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This set of real-world performance tests demonstrates that the prior glowing reviews of the M1 were based on artificial benchmarks. It turns out the M1 is not

This set of real-world performance tests demonstrates that the prior glowing reviews of the M1 were based on artificial benchmarks. It turns out the M1 is not the revelation Apple claimed. Great battery life? Maybe, when not running games or other CPU-intensive tasks. But performance champion? Not even close.

sa1 6y ago
I guess there were more reviews of the CPU rather than the GPU.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Reading through the performance reviews, it's clear that performance on M1 laptops is CPU bound, not GPU bound.
  - Toutouxc 6y ago
    How is that clear?
dannyw 6y ago
Or maybe graphics and gaming APIs haven’t been optimised in Rosetta2.
- tomc1985 6y ago
  Or maybe they optimized for specific workloads that crossplatform, not-built-for-mac games do not hit very hard Something I read stated they spent a lot of time optimizing the CPU for specific bottleneck scenarios, like NSObject creation. I don't know how that would map out to apps not written in Swift or Obj-C but my guess is "not very favorably"
- sjwright 6y ago
  It’s astonishing that this reply is being voted down. It is surely improper and unreasonable to judge a CPU architecture based upon code running predominantly through emulation layers on an architecture for which few if any serious optimisations have been attempted. It’s worth remembering the experience of first generation Ryzen which had good general compute performance hampered in games by micro-optimisations for Intel chips.
epaga 6y ago
Keep in mind that many of these values are for a laptop (MacBook Air) with no fan at all (the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini are only marginally better even with a fan). I doubt there is any other fan-less laptop in the world which can run Baldur's Gate 3 smoothly at 30 fps without a hitch.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
discordance 6y ago
You really think so? There are some very decent FPS recordings on Macbook Airs. Remember, that's a passively cooled 10W TDP chip. That's pretty incredible imo.
m_eiman 6y ago
We’re not going to see the real capabilities of these devices until the apps and games have been optimized for them, and I’d guess that most developers won’t have the resources to do so when porting from somewhere else. The big game engines like Unity et al probably will though, so it’ll be interesting to see what they manage to do in the coming year or so.
ajconway 6y ago
Keep in mind these are benchmarks done on low-priced entry-level models of Apple hardware (about one third of them on a fanless MacBook Air), while running translated x86-to-arm binaries and probably translated direct3d-opengl (correct me if I'm wrong). Aside from that, the M1 would have been great even if Apple hadn't done the x86 support. The performance at native CPU-bound tasks is still incredible.
coldtea 6y ago
>This set of real-world performance tests demonstrates that the prior glowing reviews of the M1 were based on artificial benchmarks. Yes, like running regular workloads for coding (compiling, etc), video editing, audio editing, photoshop, full Windows virtualization getting better scores than a Surface X, and other such "artificial" stuff. No, it just means the games are GPU heavy, and haven't been written natively for Apple Silicon, nor they take advantage of the graphics APIs, plus the GPU is lightweight (nobody said it's not in any review). Not to mention the performance is a huge improvement over the exact same Macbook Air's Intel model (with Intel GPU).
numpad0 6y ago
I’d interpret this as M1 Macs is still limited by iGPU and lacks proper dedicated GPU.
- sjwright 6y ago
  I'd interpret this as the inherent limitation of emulation and compatibility layers. It's pretty clear that the A1 GPU is pretty good as long as software natively targets it. Obviously it's not going to come close to dedicated GPU hardware, but I dare say it's going to be more impressive than people realise once we start seeing a few native ports.
ralfd 6y ago
You miss that most games are listed as running under Rosetta 2, not natively. This is very impressive and you now can play games you couldn't before on the Air or mini! Yes: The M1 is not beating a dedicated GPU, but it does beat other integrated graphics. The next challenge for Apple is to provide similar performance to dedicated GPUs in the MBP and iMacs. This will be interesting as NVidia and AMD have tons of experience and IP. (IF Apple decides to make their own GPU, maybe they won't.)
tosh 6y ago
One thing I'm especially fascinated about is that many gamers were sceptical about the 8GB and 16GB RAM and whether that will be enough for apps and specifically for gaming. The early reports show that when it comes to RAM there is no noticeable difference for most games regarding whether you have a M1 Mac with 8GB or 16GB. That in itself to me is remarkable and part of why I started the spreadsheet. To get to real-world performance for specific games/settings/specs and away to have something specific in addition to the (also interesting) theoretical discussions on what is enough RAM and whether you can game on an integrated GPU and so on. I hope this sheet helps answer some of it and will help more of it going forward.

