That begs the question, why then is Apple support for games (at least on Steam and the Epic store) so abysmal then? It can't be revenue, Apple users spend for than PC users, right?
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M1 graphics is as we feared. Mediocre at best.
- Thread starter TheFluffyDuck
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I would divide 'Pro' into two categories, business class and workstation class. Apple has historically catered more for creative professionals and 'content creators' who require workstation-class machines. So the Mac Pro, iMac Pro and Macbook Pro have been seen as workstations, whilst the iMac, Air and Mac Mini are 'prosumer' machines for general home or business use.
Because Apple's Pro machines have hisorically been aimed at content creators, It's not unreasonable for people to view the new Air as a prosumer machine and the Pro as a workstation-class machine. So I understand why they're disappointed when the M1 Pro doesn't have workstation features such as multiple monitors or support for more than 16GB ram.
Because Apple's Pro machines have hisorically been aimed at content creators, It's not unreasonable for people to view the new Air as a prosumer machine and the Pro as a workstation-class machine. So I understand why they're disappointed when the M1 Pro doesn't have workstation features such as multiple monitors or support for more than 16GB ram.
Not really sure these things are connected, I though we are talking about PC gaming (and which GPUs PC gamers use)?
If you want to talk about gaming on Mac: it is in a pitiful state relative to the PC since the low Mac market share, even lower availability of decent graphical performance, buggy drivers and subpar gaming programing interfaces didn't do much to attract gamers and game developers to the platform. It got somewhat better in the recent years with Metal and faster AMD GPUs, but not by much. Apple Silicon Macs completely change the equation however since they bring state of the art performance and state of the art programming interfaces. If even the entry-level laptop has the performance to run latest titles at semi-decent graphics, users will want to run those games, and developers will follow.
The 15"/16" is a entry-level workstation, sure, but the 13" Pro was never a workstation class machine. Not to mention the two-port 13" Pro, which was always intended as an "elevated" MacBook Air.
People should be happy with that level of performance in an entry level chip.
We have been saying this: the performance will beat Intel in entry level prices and that’s great news for developers that will get much more decent performance in the entry level, aka the lowest denominator.
I think we share the same concerns regarding the upper level though.
The early benchmarks, limited as they are, do pain a fairly optimistic picture. The M1 seems not only match and surpass Tiger Lake graphics, but it also seems to be really close to the state of the art premium thin-and light gaming GPUs such as the GTX 1650 Max-Q. Definitely looks like a success for Apple, especially in this ridiculously low-power package.
In the 13" case it is really 'road warrior' pro. Long battery life at good performance for plane trips, etc. And wow... 20 Hrs????
Where is that in the scheme of things? (I am more familiar with Heaven and Superposition than that one)
Hard to tell, its running emulated using Rosetta and I'm not sure if the settings are the same or not but I was able to find the Barefeats Vega 20 score which was 98.6.
If the settings are similar that bodes very well for native performance. As fast as the fastest 2 year old discrete MBP GPU would be remarkable.
PC... is that you? This is a great bump compared to what was on the shelves yesterday.
If it is anything like Superposition (which is newer) the Preset would say custom if it was a custom setting.
If you look at the screenshot posted it was using the extreme preset. The Barefeats link one is using the basic preset, so, if anything, I would expect the M1 to do even better if using the basic preset.
I just downloaded the benchmark:
Basic Settings
1280x720
2x AA
Medium Quality
Extreme Settings
1600x900
8x AA
Ultra Quality
I really don't think I am. I think you invented a new sport and I disagree with your arbitary rules.
Pro is purely a marketing term.Much like Turbo when it comes to Porsche. This became especially apparent when the 911 range is now all turbo charged. Turbo purely means top of the line. Porsche themselves proved this when they released a Taycan Turbo and a marketting chap from Porsche commented on the criticism of releasing an electric "turbo" car. We can think of computing devices as good, better and best. But calling it the Macbook Best just does not have the same ring to it as Pro. Marketing is important.
The entry level Intel MBP would have never met your arbitary "pro" criteria now, or in the past. Yet now that Apple release a much faster machine at the same pricepoint, if all of the benchmarks we've seen so far are valid, you are still not happy. I just don't understand your complaint.
