4 ms·

FWIW they showed the latest Tombraider game running on Rosetta on a dev Mac said to be using the ARM chip from the high-end iPad. It ran pretty well. Not sure i

FWIW they showed the latest Tombraider game running on Rosetta on a dev Mac said to be using the ARM chip from the high-end iPad. It ran pretty well. Not sure if I would quite count this as AAA

DCKing 6y ago
I don't think that was running on Rosetta 2's dynamic recompiler, but instead used Rosetta 2's other stated feature of being able to translate existing apps at install time. In the demo they state that they downloaded the game from the Mac App store. Certainly static recompilation yields somewhat-close-to-native performance when it is available, but that is not possible for x86 "VMs".
toyg 6y ago
> It ran pretty well It was a postproduced, recorded promotional video, not a live demo. They could have shown laptops reaching Mars and you’d have thought “that landing gear looks pretty solid”.
monocasa 6y ago
IDK, what I saw was a several year old game running on the lowest settings and still stuttering a bit.
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  The more interesting point... >The demo wasn't perfect: the game ran at 1080p with fairly middling settings, but did so at what appeared to be at the very least a steady 30FPS, all while being run as an emulated x86 version of the game. That is: the game wasn't even natively compiled for ARM. But consider that Intel's most powerful laptop chipset GPU, found in the 10th generation Ice Lake series, is not capable of breaking single digit frame rates on this game at 1080p. Apple received some snark about this demo being lame, but it's only lame if you don't understand at all just how terrible modern integrated laptop GPUs are. https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/22/apples-chipset-advantage-has-me-more-jealous-than-ever https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/22/apples-chipset-adva...
  - monocasa 6y ago
    We all know that Intel iGPUs are terrible (at least until the new Xe based GPUs start to come out). The comparison I don't see enough people making is to throw out as an option the one company that regularly ships semi custom, secure, x86 SoCs with GPUs, AMD. An Xbox One SoC is literally half of the transistor count of an A12Z (5B and 10B respectively). And the frame rate was anything but steady there. And calling it "middling settings" is pushing it as well, the env lighting wasn't even on Lara. It looks like they dropped the settings as far down as they would go.
    - GeekyBear 6y ago
      Yet the marketing push for Ice Lake was that even if the CPU cores lost most of their IPC gains to lower clock speeds, the GPU itself was to be a massive improvement. I'm looking forward to seeing if the demos were on the Dev Kit hardware, because if that was the performance on a specially binned two year old iPad Pro chip, it's pretty darn impressive.
      - monocasa 6y ago
        It's Tiger Lake that's supposed to see the passable GPU, when they use the same cores as their new discrete GPU. Not that I'm really defending Intel here, they fell behind the curve.
        GeekyBear 6y ago
        Jam tomorrow, but never jam today? With Intel, I've gotten to the point where I'll only believe their marketing spiel after the hardware ships and the claims are confirmed by third party testing. However, they did indeed market Ice Lake as a huge GPU improvement.
