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This is insane. They claim that its GPU performance tops the RTX 3090, while using 200W less power. I happen to have this GPU on my PC and not only it costs ove

• 5etho 5y ago
  if it isn't marketing straight from the Apple HQ I will be wrong
• outworlder 5y ago
  Too bad that historically Apple has not given any attention to Mac gaming.
  • bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
    Part of Apple's historic MO has been to not invest in areas they don't see themselves having a competitive advantage in. Now that they can make gaming happen with a very low wattage budget they may well try to enter that space in earnest.
    • kllrnohj 5y ago
      The gaming performance of the existing M1 GPUs is, well, crap (like far behind the other laptop competition, to say nothing of desktop GPUs). The Ultra probably isn't changing that, since it's very unlikely to be a hardware problem and instead a software ecosystem & incentives problem.
      • kitsunesoba 5y ago
        I don’t think the performance is that bad. On a whim I tried running WoW on a 16” M1 Pro MBP and it consistently got FPS higher than the refresh rate (120hz) with the game rendering at 1x scale and most effects maxed out. Granted, that’s not as good as what you’d get with a mobile RTX 3080 or something, but it’s nothing to sneeze at for a laptop that doesn’t get scorching hot and doesn’t sound like a leaf blower when being pushed. I could definitely see the Max and Ultra with a beefier cooling system (like the Studio’s) having pretty respectable performance.
        • kllrnohj 5y ago
          https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... M1 Max struggles to keep up with an RTX 3060 mobile. Now that's with the overhead of Rosetta 2 and all that, so it's of course "not fair" for the M1. But that's also the current reality of the market, so ya know.
        • ohgodplsno 5y ago
          WoW isn't exactly the pinnacle of demanding performance. It's like saying you can run counter strike at 200FPS: congrats, so can everyone else, without paying $2000
      • Croftengea 5y ago
        Yes, it's "crap" not because GPU is slow but rather that most triple A title games are optimized for Windows. So it's difficult to expect a good performance from a game that runs with API conversion layer(s) (Windows -> Mac) and then CPU emulation (x86 -> arm). So publishers/developers need to make more native games. Even though every Mac port will probably make 1/10th revenue of a Windows title I guess Mac users would be happy to pay more for better games. I certainly would.
      • gameswithgo 5y ago
        It is a video memory problem. Unified memory is nice but you need GDDR6 to feed a powerful GPU. But you don't want GDDR6 for the cpu.
    • altairprime 5y ago
      The difference between an Apple TV and a Mac Mini is essentially how powerful of Apple silicon it has, whether it runs tvOS or macOS, and whether it has HDMI out or not. The Studio is a more compact form factor than any modern 4K gaming console. If they chose to ship something in that form factor with tvOS, HDMI, and an M1 Max/Ultra, it would be a very competitive console on the market — if game developers could be persuaded to implement for it. How would it compare to the Xbox Series X and PS5? That’s a comparison I expect to see someday at WWDC, once they’re ready. And once a game is ported to Metal on any Apple silicon OS, it’s a simple exercise to port it to all the rest; macOS, tvOS, ipadOS, and (someday, presumably) vrOS. Is today’s announcement enough to compel large developers like EA and Bungie to port their games to Metal? I don’t know. But Apple has two advantage with their hardware that Windows can’t counter: the ability to boot into a signed/sealed OS (including macOS!), load a signed/sealed app, attest this cryptographically to a server, and lock out other programs from reading with a game’s memory or display. This would end software-only online cheating in a way that PCs can’t compete with today. This would also reduce the number of GPUs necessary to support to one, Apple Metal 2, which drastically decreases the complexity of testing and deployment of game code. I look forward to Apple deciding to play ball with gaming someday.
      • neetdeth 5y ago
        This all makes sense, and in that context it’s unfortunate that Apple’s relationship with the largest game tools company, Epic, is... strained, to say the least. They could always choose to remedy that with a generous buyout offer.
      • t3rabytes 5y ago
        A recent keynote compared an Apple series chip to an Xbox One S, can’t remember which though.
      • derac 5y ago
        Seems unlikely that the general population would spend 2-4k on a console.
        • codyb 5y ago
    • michaelmrose 5y ago
      $4000-$6000 is a toy for a tiny number of rich people or a work machine for a well paid professional. In the PC space the average spend is $800 and a PS5 is $500.
    • novok 5y ago
      Every god damn child has an iPad already to keep them entertained and the hardware is plenty good enough. Going one step further in the age ranges to get big game revenue like the switch will help them capture more.
    • torginus 5y ago
      This has been always very strange for me. Apple chips used in smartphones were very consistently near the top of the pack even in terms of GPU performance, and unlike their Android counterparts, they rarely throttled, and could deliver said perf with decent battery life. Yet the iOS 'gaming' scene, despite being one of the major revenue drivers, consists mostly of low-quality F2P games.
    • arvinsim 5y ago
      Or maybe Jobs was just salty about the Halo buyout? In any case, it's a moot point. Apple clearly doesn't care about desktop gaming and it shows in both their hardware and software.
  • miohtama 5y ago
    Apple has now too much money and is running out of core business areas. Expect more investing in non-Apple areas like gaming, cars, etc. Though every video game company on the planet hates them because of App Store terms.
    • nr2x 5y ago
      The first half of the event was old wine in new bottles - I reckon that’s the main growth area they are squeezing.
      • lostlogin 5y ago
        Or was it last seasons wine in old bottles?
        • kllrnohj 5y ago
          The "new" display is an 8 year monitor whose updates were a better webcam & integrated speakers, and they're charging more for it than ever before. More like rotten wine in old bottles.
    • jen20 5y ago
      > Expect more investing in non-Apple areas like gaming, cars, etc. I remember people saying this about phones in 2006.
