But it does demonstrate what Apple could choose to do in terms of more specialised CPUS and its a good indicator that its possible to build a big, powerful GPU on a "Workstation" class SoC.
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The final blow for real gaming on the Mac, or the beginning of a new era?
- Thread starter Frankied22
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But it does demonstrate what Apple could choose to do in terms of more specialised CPUS and its a good indicator that its possible to build a big, powerful GPU on a "Workstation" class SoC.
Different task domains. By the way, I am always fascinated by how technology goes in cycles. Around 10x15 years ago GPU tech was all about going towards general-purpose hardware. As companies figured out how things could be done simpler, a lot of special purpose hardware could be unified. This enabled new levels of performance and new usage scenarios.
But nowadays, as specialized applications require more and more performance, we see a big revival of specialized coprocessors. AI acceleration requires very specific operations and general-purpose hardware just cannot provide them efficiently enough. AI accelerators cannot take over the job of the GPU and via versa. Maybe in the future we will have hybrid devices that can do both, but then you can’t do AI and graphics at the same time... right now what we see is chip designers adding dedicated AI acceleration hardware into the CPU.
Final blow?
Steve Jobs himself said, 'We intend to make the Mac the best gaming platform on the planet.'
And failed to deliver on that promise.
From which the Mac could never recover in the face of the mass market onslaught of PCs with cheaper prices and better specs. And in M$, a company that ate it's own dog food on Direct X and bought their own gaming companies in the form of Bungie (who they 'stole' right from under Steve's nose.)
That was the knockout blow. Right there.
With Steve's 'promise', blue and white towers, reasonable prices and decent gpus and John McCarmack sharing the same stage to talk about Quake?
For a moment in time...in another universe? That would have been the touch paper for the slaying of PC hordes and storming the castle of Redmond.
In THIS reality. That never happened. We got crap Open GL with half the performance whilst Apple charged higher premiums to access the same tech'. And with Apple deprecating Open GL support over the years until it finally put the bullet into it with official deprecation...so that if Apple didn't even believe in Open GL middle ware why should the devs give anything other than 2nd rate unoptimised ports..?
Zoom forward to 2020.
A New Hope.
What's this I spy? A Prototype AS Mac Mini (with A12z) running Lara Croft at 1080p smooth as butter? On a machine they're charging devs £499 for?
With rumours of the AS having 12 cores (8 big and 4 small...plus quiet Apple confidence on optimised GPU tech' of their own...) I forsee an AS Mac Mini that can do more than run Lara Croft smoothly at 1080p. Or in a MB13. Or the iMac24.
All of which are current consumer Mac models.
Imagine on that consumer Mac on AS14.
At 50-100% better performance according to Bloomberg articles.
Then Mac gaming will be reborn?
If that wasn't enough. The real killer feature of AS will be in accessing a 'write once and deploy multi platform' approach that AS allows with Mac entering the 'iOS' marketplace.
Millions of apps. Zillions of games will 100% work out of the box as soon as the 1st AS Mac hits the shelves.
That's what's going to be seismic. If you're an iPhone or iPad game developer? You're now, almost automatically, a Mac games developer.
Shockwave.
A new dawn.
Azrael.
I never forgot the ruckus by people at the Blizzcon 2018 years when Blizzard announced Diablo Immortal for phones/tablets rather then announce the next PC/console based game which is Diablo 4. Perhaps Apple told them about ARM Macs coming. 
Almost all of them dumbed down casual shovelware sh—. Making "Mac gaming" a laughing stock for good.
You clearly don't understand anything in the ARM architecture and Apple SoC GPU.
I never forgot the ruckus by people at the Blizzcon 2018 years when Blizzard announced Diablo Immortal for phones/tablets rather then announce the next PC/console based game which is Diablo 4. Perhaps Apple told them about ARM Macs coming.
The PC GamOR ToWUr crowd can boo him all they want.
The £££ is going mobile.
Suck it up, Blizzard fans.
Azrael.
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Nope. Plenty of decent games.
Maybe some don't like casual games.
But it's a far bigger market than the PC games market.
This will be just the start.
As the AS grows in power. So will the games.
Azrael.
ARM have been looking into (discrete?) GPUs and optimising the latest versions of Unity and Unreal engine. Those AAA games are coming alright.
Hyper-casual games are typical of mobile computing. I don't need to play with the phone forever like a lot of people do. But you keep buying those optional in-app purchases so you help make those game developers earn a meager living.
Can’t wait to play the Apple Silicon versions of Sea of Thieves, God of War, Uncharted and The Last of Us...
GTA on iOS does seem a no brainer. Test the water with an old edition like 5 and if its popular maybe do some kind of AR version.
Can't help but wonder if its not happened for non-technical reasons. GTA has a bit of a rep and Apple tends to try to look squeaky clean enough that they don't offend the Disney crowd or Mothers Without Hobbies and other organisations with nothing better to do than complain about the Christian values they pretend to hold.
Can't help but wonder if its not happened for non-technical reasons. GTA has a bit of a rep and Apple tends to try to look squeaky clean enough that they don't offend the Disney crowd or Mothers Without Hobbies and other organisations with nothing better to do than complain about the Christian values they pretend to hold.
All these are on the App Store (along with a whole bunch of other Rockstar IPs)
GTA III
GTA: Chinatown Wars
GTA: Vice City
GTA: San Andreas
GTA: Liberty City Stories
GTA: iFruit
GTA V - The Manual
GTA III
GTA: Chinatown Wars
GTA: Vice City
GTA: San Andreas
GTA: Liberty City Stories
GTA: iFruit
GTA V - The Manual
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Um..... I’m assuming you missed the entire part of the keynote where an x86 game (shadow of the tomb raider) was running in emulation on an A12z at 1080p and a decent frame rate??? Is emulation ideal? Absolutely not but it appears to work well enough that you still should be able to use x86 programs and games, steam games included.
Like what? Candy Crush? Don't make me laugh.
Many of the few iOS games not just build to waste a few minutes on the crapper have Mac versions anyway.
Please elaborate, if we remove AI and ML, what compute are we talking about that still requires a GPU? Ray tracing based on OpenCL/CUDA?
I agree, we move towards specialised energy efficient coprocessors and over all, I think it is the correct way. The only problem I see with that is that we all use/need different performance of the respective coprocessors so it maybe difficult to find a balance. At some point we will see out of SoC coprocessors like the Afterburner card for customisation of functions.
You mean, beside actual graphics-related tasks? Anything where parallel processing is possible but higher precision is required. Like content creation, image data manipulation, scientific applications...
In principle, it can be done using the CPU vector units, but then again you already have this massive parallel processor in your system anyway (you do want to play games, right?), so you might as well use it
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Rosetta and Rosetta 2 are completely different beasts. I believe Rosetta 2 will stay here for a long while. At some point Apple will simply stop supporting building of Intel binaries for macOS. But I am sure you’ll be able to run your older games for a long while. And even if Apple decides to remove Rosetta 2 and OpenGL completely, open source projects to work around it will pop up. The groundwork is already there.