        monocasa 6y ago
        Lol, like I said, Intel is obviously out of the picture. I'm not really defending them, just being as charitable to their side as I can for the sake of argument. But yes, their GPUs are perennially terrible, and their fab side has too many issues these days to rely on being able to ship a leading edge process node at scale. I'm just on the side that a semicustom AMD APU would have made way more sense for the stated reasons of the arch switch, as you would have been able to have all the power/watt and raw GPU perf improvements (if not more) without switching arch from under your users. And the Xbox One is an incredibly secure chip that'll be the first major game console I know of to not be hacked to allow unsigned code during it's lifetime, and that's while running games in kernel mode. I think the real reason for the switch is the fact that catalyst runs iOS apps unmodified on macOS/aarch64. When you look at their 10-K that's where they make their real money, and I suspect that they had a hard conversation about the mac app store not meeting expectations and this is how they intend to get macs on that same gravy train. That has a lot of implications for their incentive structure going forward that doesn't look great for people who want a genreal purpose computer ala Cory Doctorow's "The Coming War on General Computation".
- hn_check 6y ago
  https://youtu.be/GEZhD3J89ZE?t=6070 https://youtu.be/GEZhD3J89ZE?t=6070 It doesn't stutter whatsoever (you've claimed this in multiple posts, and I think you need to look at your playback device because the game is buttery smooth). And for integrated graphics of a binary translated x86-64 game running on ARM @ 1080p, that is pretty amazing. No one is going to claim that the GPU on the A12Z beats a dedicated GPU, even a low-end one. But as someone whose kid has an iMac with a Iris Pro integrated graphics, this looks a world better than what Intel integrates, not even accounting for the whole binary translation thing. And clearly the higher end Macs with Apple silicon will still have dedicated GPUs as well. Why wouldn't they?
  - monocasa 6y ago
    An A12Z's GPU is around double an Xbox One's in gate count. On a GPU limited title like that it should be doing way better than this. Also it still appears to be stuttering, and opening other videos doesn't show the same stutter.
    - hn_check 6y ago
      You're really veering all over the place to dismiss this (which is funny given that it was on the A12Z, and we know production machines will be much more powerful). Now this tiny (less than 1/3rd the die size of the Xbox One SoC...hell, 1/4) SoC needs to game better than an Xbox One whose SoC draws 4X+ the power. Also note that the A12Z has a 5TFlop+ neural engine (in addition to everything else), dedicated video encoders and decoders (separate from the GPUs), and loads of other hardware that consumes transistor counts. And for that matter, the gameplay looks easily comparable to walkthroughs of this same game on an Xbox One.
      - monocasa 6y ago
        Die size doesn't matter here, because they're on radically different process nodes; it's gate count that matters to compare apples to apples (or Apple to AMD, I guess, lol). Xbox One has 5B, an A12Z has 10B. And when you look at the layout, it's you can see that in each it's about a third of the space for the GPU cores, with each having very large L3 like banks of SRAM before the memory controller.

