Will the M1x MacBook pros be gaming worthy?

[JMacHack]

Luckily, the best game ever made, Myth II: Soulblighter

That’s an odd way to spell “Deus Ex”

 

[TSE]

Yes, the next MacBook Pro is going to be gaming worthy. It's going to be covered in LEDs on every surface that switches colors, it's going to have a choice of either a flame or dragon decal, and it's going to be 8.6 lbs with an hour of battery life and a power brick the size of a building brick for max gaming capabilities.

 

[throAU]

Anyone who tells you an m1 (or any TBA apple M series processor) mac will be good for gaming is at this point speculating.

However, the GPU in them is stronger than anything intel or amd have in the same thermal envelope, the ipad has a heap of game developers on it, and the development path from ipad to m1 mac isn't that difficult.

So.... potential is there. But i wouldn't go buying an m1 mac specifically for gaming just yet. It will be a few years.

 

[diamond.g]

That’s an odd way to spell “Deus Ex”

It is clearly shorthand for “Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic”

 

[jterp7]

Anyone who tells you an m1 (or any TBA apple M series processor) mac will be good for gaming is at this point speculating.

However, the GPU in them is stronger than anything intel or amd have in the same thermal envelope, the ipad has a heap of game developers on it, and the development path from ipad to m1 mac isn't that difficult.

So.... potential is there. But i wouldn't go buying an m1 mac specifically for gaming just yet. It will be a few years.

yeah we know it has decent power, but not many big studios are writing for it, yet anyway, so id stick with consoles or your separate pc for any serious gaming

 

[im_Jared]

This is what I would do:
1) don't buy an overpriced and noisy Windows gaming notebook, instead:
bulid yourself a gaming PC with the same performance with less money
2) from the money that you saved buy a light Macbook Air for on-the-go
3) be happy

Another option would be:
If you still want to buy a Macbook Pro and game on it, a gaming streaming service like "Geforce now" is the way to go - it works surprisingly good. Only thing you need is a stable internet connection with a low latency.

I wouldn't mess around with any virtualization or emulation on Macs - it's just not made for gaming...

Thank you, best answer so far.

Any given game will run just as well as the system is capable (optimizations aside). A Windows PC isn't automatically better at gaming, just because it's not a Mac. Current M1 Macs are already able to run plenty of intensive games, given their integrated chips outperform dedicated GTX 1050Ti and RX 560 GPUs. What games are you planning on running?

Just rocket league and the new forza Horizon coming out. Both of which are only on windows. As long as I can play them at least at console level then I will be happy.

 

[JMacHack]

Just rocket league and the new forza Horizon coming out. Both of which are only on windows. As long as I can play them at least at console level then I will be happy.

I’d say those have a snowballs chance in hell of coming for Mac at all. M-series is not guaranteed to get native Windows compatibility at all, so I’d say your best bet is for a Windows machine or console.

 

[im_Jared]

Yea, looking at a G15 or a legion 5 pro or the legion 7 16in

 

[thekev]

The hypervisor is an ARM hypervisor, running ARM Win natively which does x86 emulation on a SoC faster than any other SoC ARM Win runs on.

Parallels intercepts the DirectX calls and converts them to Metal calls - and you don't have to package up graphics requests, compress them, transmit them over PCIe, read them into graphics memory, and decompress them the way you do on a Wintel architecture to a discrete graphics card sitting on the other side of the PCI divide.

The graphics workflow on Apple Silicon is really much more straight-forward than the Wintel workflow since both the CPU and graphics coprocessors access the same memory.

We'll have to wait and see how it all pans out.

Meanwhile, hopefully ports from Aspyr and Feral Interactive and the like start appearing with universal binaries.

You're right, I got confused there. That doesn't help him run games meant to run on amd64 though. DirectX 12 isn't so bad, but it seems like a nightmare porting the older versions to ARM (mostly thinking of 11).

 

[ACD30"]

Thank you, best answer so far.

Just rocket league and the new forza Horizon coming out. Both of which are only on windows. As long as I can play them at least at console level then I will be happy.

Current M1 Macs look to meet the general requirements for Forza Horizon. (EDIT: turns out Forza Horizon won't launch from an M1 Mac. See my response to a reply another user made to my initial comment.) Although there's a loss associated with emulating the game (20% or so, I think), know that the M1 chip is still way faster than common Intel chips. Oh, and it goes without saying that you can also run Rocket League well.

IMO, building a gaming PC would be a waste of money: the ratio of price to performance, for M1 Macs, is unbeatable. If you want the power of a $700 M1 Mac mini, you'd need to build a PC costing hundreds more — and, at the end of the day, you'll have a large and noisy box that consumes more electricity (at idle) than an M1 Mac would at full load.

