Jesus this has been discussed so many times. I think you’ve been a part of those talks too. Do we really need to go down this hole again?
Plenty of developers have proved that statement wrong.
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M1 Pro/Max's GPU performance for gaming is quite poor.
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Plenty of developers have proved that statement wrong.
Yes and the M1 32 core is comparable or faster as evidenced by multiple benchmarks.
May be you need to understand how things work first?
He won't answer. He knows he doesn't have one. He knows that that we've explained why the "real life" tests have largely come out the way they have and that it isn't because of the gaming potential of the hardware is lacking. This is why he focuses on every other argument and ignores this, only responding in vague statements. If someone were to say: "gaming on this GPU is likely to underperform Apple's claims now and for a long time because most games that are ported (and many won't be) aren't going to be optimized for it", then yes, absolutely. That's unarguably true. That's different from his attempted claim that the GPU "lacks the raw power" for gaming. But he can't actually defend that statement and isn't trying to. I doubt he'll try to explain what it is about the GPU hardware that makes it a poor fit for gaming, but let's see if he is an honest broker.
This is just this weeks installment of “Macs suck at games” from the PC crowd. It’s all the same talking points every time. Only difference is now the PC crowd is getting really defensive over Nvidia after the M1 Max came out. I swear these forums are like a broken record and we’re caught in a endless cycle.
I'd like to point out that the M1 Max is faster than the very best AMD mobile GPU, the 6800M. The M1 Max scores 119 fps in Wild Life Extreme (anandtech) while the 6800M typically scores 80 fps (there is one much higher score, but the GPU was overclocked). The 6800M cannot maintain the "game frequency" most of the time during this test, due to overheating.
Same pre-M1 with regards to Apple Silicon. The comments on Anandtech reviews were always variations of “it’s just a mobile cpu” and “those are just synthetic benchmarks, real world will be different”. It’d be pointed out why their argument made no sense and they would shift to a new argument and then when that well ran dry it would be back to the old one.
To be fair I also saw (and still see) some pretty toxic behavior from Apple fan boys. But one just encourages the other and they all argue the same way: Ignore the main argument, nitpick an extraneous detail, shift the argument around - not even goal post shifting just entirely new arguments that sometimes invalidate the old they themselves made, rinse and repeat. Half the time you could replace the pronouns and not even know they were talking about tech.
Sadly it’s going to be awhile before we get enough (if you’ll excuse the expression) apples-to-apples comparisons where multiple games have been well optimized for both Apple Silicon and Nvidia/AMD GPUs. So no, no one in the market right now, should expect most games to get the full performance out of these GPUs in the very near future. Most are indeed going to be mobile 3060 level.
So again it depends on what you want to know: what is the gaming performance of the GPU right now? Not as good as Apple’s claims for its potential. What is the raw ability ability of the GPU? Well, benchmarks and professional graphics apps that have been ported to the GPU have (largely) backed up Apple’s claims. That shows what an optimized graphics pipeline *can* do with the M1 GPU. Whether that potential will ever be fulfilled in a meaningful way for gaming is a different story. And I fear not a happy one but I’m a little more cynical and pessimistic on that front. The nice thing about that is I hope to be proven wrong and will be very happy to be so! So it’s a win-win. ?
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It was apple that made the choice in their marketing to compare to gaming cards, and then claim equal performance.
Why didn’t they compare against the professional workstation chips? Maybe if they against workstation gpus then people wouldn’t expect “3080 performance”
Because the laptops they are comparing to are in the same price brackets as the MacBook Pro?
Another point of comparison with one of the rare benchmark tools that is ARM-native and runs Metal, Basemark GPU:
If we double the score to extrapolate the score the M1 Max should give, we're close to the 3080 mobile, again.
powerboard.basemark.com
The M1 Max should also be faster than the Vega II at this test.
Top Components | Basemark Power Board
Ranking system components of individual devices and hardware rigs that have submitted the highest scores for Basemark GPU.
The M1 Max should also be faster than the Vega II at this test.
Because professional cards are exactly the same gaming cards, but often clocked slightly lower for better stability. E.g. an A5000 seems around 20% slower on average than the mobile 3080 it is based on.
The entry level version of 14” Razer blade, which costs the same as a M1 13” MBP comes already with a RTX 3060. That is the slowest GPU it comes with.
The higher end versions come with the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080.
They also have ECC memory and the drivers are also often different too. Again, often made for stability so professional apps can optimize not only against the hardware but the driver as well.
Of course the workstation Tesla compute cards are in a different class altogether. I don’t know if they even make small versions of those anymore. They used to, but I think they stopped.
Edit: apparently they do but for very different use cases than the bigger ones and I think they might again be closer to RTX cards. And apparently Nvidia has dropped the Tesla brand. They’re just “data center” GPUs. Huh …
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So they are comparing the performance of their workstation gpu against non-workstation gpus?
Then claiming equal performance to a consumer gaming chip?
Sounds like a typical marketing department.
Except they’re not.
Some professional cards are clocked higher, they have greater bandwidth, usually considerably more memory, and drivers built for different workflows.
The A6000 for example is 48gb RAM compared to the predecessor at 24gb. And is around 30% faster than a 3090 in machine learning tasks.
The other spin on it from my other post is that apples argument is.
“Professional workflow computer is better at professional workflows than a gaming machine?”
Aren't laptops with the high-end quadro cards much more expensive than the new MacBooks?
The game's code needs to be optimized for Apple Silicon.
The first Pentiums in 1993 had their first triple A title like Quake 1 in 1996.
So we may see Apple Silicon-native games by 2023?
The first Pentiums in 1993 had their first triple A title like Quake 1 in 1996.
So we may see Apple Silicon-native games by 2023?
You consider 14“ Blade „entry level gaming„? Ok…
And nobody ever argued that you can’t get a decent gaming laptop cheaper than a MacBook Pro. This is not going to change any time soon either. If your primary concern is gaming, buying a Mac is stupid at best.
What are the actual benefits of these pro cards, beyond the larger VRAM?
I recall that they can give better results than their gaming counterparts in very specific workflows like CAD, because of artificial limitation of the drivers.