FWIW they showed the latest Tombraider game running on Rosetta on a dev Mac said to be using the ARM chip from the high-end iPad. It ran pretty well. Not sure if I would quite count this as AAA

DCKing 6y ago

I don't think that was running on Rosetta 2's dynamic recompiler, but instead used Rosetta 2's other stated feature of being able to translate existing apps at install time. In the demo they state that they downloaded the game from the Mac App store. Certainly static recompilation yields somewhat-close-to-native performance when it is available, but that is not possible for x86 "VMs".

toyg 6y ago

> It ran pretty well It was a postproduced, recorded promotional video, not a live demo. They could have shown laptops reaching Mars and you’d have thought “that landing gear looks pretty solid”.

monocasa 6y ago

IDK, what I saw was a several year old game running on the lowest settings and still stuttering a bit.

GeekyBear 6y ago
The more interesting point... >The demo wasn't perfect: the game ran at 1080p with fairly middling settings, but did so at what appeared to be at the very least a steady 30FPS, all while being run as an emulated x86 version of the game. That is: the game wasn't even natively compiled for ARM. But consider that Intel's most powerful laptop chipset GPU, found in the 10th generation Ice Lake series, is not capable of breaking single digit frame rates on this game at 1080p. Apple received some snark about this demo being lame, but it's only lame if you don't understand at all just how terrible modern integrated laptop GPUs are. https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/22/apples-chipset-advantage-has-me-more-jealous-than-ever https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/22/apples-chipset-adva...
- monocasa 6y ago
  We all know that Intel iGPUs are terrible (at least until the new Xe based GPUs start to come out). The comparison I don't see enough people making is to throw out as an option the one company that regularly ships semi custom, secure, x86 SoCs with GPUs, AMD. An Xbox One SoC is literally half of the transistor count of an A12Z (5B and 10B respectively). And the frame rate was anything but steady there. And calling it "middling settings" is pushing it as well, the env lighting wasn't even on Lara. It looks like they dropped the settings as far down as they would go.
  - GeekyBear 6y ago
    Yet the marketing push for Ice Lake was that even if the CPU cores lost most of their IPC gains to lower clock speeds, the GPU itself was to be a massive improvement. I'm looking forward to seeing if the demos were on the Dev Kit hardware, because if that was the performance on a specially binned two year old iPad Pro chip, it's pretty darn impressive.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      It's Tiger Lake that's supposed to see the passable GPU, when they use the same cores as their new discrete GPU. Not that I'm really defending Intel here, they fell behind the curve.
      - GeekyBear 6y ago
        Jam tomorrow, but never jam today? With Intel, I've gotten to the point where I'll only believe their marketing spiel after the hardware ships and the claims are confirmed by third party testing. However, they did indeed market Ice Lake as a huge GPU improvement.
        monocasa 6y ago
        Lol, like I said, Intel is obviously out of the picture. I'm not really defending them, just being as charitable to their side as I can for the sake of argument. But yes, their GPUs are perennially terrible, and their fab side has too many issues these days to rely on being able to ship a leading edge process node at scale. I'm just on the side that a semicustom AMD APU would have made way more sense for the stated reasons of the arch switch, as you would have been able to have all the power/watt and raw GPU perf improvements (if not more) without switching arch from under your users. And the Xbox One is an incredibly secure chip that'll be the first major game console I know of to not be hacked to allow unsigned code during it's lifetime, and that's while running games in kernel mode. I think the real reason for the switch is the fact that catalyst runs iOS apps unmodified on macOS/aarch64. When you look at their 10-K that's where they make their real money, and I suspect that they had a hard conversation about the mac app store not meeting expectations and this is how they intend to get macs on that same gravy train. That has a lot of implications for their incentive structure going forward that doesn't look great for people who want a genreal purpose computer ala Cory Doctorow's "The Coming War on General Computation".
hn_check 6y ago
https://youtu.be/GEZhD3J89ZE?t=6070 https://youtu.be/GEZhD3J89ZE?t=6070 It doesn't stutter whatsoever (you've claimed this in multiple posts, and I think you need to look at your playback device because the game is buttery smooth). And for integrated graphics of a binary translated x86-64 game running on ARM @ 1080p, that is pretty amazing. No one is going to claim that the GPU on the A12Z beats a dedicated GPU, even a low-end one. But as someone whose kid has an iMac with a Iris Pro integrated graphics, this looks a world better than what Intel integrates, not even accounting for the whole binary translation thing. And clearly the higher end Macs with Apple silicon will still have dedicated GPUs as well. Why wouldn't they?
- monocasa 6y ago
  An A12Z's GPU is around double an Xbox One's in gate count. On a GPU limited title like that it should be doing way better than this. Also it still appears to be stuttering, and opening other videos doesn't show the same stutter.
  - hn_check 6y ago
    You're really veering all over the place to dismiss this (which is funny given that it was on the A12Z, and we know production machines will be much more powerful). Now this tiny (less than 1/3rd the die size of the Xbox One SoC...hell, 1/4) SoC needs to game better than an Xbox One whose SoC draws 4X+ the power. Also note that the A12Z has a 5TFlop+ neural engine (in addition to everything else), dedicated video encoders and decoders (separate from the GPUs), and loads of other hardware that consumes transistor counts. And for that matter, the gameplay looks easily comparable to walkthroughs of this same game on an Xbox One.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      Die size doesn't matter here, because they're on radically different process nodes; it's gate count that matters to compare apples to apples (or Apple to AMD, I guess, lol). Xbox One has 5B, an A12Z has 10B. And when you look at the layout, it's you can see that in each it's about a third of the space for the GPU cores, with each having very large L3 like banks of SRAM before the memory controller.