 

[hagjohn]

It would be pretty easy for Apple to create a gaming console out of a Mini, M1x chip, a good GPU and a stripped down MacOS with Vulkan.

 

[im_Jared]

It would be pretty easy for Apple to create a gaming console out of a Mini, M1x chip, a good GPU that used a stripped down MacOS that supported Vulkan.

Look forward to it!

 

[theorist9]

It's laptop version of 3070, not desktop version. Even 3060 Ti desktop version consumes the power around 200W. The performance of laptop version of 3070 seems to similar to RTX 3060 TI. If you really expect 3070 performance, then 32 cores may not be enough. Also, many games are not even optimized for macOS and Metal so the performance might be different or lower unless it's optimized.

Your post was about laptops, not desktops (it mentioned the potential gaming performance of an M1X in a MacBook Pro). Hence my reference to the laptop version of the 3070. Here's what you wrote:

If your intention was to ask if an AS Mac can reach the gaming performance of an RTX 3080 desktop, then it makes no sense to look at the type of GPU power potentially available in a Mac laptop.

Instead, you need to ask if an AS Mac desktop—namely the future large iMac—could potentially offer the GPU performance of an RTX 3000-series desktop. And there it comes down to whether they'll offer it with a 64-core GPU option (~21 TFLOPS) at the top end. If they do, that should put it at least into the same ballpark as an RTX 3070 Ti desktop (21.7 TFLOPs). [With the usual caveat that FP16 TFLOPs provides a very rough, and probably flawed, comparison.]

If Apple offers a 64-core GPU as a top-end option on the large iMac, it will be pricey—probably ~$3k-$4k. For that money, you could buy a 3080 Ti PC desktop (~$2500) and a specialized gaming monitor (144 Hz 27" 4k, e.g., LG 27GN950-B, $1150) (total $3750). You wouldn't have anywhere near as nice a computer or display (the new iMac will probably have a 5.5k/30" - 6k/32" retina display). But you'd probably have better gaming performance.

Of course, the rumored 128-core GPU option for the AS Mac Pro (~42 TFLOPs), will likely beat the RTX 3090 desktop (35.7 TFLOPs). But then the AS Mac Pro is obviously not a gaming machine.

Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1672...3080-ti-3070-ti-upgraded-cards-coming-in-june

 

[sunny5]

Your post was about laptops, not desktops (it mentioned the potential gaming performance of an M1X in a MacBook Pro). Hence my reference to the laptop version of the 3070. Here's what you wrote:
View attachment 1823388
If your intention was to ask if an AS Mac can reach the gaming performance of an RTX 3080 desktop, then it makes no sense to look at the type of GPU power potentially available in a Mac laptop.

Instead, you need to ask if an AS Mac desktop—namely the future large iMac—could potentially offer the GPU performance of an RTX 3000-series desktop. And there it comes down to whether they'll offer it with a 64-core GPU option (~21 TFLOPS) at the top end. If they do, that should put it at least into the same ballpark as an RTX 3070 Ti desktop (21.7 TFLOPs). [With the usual caveat that FP16 TFLOPs provides a very rough, and probably flawed, comparison.]

If Apple offers a 64-core GPU as a top-end option on the large iMac, it will be pricey—probably ~$3k-$4k. For that money, you could buy a 3080 Ti PC desktop (~$2500) and a specialized gaming monitor (144 Hz 27" 4k, e.g., LG 27GN950-B, $1150) (total $3750). You wouldn't have anywhere near as nice a computer or display (the new iMac will probably have a 5.5k/30" - 6k/32" retina display). But you'd probably have better gaming performance.

Of course, the rumored 128-core GPU option for the AS Mac Pro (~42 TFLOPs), will likely beat the RTX 3090 desktop (35.7 TFLOPs). But then the AS Mac Pro is obviously not a gaming machine.

Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1672...3080-ti-3070-ti-upgraded-cards-coming-in-june

That's because you were comparing with desktop version of 3070. And you didnt clear about whether it's laptop version or desktop version. Both laptop and desktop version of 3070 perform very differently. This is why you cant just say RTX 3070.

"According to this (https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple...ording-to-astonishing-estimates.543612.0.html), a 32-core MacBook Pro could match an RTX 3070."

The link clearly says it's laptop version of 3070. 32 GPU cores won't gonna be as similar as 3070(Desktop) but 3060 Ti(Laptop) Same name, different performance.

 

[smoking monkey]

That’s an odd way to spell “Deus Ex”

That's an even odder way to spell Atari 2600's "E.T."

I think they new 16 32CGPU machine will be very capable, but the problem is actual games. Will companies start making games for the Mac?

 

[theorist9]

That's because you were comparing with desktop version of 3070. And you didnt clear about whether it's laptop version or desktop version. Both laptop and desktop version of 3070 perform very differently. This is why you cant just say RTX 3070.

