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Where is the graphics test? The M1 Max versus an NVIDIA 3080 or similar?
by bhouston 5y ago
Where is the graphics test? The M1 Max versus an NVIDIA 3080 or similar?
- mhh__ 5y agoI'm waiting to be corrected by someone who knows GPU architecture better than me but as far as I can tell the synthetic benchmarks can trade blows with a 3070 or 80 (mobile), but the actual gaming performance isn't going to be as rosy. Also recall that very few games needing that performance actually work on MacOS
- smoldesu 5y agoThe gaming performance will be CPU-bottlenecked. Without proper Wine/DXVK support, they have to settle for interpreted HLE or dynamic recompilation, neither of which are very feasible on modern CPUs, much less ARM chips.
- josephg 5y agoFrom all reports, rosetta2 performs remarkably well. Apparently they added special hardware support for some x86 features to improve the performance of dynamically recompiled code.
- schleck8 5y agoDoes someone know how much VRAM the M1X has? Because I bet it's far less than a 3070 or 3080.
- mhh__ 5y agoThe memory is unified, and very high bandwidth. No idea what that means in practice, guess we'll find out.
- pornel 5y agoIt's very high bandwidth for a CPU, but not that great for a GPU (400GB/s vs 440GB/s in 3070 and 980GB/s in 3090).
- oneplane 5y agoOn the other hand, it's zero-copy between CPU and GPU.
- artificialLimbs 5y ago>> ...not that great for a GPU... * almost equals the highest laptop GPU available
- coayer 5y agoBut it's also a premium product, so it matching a 3070m isn't really above what you'd expect for the cost (but efficiency is another story)
- minhazm 5y agoIt's not quite apples to apples. The 3070 only has 8GB of memory available, whereas the M1 Max has up to 64 GB available. It's also unified memory in the M1 and doesn't require a copy between CPU & GPU. Some stuff will be better for the M1 Max and some stuff will be worse.
- nottorp 5y agoOf course, with a 3070 and up you have to play with headphones so you don't hear the fan noise. This is the best feature of the new Apple CPUs if you ask me: silence. Now to wait for a decent desktop...
- ribit 5y agoUp to 64GB…
- jbverschoor 5y agoThere's no vram. It's unified / shared memory. There's no M1X. There's M1 Pro and M1 Max
- amne 5y agothe memory is unified so whatever ram is on there (16,32,64) can be allocated as vram. That's why during the presentation they bragged about how certain demanding 3d scenes can now be rendered on a notebook.
- EugeneOZ 5y agoI still didn't get their example about the 100Gb spaceship model - max RAM supported is 64Gb...
- f0rmatfunction 5y agoM1 Pro & Max (and plain M1 too for what it's worth) have unified memory across both CPU and GPU. So depending on the model it'd be up to 32gb or 64gb (not accounting for the amount being used by the CPU). Put differently - far more than 3070 and 3080.
- ribit 5y agoWell, Apple G13 series are excellent rasterizers. I‘d expect them do very well in games, especially with that massive bandwidth and humongous caches. The problem is that not many games run on macOS. But if you are only interested in games with solid Mac support, they will perform very well (especially if it’s a native client like Baldurs Gates 3).
- mhh__ 5y agoWhat is the most intensive game you could actually run? I was going to say Fortnite but I'm guessing that's not the case anymore
- ribit 5y agoBaldurs Gates 3, Metro Last Light, Total War…
- Thaxll 5y ago"very well" 45 fps top at 1080p medium settings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hROxRQvO-gQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hROxRQvO-gQ You take a 3 years old card you get 2x more fps.
- ribit 5y agoWhich other passively cooled laptop can do it? And what 3 year old card are you comparing it to? Hopefully something with 20W or lower power consumption. 45fps at medium Full HD is not far off a 1650 Max q
- EricE 5y ago"Also recall that very few games needing that performance actually work on MacOS" But many Windows games do run under Crossover (a commercial wrap of WINE - well worth the measly licensing fee for seamless ease of use to me) or the Windows 10 ARM beta in Parallels. I got so many games to run on my M1 MacBook Air I ended up returning it to wait for the next round that could take more RAM. I'm very, very happy I waited for these and I fully expect it will replace my Windows gaming machine too.