This makes me believe that you have not used Excel in the last 15 years beyond the most trivial single page spreadsheet.
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INSANE! That's twice as fast as my RX 570 eGPU setup (only 41.1 FPS average on extreme preset).
I bought, on work's dime, a new two port may 2020 MBP on 27 Oct. I hadn't given much thought to returning it because a) I was dubious in advance about picking up the first gen of new platform and b) it's mildly useful to have vmware Windows 10 available.
Looking at the early numbers, though, I've just emailed my apple business rep to see if it can be swapped. I can live with RDP to my workstation on the rare occasion when I need to be in windows..
Looking at the early numbers, though, I've just emailed my apple business rep to see if it can be swapped. I can live with RDP to my workstation on the rare occasion when I need to be in windows..
Thanks for pointing that out! I wish they would run it using the Extreme HD preset, which seems to be the most common on. All in all, if this is comparable to a Vega 20, then it's indeed really good for a 13" laptop.
Not at all, and tons.
This is a great GPU, for people who don't need a GPU. If you're using zoom, teams, or even sharing 4k video, you need a GPU that can keep up with everyday use in 2020, and in that sense this GPU is just as good if not better, than any other integrated GPU on the market (especially compared to Intel GPUs).
If you were looking for a GPU that can do dedicated GPU tasks, like 3d rendering or gaming, then you're traditionally looking for a computer with a dedicated GPU, and the iGPU in the M1 does nothing for you.
Sure you could make do with the M1 GPU, but there's 4 years worth of progress you'd be missing out on, and battery/portability don't usually factor into consideration when you need raw power. In that regard, you could replace your 4 year old Macbook Pro (with a dedicated GPU) with a Macbook Air and not notice any performance degradation, but you wouldn't get any increase in performance either.
Often, GPU drivers are buggy, but the bugs require calling certain APIs in specific ways, and the bugs are never found. Then a game comes along and calls those APIs in a specific way, and all of a sudden a specific card doesn't run the game smoothly when all of the other comparable cards can.
The typical process is that the chipset manufacturer (AMD or nVidia) release a driver update that fixes the bugs, so that the card will run the game correctly.
Apple is traditionally against letting others dictate their update schedule, and would not work with game studios to update drivers. In fact, they historically let their openGL drivers languish around v2ish when Linux was at v4ish (it's been years, this is all off the top of my head here).
So game studios stopped targeting Apple. You had studios who would take finished games and port them to OS X, but it was a 2nd rate job because it was done after the fact by a different team than made the game.
Then Apple developed the Metal APIs, but again who cares? There's no gaming crowd on the mac, and even if there were, Apple doesn't make any gaming computers. The iMac might have a proper GPU, but the screen isn't even close to what a modern gaming rig can use. Likewise, the only Macs that even came with a GPU you could use without throttling were iMacs and Mac Pros. So even with better API support, the hardware didn't exist in any meaningful way.
So now, today, in 2020, you have a history of poor API support, poor hardware support, and no gamers. It's the opposite of "If you build it they will come", this is "Apple didn't build it and they left".
If I were to guess, Apple makes more on games in the app store than Microsoft does on the xbox. So it's not that Apple doesn't support games, it's that they support casual games where they don't have to do anything except keep the infrastructure working.
I suspect this is exactly what will happen. You seem upset it's not happened for the initial Apple Silicon lineup even though the machines they replaced are entry level and never had dGPU performance to begin with no matter what architecture they were using.
When Apple replaces the machines that do have dGPUs currently, I am sure they will increase the performance accordingly down the line as you say.
But I don't get the point of this thread when the M1 chips in the current ARM lineup are all machines that previously had Intel's iGPUs. The performance on the M1 beats Intel's iGPUs unequivocally and by a significant margin.
Except for the fact that it does support multiple monitors.
But there‘s a third class of (self-described) “pro”. The type that always buys the latest videogames and thinks that gamers are “pros” while people who use their machines to do work aren’t. The type of gamer that gives gamers a bad name.
It’s almost comical that people are using video-game performance as the primary determinant of whether or not a machine is professional class. That’s an argument you might hear from a TV sitcom character who lives in his parent’s basement and lives on pizza and coke. It’s gobsmacking when you encounter someone who believes it in the real world.
