5 ms·

This is a demo so take with huge grain of salt, but the x86 performance looks solid... better than I expected considering it's based on an iPad CPU.

monocasa 6y ago
IDK, "look how good our CPU support is by running a several year old GPU limited game" fell a bit flat for me.
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  Not even running it very well. All the graphics settings were turned down, the framerate looked choppy and it was only running in 1080p.
  - freehunter 6y ago
    It’s not a demo of their new gaming-class GPU though.
    - snuxoll 6y ago
      No - but they weren't exactly showing us performance graphs to see where the game was getting caught on bottlenecks either, however.
    - mirthflat83 6y ago
      So many people don't get this that it's astounding
  - nailer 6y ago
    It was very odd seeing Lara walk through an area with dappled bright light, and her body remain uniformly lit. It may be that the game has a very basic lighting engine though.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      It doesn't, they just had the graphics turned down super low.
      - Marsymars 6y ago
        I was wondering that. I'm hopelessly out of the loop with exposure to modern game graphics, but to me, that looked worse than 360/PS3-era games.
    - ls612 6y ago
      It is like many triple A games in that it has a wide range of settings, all the way from full potato to RTX (it was ironically one of the first games to support that).
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    Again, people need to dial back their expectations here. You aren't going to see cutting edge games running well through emulation. There is a reason Apple made such a huge emphasis on native apps, native is always going to run much faster. They didn't demo gaming to suggest this is a great machine for gaming, they demoed it to show that it was possible at all. The previous version of Rosetta during the PowerPC->Intel transition was not known for performance. If gaming is important to you and you want a Mac then you want an Intel Mac or whatever games are released for Mac ARM. Emulated games are not going to compete with native.
  - Joeri 6y ago
    But does it run better than on the current intel mac mini with integrated graphics? All it needs to do is beat intel in comparable circumstances. It doesn't really matter what the graphics performance is, on high end macs they'll still ship a dedicated GPU from AMD. What matters is that the game is GPU-limited instead of CPU-limited.
    - sizzle 6y ago
      The maxed out mac mini cpu is a 6 core 3.2Ghz i7 with turbo boost to 4.6Ghz. I wonder if they can beat that with a newly ARM optimized MacOS? The current i7 has tons of power still as an 8th gen Intel cpu.
    - Mindwipe 6y ago
      > But does it run better than on the current intel mac mini with integrated graphics? All it needs to do is beat intel in comparable circumstances. Having gone and checked, no. Not even close. (Nor would it be plausible to expect to. But it's clear Apple have made a choice here, and that is that if you're a user who wants legacy software or desktop gaming, Apple do not care about you compared to their margins. It's that simple.)
- freehunter 6y ago
  It’s not about the game, it’s about running performance-dependent code written for x86 on an ARM chip. A lot harder to fake a stable frame rate in a game than in Photoshop.
  - jbverschoor 6y ago
    It’s mostly OpenGL/metal. Show me a cpu intensive task which isn’t already gpu native/jit
  - monocasa 6y ago
    I mean, it didn't look like a stable frame rate to me.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  I think your expectations for what emulation is capable of are set a bit high. The fact that it is able to emulate a game that's a few years old at decent frame rate is more than acceptable. You didn't see Microsoft demoing games for their Surface on ARM systems at all and for good reason.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    I mean, if I had things my way they wouldn't be switching to ARM at all and emulation wouldn't be necessary, so I don't think it's wrong to be skeptical. > You didn't see Microsoft demoing games for their Surface on ARM systems at all and for good reason. Those were also lower-end computers with poor GPUs.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      > Those were also lower-end computers with poor GPUs. Were you under the impression this $500 developers kit shipping with an iPad Pro CPU/ GPU is a high end computer? While it's a decent chip, it's essentially the same CPU as the prior generation iPad Pro with 1 additional core.
    - messe 6y ago
      > Those were also lower-end computers with poor GPUs. You mean the Surface Pro X? It has similar price tiering to the iPad Pro whose SoC was used in these demos.
      - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        ...ouch, okay, I just looked up the price of Surface Pro X, and it's $1,000. I forgot how much Microsoft was charging for that thing. Still, the Pro X has poor graphics. I'm going to assume that a dedicated GPU was being used for Tomb Raider—they would have said something otherwise.
        wtallis 6y ago
        > I'm going to assume that a dedicated GPU was being used for Tomb Raider—they would have said something otherwise. They said exactly what SoC they were using, and it's not known to have spare PCIe lanes lying unused in existing products. Apple pretty much just demoed an x86 game running on an overclocked iPad Pro.
- lasagnaphil 6y ago
  If the Tomb Raider game was actually running on a A12Z system (without any external GPU - note that this is the same CPU/GPU on the iPad Pro!), then that demo is actually really impressive, even if the game settings are set to low-quality and the framerate is a bit choppy.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  I would have been more impressed with them accessing an game service like Steam and launching random games from there. Plus they insinuated they were running on the A12 but later demos including the game did not state exactly the hardware being used. If they are limited to games support Metal then that is jettisoning a large number of games. Granted Catalina already did a of that work for them. Are they going to support non Apple video cards? The skipped right over that but I suspect they don't think they need to *edit on that last note it would be a good reason they never brought nvidia chips back as they would know they would not need them
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pkulak 6y ago
  On the other hand, it probably doesn't use much CPU just because it's single threaded. No game ever uses more than 10% of my 16-thread CPU. But that also means that emulation could seriously tank single-thread performance and ruin the game.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    It might be the other way around. The might have gotten around the big issue with running arbitrary x86 code on ARM (the way weaker memory model) by pinning all x86 threads in a process to a single core. Which would be unfortunate.

monocasa 6y ago

IDK, "look how good our CPU support is by running a several year old GPU limited game" fell a bit flat for me.