"According to this (https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple...ording-to-astonishing-estimates.543612.0.html), a 32-core MacBook Pro could match an RTX 3070."

The link clearly says it's laptop version of 3070. 32 GPU cores won't gonna be as similar as 3070(Desktop) but 3060 Ti(Laptop) Same name, different performance.

Nope, wrong. Here's a screenshot of my post, pasted between the asterisks below. I challenge you to show where I specified that I was "comparing with desktop version of 3070". I specifically said I was talking about laptops. Furthermore, the article I referenced was talking about laptop GPUs. Finally, I was responding to your post, where you were talking about laptops. [Granted, since the RTX3070 comes in both a desktop and a laptop version, I could have been more explicit; but given the context, I thought the laptop version was assumed.]
********************

********************
Futhermore, my point still stands: If it was your intention, in your original post, to be talking about whether an AS Mac could achieve the performance of a 3000-series desktop GPU, it makes no sense to consider the potential GPU f capabilities of the upcoming high-end Mac laptop. Instead, you need to consider the potential GPU capabilities of the upcoming high-end Mac desktop (the future large iMac).

 

[thekev]

Current M1 Macs look to meet the general requirements for Forza Horizon. Although there's a loss associated with emulating the game (20% or so, I think), know that the M1 chip is still way faster than common Intel chips. Oh, and it goes without saying that you can also run Rocket League well.

IMO, building a gaming PC would be a waste of money: the ratio of price to performance, for M1 Macs, is unbeatable. If you want the power of a $700 M1 Mac mini, you'd need to build a PC costing hundreds more — and, at the end of the day, you'll have a large and noisy box that consumes more electricity (at idle) than an M1 Mac would at full load.

Emulating game only works with games that were actually released for Intel macs or through Parallels on games that are compiled for the ARM version of Windows. It doesn't work otherwise.

As for big and noisy, you can do better on noise if you're building them yourself. Dell and some of the others have been cheaping out the past few years. The biggest bottleneck right now is graphics card pricing, but they should be back to MSRP later this year with China cracking down on crypto-currency mining.

TLDR, your advice only works for a small number of games, some of which may not be supported in a year or two.

 

[MacsRgr8]

Hate to keep repeating myself, but a game engine ported to iOS/iPadOS Metal is 98% of the way to ARM macOS.

Due to this, I expect many games coming to Apple Silicon Macs.... however not AAA titles, but all those iOS games. Not sure this is what gamers would like to see.

I only play a couple of games on my Mac: X-Plane, Dirt, Grid.
Currently my 2017 iMac 27 with Radeon 580 handles these quite well.

Looking for my next Mac to either be the rumoured beefier Mac mini, or the to be expected new iMac (>27").
I expect X-Plane 12 to be Apple Silicon native, which is the most important game for me. And yes, many plugins I currently use will stop working... but they will hopefully be upgraded along the way.

The other thing: what will Feral do? Will those racing-games titles be ported over, or newer versions be Apple Silicon native? If not, I will miss them...

That's the issue with gaming on a Mac, throughout the years... always some form of concessions to make.
If it's worth it because you 100% want to use macOS, fine. It not: get a 2nd PC as gaming-PC and only use Windows as gaming-OS.

 

[sunny5]

Nope, wrong. Here's a screenshot of my post, pasted between the asterisks below. I challenge you to show where I specified that I was "comparing with desktop version of 3070". I specifically said I was talking about laptops. Furthermore, the article I referenced was talking about laptop GPUs. Finally, I was responding to your post, where you were talking about laptops. [Granted, since the RTX3070 comes in both a desktop and a laptop version, I could have been more explicit; but given the context, I thought the laptop version was assumed.]
********************
View attachment 1823401
********************
Futhermore, my point still stands: If it was your intention, in your original post, to be talking about whether an AS Mac could achieve the performance of a 3000-series desktop GPU, it makes no sense to consider the potential GPU f capabilities of the upcoming high-end Mac laptop. Instead, you need to consider the potential GPU capabilities of the upcoming high-end Mac desktop (the future large iMac).

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. There are two versions of RTX 3070 which is either laptop version or desktop version. Your post does not say anything about it and you weren't talking about a laptop specifically. With your post, I clearly see you were talking about 3070 but never mentioned which one. Maybe you are confused with RTX 3070 desktop or laptop version.

Could achieve the desktop grade performance but it will be near 3060 desktop version. Apple Silicon GPU with 32 cores is still far from high end and mainstream desktop GPU.

 

[ACD30"]

Emulating game only works with games that were actually released for Intel macs or through Parallels on games that are compiled for the ARM version of Windows. It doesn't work otherwise.

