GPU, but M1 delivers more stable framerates overall.
There will still be driver bugs, obviously, but already the fact that you only have to deal with one vendor and unified GPU capabilities across the entire ecosystem is a massive improvement. From the perspective of a GPU programmer, Apple Silicon is not dissimilar to a gaming console, and you get fairly low-level access to it's GPU.
Thanks, that's a great perspective. The reason I called the move hostile towards users is because I'd argue that these platform independent libraries still made it a bit more likely for stuff to be ported to Macs by reducing the amount of work needed. Metal seems great, but it doesn't exactly exist on other platforms. However, I did just read about Apple releasing Metal Developer Tools on Windows last year, so it does seem that they are aware of needing to make things a bit more accessible.
That's great to hear, I really hope they keep pushing on then. Maybe even some ML stuff gets ported over if they hit a home run with the upcoming desktop AS chips
I actually completely agree and see my MBP in the same light. And you are correct regarding the thermals, even running games on a PC and just streaming them to my MBP makes the fans go insane. But I can't say I would say no to a future where I could play a light game at even a reduced resolution and graphics settings without needing to worry about booting into windows (which now stopped being an option) or needing a console. And that's just one GPU use.
I am a previous Macbook Pro 16", (32GB RAM, 5500 8GB), Macbook Pro 13" 4core i5 with Iris (the latest one), Macbook Pro M1 8GB and a current Macbook Air M1 16GB owner. I am not crazy about games, except the Mass Effect trilogy, (especially 2 and 3). They are Windows only games and old by todays standards, although I play them with ALOT and ALOV installed, (they are mods that install hires textures and videos in the games), and that way they look modern and are a lot more heavy on resources.
When I had the Macbook Pro 16" with the 5500 Radeon Pro, Mass Effect 2 and 3 were playable in Windows 10 through Bootcamp, at 1080p with the hires mods installed and the fans were at full speed. They were NOT playable in Parallels at any resolution.
With the Macbook Pro 13" i5 Iris, they were half playable at 1440x900 in bootcamp and the fans were at full speed, not playable in Parallels.
My Macbook Air M1 16GB can play them through Parallels, in Windows 10 ARM, at 1080p, with the hires mods installed, at phenomenal speed. They play better in Parallels in M1 than they did in Bootcamp with the Macbook Pro 13" Iris i5, and equally good as the Macbook Pro 16" in Bootcamp. I know that they are not 2021 games, but just the fact that I can play a Windows game in Parallels M1 at 1080p over 60 frames per second is magical to me!
When I had the Macbook Pro 16" with the 5500 Radeon Pro, Mass Effect 2 and 3 were playable in Windows 10 through Bootcamp, at 1080p with the hires mods installed and the fans were at full speed. They were NOT playable in Parallels at any resolution.
With the Macbook Pro 13" i5 Iris, they were half playable at 1440x900 in bootcamp and the fans were at full speed, not playable in Parallels.
My Macbook Air M1 16GB can play them through Parallels, in Windows 10 ARM, at 1080p, with the hires mods installed, at phenomenal speed. They play better in Parallels in M1 than they did in Bootcamp with the Macbook Pro 13" Iris i5, and equally good as the Macbook Pro 16" in Bootcamp. I know that they are not 2021 games, but just the fact that I can play a Windows game in Parallels M1 at 1080p over 60 frames per second is magical to me!
Unfortunately, the GPU API space as it evolved did it through Direct3D. As Leman points out, OpenGL is a rather crusty API to work with, and it’s been in dire need of replacement for close to 15 years now, if I’m not mistaken. But since the OpenGL group basically did nothing but smaller changes here and there to apply band-aids to the situation, Microsoft was allowed to effectively carve their own path unopposed for years, and they’ve been heading down the path of lower level APIs for quite a while (much like Metal and Vulkan do).
Apple didn’t have a ton of choice here. Microsoft has zero incentive to let Apple license D3D APIs. Vulkan was available 2 years after Metal was, so too little, too late.
But as Leman pointed out around quirks with different GPUs, the same is true for different platforms. OpenGL on Windows, Mac and Linux would have different issues you had to take into account for getting the “fast path” through the drivers. What would be fast on Windows may not be fast on the Mac. So being cross-platform doesn’t necessarily mean equivalent. Vulkan on paper could do better as a cross-platform API, potentially, but neither Apple nor Microsoft really have an incentive to jump on board at this point. So instead Vulkan at least on Mac is driving Metal for you with a bit of overhead to do so (MoltenVK). I’m not sure if Vulkan on Windows has more direct access.
But generally, these APIs have all been converging on a similar train of thought on how they should work anyways. So it may not be as expensive to support both Metal and D3D as you might think. And with more game devs using middleware like Unity and Unreal Engine, these details are managed by the middleware developer, not the game dev. It’s led to more games on the Mac, although more indie games rather than the big AAAs (the devs more likely to be using their own engines).
This is a bit harder to see happening for a couple reasons:
1) Apple wants folks using CoreML so that ML isn’t specific to the CPU, GPU, or Neural Engine (the OS will just pick for you based on what resources are available). So even with tools Apple is providing for converting stuff over, it is still an extra step for Windows-dominant shops.
2) Nvidia’s got a leg up on ML compute right now with their CUDA tech which is tied to their GPUs, and I’m seeing a lot of folks basically asking for “CUDA support or else”, which only will ever benefit Nvidia and contribute to lock-in. Platforms like Windows and MacOS needed to be on this sooner if they wanted to avoid this situation, IMO.
Guess it just depends on what game you want to play. Sounds like we are in similar camps re: light gaming and I definitely think we're not far off from seeing that happen on a larger scale.
I agree, since the base M1 Macs are able to play games that would require dGPUs on Intel Macs. These Macs are bought in large numbers for education use. It should be enough of a carrot to entice more games to be released for M1 Macs.
13" MacBook will probably match the performance of 5300 in 2022, and exceeding it may likely be 2023 for Apple. Or that's what I think. 2021 is a wash if Apple isn't going to move past the M1 any time soon. And mind... Apple hasn't even announced the iPad with A14X yet, so they're likely delayed by the global chip shortage.
There is no immediate "need" for Apple to raise GPU performance beyond what the current Macs offer. Apple keeps trying to push gaming and high performance graphics, but they aren't working closely with game developers to bring more AAA games to the Mac, nor are they working with industry-leading CAD companies to bring over their CAD software.
So I suspect they'll just keep throwing more cores at the problem and call it a day.
The next 16" MacBook may surpass the 5300, though. But that's almost a given since I doubt Apple wants to introduce a 2021 MacBook that's not any better than its 2019 predecessor. When you think about it, your computer is almost 1.5 years old.