- labby5 5y agoIt's really hard to compare Apple and Nvidia, but a bit easier to compare Apple to AMD. My best guess is performance will be similar to a 6700xt. Of course, none of this really matters for gaming if studios don't support the Mac.
- neogodless 5y agoThe mobile RTX 3080 limited to 105W is comparable to about an RX 6700M, which is well behind the desktop RX 6700XT.
- tromp 5y agoSeems kind of unfair with the NVIDIA using up to 320W of power and having nearly twice the memory bandwidth. But if it runs even half as well as a 3080, that would represent amazing performance per Watt.
- wilde 5y agoApple invited the comparison during their keynote. ;)
- throwawaywindev 5y agoI believe they compared it to a ~100W mobile RTX 3080, not a desktop one. And the mobile part can go up to ~160W on gaming laptops like Legion 7 that have better cooling than the MSI one they compared to. They have a huge advantage in performance/watt but not in raw performance. And I wonder how much of that advantage is architecture vs. manufacturing process node.
- moron4hire 5y agoA "100W mobile RTX 3080" is basically not using the GPU at all. At that power draw, you can't do anything meaningful. So I guess the takeaway is "if you starve a dedicated GPU, then the M1 Max gets within 90%!"
- fnordsensei 5y agoThe performance right now is interesting, but the performance trajectory as they evolve their GPUs over the coming generations will be even more interesting to follow. Who knows, maybe they'll evolve solutions that will challenge desktop GPUs, as they have done with the CPUs.
- wtallis 5y agoThe MSI laptop in question lets the GPU use up to 165W. See eg. AnandTech's review of that MSI laptop, which measured 290W at the wall while gaming: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16928/the-msi-ge76-raider-review-tiger-lake-plus-ampere-equals-framerate https://www.anandtech.com/show/16928/the-msi-ge76-raider-rev... (IIRC, it originally shipped with a 155W limit for the GPU, but that got bumped up by a firmware update.)
- Thaxll 5y agoIt's probably bad, the M1 could not get 60fps on WoW so ... When I see Apple comparison I would take that with a grain of salts because the M1 is not able to run any modern game at decent fps.
- wil421 5y agoAre modern games built with Metal? Pretty sure Apple deprecated OpenGL support. Macs have never been gaming computers. The GPUs in the M1 family of Macs are for “professional” users doing Video Editing, Content creation, 3D editing, Photo editing and audio processing.
- lights0123 5y agoMoltenVK is Vulkan's official translation layer to Metal, and doesn't have too much overhead. Combine with dxvk or d3vkd to translate from DirectX—DirectX before 12 is generally faster with DXVK that Windows' native support.
- williamtwild 5y ago"the M1 is not able to run any modern game at decent fps." Do you have first hand experience with this? I do . We play WoW on MacBook air M1 and it runs fantastic . Better than my intel MacBook Pro from 2019
- schleck8 5y ago"Running fantastic" is what Apple would advertise, but what matters is fps, utilisation and thermals when benchmarking games
- Thaxll 5y agoDefines fantastic because a 1080ti from 4 years ago run faster than the M1. My 2070 could run wow at 144fps, and it's a 2.5y/o card. Yet most people can't get 60fps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhcJzKCcpMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhcJzKCcpMQ Edit: thanks for the dates update
- akmarinov 5y agoNo way it can get anywhere near 3080
- alfredxing 5y agoIn the keynote Apple said the M1 Max should be comparable to the performance of an RTX 3080 Laptop (the footnote on the graph specified the comparison was against an MSI GE76 Raider 11UH-053), which is still quite a bit below the desktop 3080.