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youngmac

macrumors regular
Apr 17, 2010
163
45
London
I don’t know much about GPUs but I know my MBP M1 run gpu intensive task almost as good as my previous MBP 16 with dedicated graphics that cost twice as much. My video editing export is not too far off and that process uses GPU. I don’t do gaming so I can not comment on that. However most people uses Mac laptop for creative stuff and to me looks like the M1 is shaming lot of very expensive laptops with GPUs that are very new in release.
 
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avkills

macrumors 65816
Jun 14, 2002
1,226
1,074
... So, I'm calling an M1/M1X/M2/whatever accelerator card in MPX format for the Mac Pro as the first step to moving the Mac Pro to Apple Silicon.
This is also what I am thinking they will do. This would allow the Mac Pro to run native intel and native Apple Silicon apps in the same box, until Apple is ready for an all Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

The lower MPX "bay" has a x16 + extra power/dp routing and a x8 PCI slot. The upper bay has 2 x16 plus the extra power/dp routing. That is quite a bit of bandwidth available.
 

jeanlain

macrumors 68020
Mar 14, 2009
2,459
953
Passively cooled M1 running non-native Borderlands 3 outperforms an entry-level Nvidia dGPU. Not too bad at all.
What's more, the Mac version of this game isn't particularly well-optmized, even for intel Macs. Based on other results and specs, I expected the M1 to outperform the 560X in the MacBook Pro. This game is not representative of what the M1 is capable of.
 

Hexley

Suspended
Jun 10, 2009
1,641
505
Mediocre is relative.

Is the M1's iGPU the fastest of any iGPU?

If it's the fastest iGPU then what is it equivalent to in terms of discreet GPU.

If it's equivalent to a GeForce 1050 Ti discreet GPU then what the complaint about it?

It exceeds expectations of 10W ultrabook chip is supposed to do.

Imagine what a 100W chip can do on an iMac?

Let us look forwards towards to early 2021 Macs. :D
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,521
19,675
What's more, the Mac version of this game isn't particularly well-optmized, even for intel Macs. Based on other results and specs, I expected the M1 to outperform the 560X in the MacBook Pro. This game is not representative of what the M1 is capable of.

The interesting thing is that in Wild Life, which is a modern, reasonably optimized gaming benchmark, M1 is basically on par with a 1650 Ti max-q. I think this is the level of performance we can expect from native games.

Another interesting thing is that all games I have tested on my M1 MBP run with stable frame rates, even with Rosetta. The performance varies from title to title, and there are some glitches here and there, but I haven’t seen latency spikes that are fairly common on Intel Macs, even with beefy GPUs.
 
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jeanlain

macrumors 68020
Mar 14, 2009
2,459
953
I think this is the level of performance we can expect from native games.
If they are reasonably optimized for Metal. This is not something to expect, except from Feral games and other exceptions. For borderlands 3, Gearbox may not have done much more than hitting the compile button in UE4 to generate the Mac version.
 
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eltoslightfoot

macrumors 68030
Feb 25, 2011
2,546
3,098
Apple was very clear that there won't be any third-party GPUs on Apple Silicon Macs. They have their own custom GPUs with custom features.
And why would they given the history they have had with both amd and nvidia in their 15 inch line? So many recalls and problems... this is much simpler and seemingly just as effective.
 
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MarkAtl

macrumors 6502
Jul 9, 2019
402
407
And why would they given the history they have had with both amd and nvidia in their 15 inch line? So many recalls and problems... this is much simpler and seemingly just as effective.
Plus they’ll probably come out with more cores focused for GPU performance in a 16” and Mac Pro system.

I’m happy with my M1 MBP so far, no complaints with GPU performance.
 
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throAU

macrumors G3
Feb 13, 2012
9,198
7,351
Perth, Western Australia
The interesting thing is that in Wild Life, which is a modern, reasonably optimized gaming benchmark, M1 is basically on par with a 1650 Ti max-q. I think this is the level of performance we can expect from native games.

Another interesting thing is that all games I have tested on my M1 MBP run with stable frame rates, even with Rosetta. The performance varies from title to title, and there are some glitches here and there, but I haven’t seen latency spikes that are fairly common on Intel Macs, even with beefy GPUs.
Suspect the lack of latency spikes is due to the unified memory.

A transfer over PCIe from system ram to VRAM = latency spike
 

CMMChris

macrumors 6502a
Oct 28, 2019
850
794
Germany (Bavaria)
Nah the reason is that Apple's AMD GPU drivers (and partially even Intel GPU drivers) are of comparably poor quality. They never worked on getting the most out of them which is a shame. But at least for their own Chips they do seem to care which is good news for the future of the Mac. The M1 graphics drivers are extremely well optimized considering this is a freshly released 1st gen product.
 
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