Mindwipe 6y ago
Not even running it very well. All the graphics settings were turned down, the framerate looked choppy and it was only running in 1080p.
- freehunter 6y ago
  It’s not a demo of their new gaming-class GPU though.
  - snuxoll 6y ago
    No - but they weren't exactly showing us performance graphs to see where the game was getting caught on bottlenecks either, however.
  - mirthflat83 6y ago
    So many people don't get this that it's astounding
- nailer 6y ago
  It was very odd seeing Lara walk through an area with dappled bright light, and her body remain uniformly lit. It may be that the game has a very basic lighting engine though.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    It doesn't, they just had the graphics turned down super low.
    - Marsymars 6y ago
      I was wondering that. I'm hopelessly out of the loop with exposure to modern game graphics, but to me, that looked worse than 360/PS3-era games.
  - ls612 6y ago
    It is like many triple A games in that it has a wide range of settings, all the way from full potato to RTX (it was ironically one of the first games to support that).
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Again, people need to dial back their expectations here. You aren't going to see cutting edge games running well through emulation. There is a reason Apple made such a huge emphasis on native apps, native is always going to run much faster. They didn't demo gaming to suggest this is a great machine for gaming, they demoed it to show that it was possible at all. The previous version of Rosetta during the PowerPC->Intel transition was not known for performance. If gaming is important to you and you want a Mac then you want an Intel Mac or whatever games are released for Mac ARM. Emulated games are not going to compete with native.
- Joeri 6y ago
  But does it run better than on the current intel mac mini with integrated graphics? All it needs to do is beat intel in comparable circumstances. It doesn't really matter what the graphics performance is, on high end macs they'll still ship a dedicated GPU from AMD. What matters is that the game is GPU-limited instead of CPU-limited.
  - sizzle 6y ago
    The maxed out mac mini cpu is a 6 core 3.2Ghz i7 with turbo boost to 4.6Ghz. I wonder if they can beat that with a newly ARM optimized MacOS? The current i7 has tons of power still as an 8th gen Intel cpu.
  - Mindwipe 6y ago
    > But does it run better than on the current intel mac mini with integrated graphics? All it needs to do is beat intel in comparable circumstances. Having gone and checked, no. Not even close. (Nor would it be plausible to expect to. But it's clear Apple have made a choice here, and that is that if you're a user who wants legacy software or desktop gaming, Apple do not care about you compared to their margins. It's that simple.)
freehunter 6y ago
It’s not about the game, it’s about running performance-dependent code written for x86 on an ARM chip. A lot harder to fake a stable frame rate in a game than in Photoshop.
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  It’s mostly OpenGL/metal. Show me a cpu intensive task which isn’t already gpu native/jit
- monocasa 6y ago
  I mean, it didn't look like a stable frame rate to me.
ogre_codes 6y ago
I think your expectations for what emulation is capable of are set a bit high. The fact that it is able to emulate a game that's a few years old at decent frame rate is more than acceptable. You didn't see Microsoft demoing games for their Surface on ARM systems at all and for good reason.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I mean, if I had things my way they wouldn't be switching to ARM at all and emulation wouldn't be necessary, so I don't think it's wrong to be skeptical. > You didn't see Microsoft demoing games for their Surface on ARM systems at all and for good reason. Those were also lower-end computers with poor GPUs.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > Those were also lower-end computers with poor GPUs. Were you under the impression this $500 developers kit shipping with an iPad Pro CPU/ GPU is a high end computer? While it's a decent chip, it's essentially the same CPU as the prior generation iPad Pro with 1 additional core.
  - messe 6y ago
    > Those were also lower-end computers with poor GPUs. You mean the Surface Pro X? It has similar price tiering to the iPad Pro whose SoC was used in these demos.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      ...ouch, okay, I just looked up the price of Surface Pro X, and it's $1,000. I forgot how much Microsoft was charging for that thing. Still, the Pro X has poor graphics. I'm going to assume that a dedicated GPU was being used for Tomb Raider—they would have said something otherwise.
      - wtallis 6y ago
        > I'm going to assume that a dedicated GPU was being used for Tomb Raider—they would have said something otherwise. They said exactly what SoC they were using, and it's not known to have spare PCIe lanes lying unused in existing products. Apple pretty much just demoed an x86 game running on an overclocked iPad Pro.
lasagnaphil 6y ago
If the Tomb Raider game was actually running on a A12Z system (without any external GPU - note that this is the same CPU/GPU on the iPad Pro!), then that demo is actually really impressive, even if the game settings are set to low-quality and the framerate is a bit choppy.
Shivetya 6y ago
I would have been more impressed with them accessing an game service like Steam and launching random games from there. Plus they insinuated they were running on the A12 but later demos including the game did not state exactly the hardware being used. If they are limited to games support Metal then that is jettisoning a large number of games. Granted Catalina already did a of that work for them. Are they going to support non Apple video cards? The skipped right over that but I suspect they don't think they need to *edit on that last note it would be a good reason they never brought nvidia chips back as they would know they would not need them
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pkulak 6y ago
On the other hand, it probably doesn't use much CPU just because it's single threaded. No game ever uses more than 10% of my 16-thread CPU. But that also means that emulation could seriously tank single-thread performance and ruin the game.
- monocasa 6y ago
  It might be the other way around. The might have gotten around the big issue with running arbitrary x86 code on ARM (the way weaker memory model) by pinning all x86 threads in a process to a single core. Which would be unfortunate.