As for big and noisy, you can do better on noise if you're building them yourself. Dell and some of the others have been cheaping out the past few years. The biggest bottleneck right now is graphics card pricing, but they should be back to MSRP later this year with China cracking down on crypto-currency mining.

TLDR, your advice only works for a small number of games, some of which may not be supported in a year or two.

My mistake — it seems nobody has successfully launched Forza Horizon on an M1 Mac. (My apologies, OP, for concluding this before I had confirmation.)

There are plenty of other games that will run, however; Rocket League is one of the many. OP shouldn't build an entire computer for one game, IMO. Maybe OP could instead use a cloud service for certain games. It would be cheaper than building an entire gaming PC, considering a good GPU runs the cost of an entire M1 Mac mini (at the least).

For this reason, I don't entirely discount my previous advice — I'll just correct the part regarding Forza. Separately, OP might like to check out this list of games that can run on M1 Macs.

 

[theorist9]

View attachment 1823403
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. There are two versions of RTX 3070 which is either laptop version or desktop version. Your post does not say anything about it and you weren't talking about a laptop specifically. With your post, I clearly see you were talking about 3070 but never mentioned which one. Maybe you are confused with RTX 3070 desktop or laptop version.

Could achieve the desktop grade performance but it will be near 3060 desktop version. Apple Silicon GPU with 32 cores is still far from high end and mainstream desktop GPU.

Let me bring it down to grade-school level for you in the hope that even you will understand: The RTX 3070 comes in both a desktop and a laptop version. That means there is both a desktop RTX 3070, and a laptop RTX 3070. When someone says "RTX 3070", they are not saying "desktop RTX 3070". They could be referring to either the laptop or the desktop verison. In my case, I had in mind the laptop version, but did not feel I needed to be explicit and specify "laptop RTX 3070", because the entire post was about laptops! Of course, if you understood the concept of context, we woudn't be having this discussion.

 

[sunny5]

Let me bring it down to grade-school level for you in the hope that even you will understand: The RTX 3070 comes in both a desktop and a laptop version. That means there is both a desktop RTX 3070, and a laptop RTX 3070. When someone says "RTX 3070", they are not saying "desktop RTX 3070". They could be referring to either the laptop or the desktop verison. In my case, I had in mind the laptop version, but did not feel I needed to be explicit and specify "laptop RTX 3070", because the entire post was about laptops! Of course, if you understood the concept of context, we woudn't be having this discussion.

That's what I've been said from the beginning: You did not clear about whether it's desktop or laptop version. Is it really hard to understand? Since you didnt mention which one, I said RTX 3070 laptop because RTX 3070 desktop version perform way more better than a laptop version.

 

[throAU]

Current M1 Macs look to meet the general requirements for Forza Horizon. (EDIT: turns out Forza Horizon won't launch from an M1 Mac. See my response to a reply another user made to my initial comment.) Although there's a loss associated with emulating the game (20% or so, I think), know that the M1 chip is still way faster than common Intel chips. Oh, and it goes without saying that you can also run Rocket League well.

IMO, building a gaming PC would be a waste of money: the ratio of price to performance, for M1 Macs, is unbeatable. If you want the power of a $700 M1 Mac mini, you'd need to build a PC costing hundreds more — and, at the end of the day, you'll have a large and noisy box that consumes more electricity (at idle) than an M1 Mac would at full load.

i have a gaming pc

an m1 Mac simply won’t run what my machine will run. It will for some time remain a square peg in a round hole as far as gaming is concerned no matter how powerful it is.

And it’s a lot less powerful than my 6900xt

 

[TimmuJapan]

Buy a kick-@ss pc gaming laptop, and then turn it into a dual boot Windows 11 - Hackintosh with opencore. Monterey will still run on a ton of intel devices, and the next MacOS that comes after Monterey will probably still be able to run on arm and intel. So Hackintosh won't be squeezed out until sometime around 2025, and you can keep using an old MacOS anyway, even after they stop supporting it.

 

[diamond.g]

Let me bring it down to grade-school level for you in the hope that even you will understand: The RTX 3070 comes in both a desktop and a laptop version. That means there is both a desktop RTX 3070, and a laptop RTX 3070. When someone says "RTX 3070", they are not saying "desktop RTX 3070". They could be referring to either the laptop or the desktop verison. In my case, I had in mind the laptop version, but did not feel I needed to be explicit and specify "laptop RTX 3070", because the entire post was about laptops! Of course, if you understood the concept of context, we woudn't be having this discussion.

Ah, I think your (our) percentages are wrong then because Laptop 3070's do show up as 3070 Laptop and are only .28% of GPU's on the list. The 3080 Laptop doesn't even show up. In the end they are all (the laptop 3060/3070/3080) variants of the GA104 die (Desktop 3070) so we are kind of splitting hairs here.