I am very intrigued as to how Apple's own GPUs will compete with high-end GPUs... Perhaps it will be as simple as: if the task you want is hardware accelerated (ML, etc), then it will be fine, otherwise forget it. I know they showed off a few demos at WWDC, but that hasn't fully sold me they can do the GPU stuff as well as the CPU side of things.
I think the more competitors in the GPU space the better. (See: Nvidia cpu pricing.)
Mac being the 'creative/work' machine we can see workflow tasks accelerated, perhaps by an order of magnitude. One subtle example is the way that on Apple GPU hardware, the 'biker/cyclist' in the video example could be crop isolated and they had 3x 4k streams ongoing. I do remember one play back review example of the 2019 iMac and its 580 struggling with one smooth 4k stream.
It's not just raw numbers and grunt (though it will have plenty of that...) it's efficiency. Try sucking a McDonald's smooth through a thin straw? No matter how much 'blow' (no jokes, please...) you have or 'suck' (!) it's never going to be efficient.
The current A12z may, according to a dev, have the power of a 1060. A 'proper' AS Mac may have the power of a 2060 (I'd take that in a Mac Mini...and would have bought one at that plus a monitor of my choice...) but if the efficiency is x4 times or 400% greater that can turn into a lot of user power. The machine learning can accelerate tasks by an order of magnitude. There are WWDC2020 tech' videos that demonstrate Apple is quite serious about gpu power to give good gpu power in all Macs. Including the Mini. And that a great amount of that effort will be in efficiency. So it may have the raw grunt of a eg. 2060 Nividia...but it will hit harder because of greater efficiency. Maybe it can process that workload 4x 'faster' because of the efficiency...in workflow and games. One good example was a ralley game where the game ran as smooth as butter with no dropped frames.
It's not just about general monolithic grunt. Or the classic try running a F1 down a country lane example. Efficiency can limit power potential and design. Compare the Macs to the iOS devices. The Macs look...and feel...well...old to use.
It's about user workload cases. Video. 3D rendering. Your workflow window. Ray Tracing. Once you can do those kind of things. Once these things are accelerated it's going to make a massive difference.
We're no longer going to get generic gpus on our Macs. Or Nvidia gpus. But they do serve as a compass for how gpu tech is advancing in general. And what Apple is doing with AS balanced against it.
I'd rather take an iPad style 'feel of optimisation, with sound gaming performance and 4/8k video codec performance (which beats up a Mac Pro...) than the current Mac situation where it doesn't have the leading cpu performance, efficiency or gpu performance. But the prices are certainly 'class' leading. This efficiency will come to all AS Macs. And therefore many, currently considered, 'pro workflow' features and 'mainstream-higher pc' games will come to all consumer Macs. Once the big gaming companies catch onto the £££ in mobile gaming. As Blizzard themselves cottoned onto. Having been roundly boo'd by their 'home pc gamer' crowd. But Diablo always looked like a mobile type of game. An iPad could easily run it.
I grew rather tired of Macs having 2nd rate gaming with a 2nd rate graphic API with 2nd rate devs or creative app devs porting feature bi-passed examples of their best sell apps. That would probably explain why I didn't buy Macs that often. That and the high prices for such fare.
This last legacy iMac is a worthy flag ship iMac. It's probably the 1st one where I feel it can handle 3d without some 3rd rate gpu on it. Yeah. It's still last year's gpu. And no, we didn't get RDNA2. But that won't ship until around November and you can at least at it via eGPU.
But I won't pretend (just because I bought one...) that everything in the garden is rosey. It wasn't and isn't. iStale design. And one sodding fan.
I'm still looking forward to the new AS iMac. The cpu cores. The gpu cores. The efficiency. The doors of infinity opening to the iOS market of millions of apps. The Mac never had that.
It's going to have that. And better gaming performance. Better creative app performance all round.
Azrael.
