How foolish would it be to buy an M4 Max MBP for gaming ?

[s4snail]

That’s a really good question, since there’s a massive spec difference between them (the RAM amount is irrelevant at that level, particularly if you’re playing on the laptop screen rather than a higher resolution external monitor).

The CPU difference is likely to be nil for gaming, slight advantage M4.

The superior M4 GPU (higher performance per core, better mesh shading and raytracing) has fewer cores than the inferior M3 GPU which means the M3 is faster for raster. Raw numbers: 14.8 TFLOPS M4 with 32 cores, 16.4 TFLOPS M3 with 40 cores

So the question is: how important are mesh shading and raytracing to your gaming? If those laptops both have the same size storage and price, the M3 Max is absolutely the better deal but perhaps not the better machine for you.

Thank you for your comment, very detailed explanation and advice. I also thinkin towards choosing the option with M3 max. Since this is an integrated video card, I don't think it's worth seriously considering it for the ray tracing task. This feature is rather a bonus of the M4 generation, but the performance in ray tracing will of course be dramatically inferior to discrete video cards from Nvidia. The only thing that stops me from deciding to buy the M3 is the almost 20% lower single-core processor performance. Since I would like to keep my machine as long as possible, I'm worried that over time, the processor power may become a bottleneck much faster compared to the new M4. Probably even in games, if I'm not mistaken most of them use the performance of single core.

 

[leifp]

Thank you for your comment, very detailed explanation and advice. I also thinkin towards choosing the option with M3 max. Since this is an integrated video card, I don't think it's worth seriously considering it for the ray tracing task. This feature is rather a bonus of the M4 generation, but the performance in ray tracing will of course be dramatically inferior to discrete video cards from Nvidia. The only thing that stops me from deciding to buy the M3 is the almost 20% lower single-core processor performance. Since I would like to keep my machine as long as possible, I'm worried that over time, the processor power may become a bottleneck much faster compared to the new M4. Probably even in games, if I'm not mistaken most of them use the performance of single core.

Single core scores matter but much less than they used to. No modern AAA game that I’m aware of relies on a single core. Most are console-first where PS5 and Xbox Series consoles have 8 cores (which is also why the gaming focused AMD 9800X3D is an 8 core CPU). The M4 you spec has 10 performance cores and is thus fine for present use scenarios.

Since you seem to be coming from the WinPC side of things (or at least the Intel Mac era), the distinction between integrated and discrete GPUs is not relevant for thinking about Apple Silicon. It’s leagues better than any integrated GPU in the WinPC universe and also not up to par with the very best nVidia GPUs, except in performance per watt but we don’t game in joules…

As to which computer has a longer useful life ahead for you, I would guess it’s a wash. The CPU in M4 is faster and the GPU newer but the RAM and raster performance of the M3 is superior. Only you can know which compromises you prefer to make. I’d guess that you have until the next generation consoles are properly established in the market before games come out that won’t run properly on either of those machines with one caveat: ray tracing.

I apologize for the length of my comments. I’ve tried to be as concise as possible… I guess I’m just a maximum verbosity kinda guy.

 

[s4snail]

Single core scores matter but much less than they used to. No modern AAA game that I’m aware of relies on a single core. Most are console-first where PS5 and Xbox Series consoles have 8 cores (which is also why the gaming focused AMD 9800X3D is an 8 core CPU). The M4 you spec has 10 performance cores and is thus fine for present use scenarios.

Since you seem to be coming from the WinPC side of things (or at least the Intel Mac era), the distinction between integrated and discrete GPUs is not relevant for thinking about Apple Silicon. It’s leagues better than any integrated GPU in the WinPC universe and also not up to par with the very best nVidia GPUs, except in performance per watt but we don’t game in joules…

As to which computer has a longer useful life ahead for you, I would guess it’s a wash. The CPU in M4 is faster and the GPU newer but the RAM and raster performance of the M3 is superior. Only you can know which compromises you prefer to make. I’d guess that you have until the next generation consoles are properly established in the market before games come out that won’t run properly on either of those machines with one caveat: ray tracing.

I apologize for the length of my comments. I’ve tried to be as concise as possible… I guess I’m just a maximum verbosity kinda guy.

Thank you very much for the explanations. Your comments are really very detailed and that is why they are very useful My ideas about how modern computers work are really very simplified and in many ways simply wrong. There is really something to think about...