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This is significant because the NVIDIA 1050Ti, while way slower than the state of the art, is still the meaningful practical minimum discrete GPU. There’s no 20
by unsigner 6y ago
This is significant because the NVIDIA 1050Ti, while way slower than the state of the art, is still the meaningful practical minimum discrete GPU. There’s no 2050 or 3050 - if you go about looking for the cheapest PC suitable for gaming, you might buy a 1050Ti. It is head and shoulders above the integrated GPUs (yes, even the AMD Vega ones), and comparable in power to last-gen (as of last week) consoles, the PS4 and Xbox One S.
This in turn means that every PC and console game created up until now, and probably for the next year or so, will comfortably run on a 1050Ti, even with compromises (“medium” settings, middling resolution like 1080p).
For the first generation of Apple’s Mac GPU, running at 10W, this is a great result. This means, Apples idiosyncrasies aside, there will be no technical problems in porting games to macOS. (Metal is less of a problem than you’d think - if you use Unreal, Unity, DirectX 11/12 or Vulkan for graphics, the work needed will be on the order of a few man/months, which is small change in game development budgets.)
- diminish 6y ago> NVIDIA 1050Ti, while way slower than the state of the art, is still the meaningful practical minimum discrete GPU Not at all - I'm using it now. It's 5 years old and not adequate for most games & renders.
- faxfax 6y agoReally, I find that surprising. I use a GTX 1070 and it's still capable of playing a decent number of recent games at 4K with the settings turned down. Seems like the GTX 1050 Ti should still cut it for some moderate 1080p gaming.
- russli1993 6y agoRight now m1 is on macbook air and pro 13 inch. At 13 inchs 1080 render resolution for games is enough.
- ulfw 6y agoSlight correction. It came out October 25, 2016. So four years old.
- rafram 6y agoSeriously? I run a GTX 770 and get by fine with most games I want to play. I’ll upgrade eventually but don’t feel the need right now. Maybe CPU is the bottleneck for you?
- benlumen 6y agoIt's definitely impressive performance for an ultrabook - my concern right now is external monitor support. I use an eGPU for the sole purpose of running triple monitors. It's a docking station, and the whole setup works brilliantly with my 13" Macbook. Productive workstation setup at home, super nimble laptop on the go. Apparantly these M1 chips don't support eGPUs and don't even support two external monitors, let alone three. I know it's asked a lot, but what's "Pro" about that? Completely negates any of the benefits of M1, which is a shame because I really wanted one. edit: You know, if they don't resolve this then the final round of Intel Macbooks with the non-butterfly keyboards are going to be the holy grail of laptops to a lot of people for a long time, just like the pre-butterfly ones with the ports still are. Multiple external monitors, eGPUs and bootcamp... that's a lot to lose, man.
- vaxman 6y agoPro apparently means it has an extra 100 nits and forced airflow to minimize processor throttling. It only has two serial ports and a small screen, so this was made for field use, though it does have support for a single 6K display when you get (or are confined to) home. Might be better to go for a System76 or Dell if you can find all the apps you need for them.
- vaxman 6y agoPS: Pro also means an extra GPU core.
- klelatti 6y agoThose are really good points and thank you for making them. I actually bought one of the last generation of MacBook Pros so I can continue to build an x86 based server application. Maybe these machines will command a premium on the second hand market in due course?
- unsigner 6y agoYou can still compile for x64 (by default Xcode produces fat binaries), and do some testing via Rosetta.
- cuddly_bear 6y agoI do have one question. How did they managed to get 1050ti working with metal api? As far as I know there is no nvidia drivers for macOS big sur and macOS catalina.
- GeekyBear 6y agoGiven the power draw difference, the performance is impressive. The version of the 1050 sold as a discrete GPU for laptops draws several times more power than the entire M1. >The power consumption of the GeForce GTX 1050 is roughly on par with the old GTX 960M, which would mean around 40-50 Watts https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-1050-Notebook.178614.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-1050-Notebo... In comparison, the mobile version of the 1080 drew between 150 and 200 Watts, with the lower clocked Max Q version getting the power draw down to 90 to 110 Watts. https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-1080-Laptop.171212.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-1080-Laptop...
- IceWreck 6y ago> There’s no 2050 Ther 1050Ti was replaced by the 1650, 1650S and 1650Ti
- unsigner 6y agoYeah, I know. Where I live the 1050 is still widely available and slightly cheaper than the 1650.