sa1 6y ago

I guess there were more reviews of the CPU rather than the GPU.

gamblor956 6y ago
Reading through the performance reviews, it's clear that performance on M1 laptops is CPU bound, not GPU bound.
- Toutouxc 6y ago
  How is that clear?

dannyw 6y ago

Or maybe graphics and gaming APIs haven’t been optimised in Rosetta2.

tomc1985 6y ago
Or maybe they optimized for specific workloads that crossplatform, not-built-for-mac games do not hit very hard Something I read stated they spent a lot of time optimizing the CPU for specific bottleneck scenarios, like NSObject creation. I don't know how that would map out to apps not written in Swift or Obj-C but my guess is "not very favorably"
sjwright 6y ago
It’s astonishing that this reply is being voted down. It is surely improper and unreasonable to judge a CPU architecture based upon code running predominantly through emulation layers on an architecture for which few if any serious optimisations have been attempted. It’s worth remembering the experience of first generation Ryzen which had good general compute performance hampered in games by micro-optimisations for Intel chips.

epaga 6y ago

Keep in mind that many of these values are for a laptop (MacBook Air) with no fan at all (the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini are only marginally better even with a fan). I doubt there is any other fan-less laptop in the world which can run Baldur's Gate 3 smoothly at 30 fps without a hitch.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

discordance 6y ago

You really think so? There are some very decent FPS recordings on Macbook Airs. Remember, that's a passively cooled 10W TDP chip. That's pretty incredible imo.

m_eiman 6y ago

We’re not going to see the real capabilities of these devices until the apps and games have been optimized for them, and I’d guess that most developers won’t have the resources to do so when porting from somewhere else. The big game engines like Unity et al probably will though, so it’ll be interesting to see what they manage to do in the coming year or so.

ajconway 6y ago

Keep in mind these are benchmarks done on low-priced entry-level models of Apple hardware (about one third of them on a fanless MacBook Air), while running translated x86-to-arm binaries and probably translated direct3d-opengl (correct me if I'm wrong). Aside from that, the M1 would have been great even if Apple hadn't done the x86 support. The performance at native CPU-bound tasks is still incredible.

coldtea 6y ago

>This set of real-world performance tests demonstrates that the prior glowing reviews of the M1 were based on artificial benchmarks. Yes, like running regular workloads for coding (compiling, etc), video editing, audio editing, photoshop, full Windows virtualization getting better scores than a Surface X, and other such "artificial" stuff. No, it just means the games are GPU heavy, and haven't been written natively for Apple Silicon, nor they take advantage of the graphics APIs, plus the GPU is lightweight (nobody said it's not in any review). Not to mention the performance is a huge improvement over the exact same Macbook Air's Intel model (with Intel GPU).

numpad0 6y ago

I’d interpret this as M1 Macs is still limited by iGPU and lacks proper dedicated GPU.

sjwright 6y ago
I'd interpret this as the inherent limitation of emulation and compatibility layers. It's pretty clear that the A1 GPU is pretty good as long as software natively targets it. Obviously it's not going to come close to dedicated GPU hardware, but I dare say it's going to be more impressive than people realise once we start seeing a few native ports.

ralfd 6y ago

You miss that most games are listed as running under Rosetta 2, not natively. This is very impressive and you now can play games you couldn't before on the Air or mini! Yes: The M1 is not beating a dedicated GPU, but it does beat other integrated graphics. The next challenge for Apple is to provide similar performance to dedicated GPUs in the MBP and iMacs. This will be interesting as NVidia and AMD have tons of experience and IP. (IF Apple decides to make their own GPU, maybe they won't.)

tosh 6y ago

One thing I'm especially fascinated about is that many gamers were sceptical about the 8GB and 16GB RAM and whether that will be enough for apps and specifically for gaming. The early reports show that when it comes to RAM there is no noticeable difference for most games regarding whether you have a M1 Mac with 8GB or 16GB. That in itself to me is remarkable and part of why I started the spreadsheet. To get to real-world performance for specific games/settings/specs and away to have something specific in addition to the (also interesting) theoretical discussions on what is enough RAM and whether you can game on an integrated GPU and so on. I hope this sheet helps answer some of it and will help more of it going forward.