    • flipgimble 5y ago
      "every video game company" = Epic Games, and mostly because they don't like to pay overhead for their Fortnite loot boxes that most parents wish they could have some control over. I don't have allegiance to either company mostly because they don't care about me, just my money.
      • t3rabytes 5y ago
        Epic doesn’t do lootboxes, next.
  • onethought 5y ago
    Except when Bungie was going to release Halo on Mac[0] and Microsoft swooped in bought them and made it an Xbox thing. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzrme9yWens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzrme9yWens
    • lostlogin 5y ago
      The Marathon days were really great. That jump was a huge loss to me, even if it wasn’t to Apple.
  • xbmcuser 5y ago
    Once they are confident of their graphics advantage I think they will enter the console market against Microsoft and Sony with Apple tv console
  • hajile 5y ago
    Apple is the world's biggest and most profitable gaming company. For every AAA gamer, there are a hundred casual gamers (one reason why Nintendo consoles run circles around Sony and Microsoft). Apple has invested billions into their gaming division. The big thing they need right now is a new version of Metal that gets feature parity with Vulkan or DX. Also of note, there are very persistent rumors of an upcoming VR headset. Their M1 alone would blow away competition like the Quest. A Pro or max chip with some disabled CPU cores wouldn't cost a ton due to being scavenged cores and would positively stomp the competition.
    • pjmlp 5y ago
      In what concerns developer productivitiy, it is Vulkan that needs to get feature parity with Metal.
• EugeneOZ 5y ago
  But it's still impossible to replace RTX 3090 with this new Mac Studio because games just will not run on MacOS.
  • idonotknowwhy 5y ago
    Maybe Valve can port proton to mac
    • OOPMan 5y ago
      That would not help. The reason proton works so well is because Linux on x86 and Windows on x86....are both on x86. Proton on ARM Mac's would involve Rosetta and while that does a surprisingly good job of running x86 on ARM I'm not sure it's up to the job of running games at high speed...
      • kitsunesoba 5y ago
        Games seem playable running through Microsoft’s inferior x86 compatibility layer in a Windows ARM VM on M1 Pro/Max, so I don’t see how running games through Rosetta would be any worse.
        • EugeneOZ 5y ago
          If you have some monster like 3090, you expect it to run games smoothly on “ultra” settings. In reality, some games are pushing its limits even on “middle” settings (Cyberpunk 2077 @ 2k, RDR2 @ 4k). Any emulator will hit performance, so if you want some top-of-the-top performance - you still need Windows PC with RTX 3090. And it will not be even more expensive than Mac Studio ;)
          • dcow 5y ago
            I want my game to vsync with my monitor. That is all I care about.
            • 5y ago
• TheKarateKid 5y ago
  What we're seeing right now with Apple's M1 chips for desktop computing is on the same level of revolutionary as what the original iPhone did for mobile phones. The advancements in such a short period of time in the amount of computing power, low power usage, size, and heat usage of these chips is unbelievable and game-changing.
  • bradmcgo 5y ago
    It really feels like this is all in the name of their AR/VR efforts. The killer device as far as I can think would be a simple headset that packs the capabilities of full-blown workstations. Apple Silicon seems like it could totally be on that track in some way.
    • GekkePrutser 5y ago
      True but I can only imagine the cost of that headset. It will be sure the 1% of the 1% :'(
    • TheKarateKid 5y ago
      I don't think so. I think it stemmed from Apple's desire to make their SoC fully in-house for their iPhones. They realized they were onto something, and took it to a whole new level by focusing on desktop-class performance. This was probably further fueled by their soured relationship with Intel which was responsible for thermal issues on MBP's for years, poor performance increases across their entire Mac lineup, and poor cellular radio performance on some iPhone models -- forcing them to settle with Qualcomm and ditch Intel for mobile radios.
  • schmuelio 5y ago
    Don't get me wrong, the benefits of using ARM architectures for general purpose vs. x86 are really compelling. The performance of x86 has been a leader for a while mostly because of the sheer amount of optimization work that has gone into them, but the cruft of the x86 instruction set and the architectural stuff you have to do to make the instruction set work is really showing it's age. That being said, the GPU performance claims are incredibly misleading. The previous "relative performance" benchmarks that were done on the M1 Max for GPU performance were misleading as well, they definitely cannot keep up with a mid-tier modern discrete GPU. The GPU claim isn't an ARM/x86 comparison like the CPU performance would be. This is comparing a 64 core 800GB/s GPU with a 10k core 900GB/s GPU and trying to make them look equivalent through misleading marketing. None of this is to say that the M1 Ultra is bad necessarily, even if it performs roughly the same as a mobile GPU or powerful iGPU it would still be a very good chip, and I'd love to use one if I could use it in my environment properly. I'm just saying don't put too much faith in the GPU performance measurements provided here.
• gameswithgo 5y ago
  unless it has its own gddr6 it won’t be anything like a 3090 for games
• quickthrower2 5y ago
  I wonder how it compares for crypto mining, and if that group would be buying these up
  • tenuousemphasis 5y ago
    Poorly compared to an ASIC which has the SHA-256 algorithm encoded as hardware circuits. Maybe better than GPUs when it comes to mining Ethereum or others where ASICs aren't as prevalent.
  • wyager 5y ago
    If you're mining crypto you want 95% of your capex to go to graphics cards/ASICs, not to RAM+NICs+CPU+case+etc.
• michaelmrose 5y ago
  Why would you believe that it tops the RTX 3090? It's just 2 of their prior chips in the same package? This is purely marketing nonsense with nothing to back it up. At least in the US You can get a 3090 for 2200 even with markup and an almost as good 3080 for $1150. If you wait until its in stock at a big box store you can get one for less even. A machine could be built with a 3080 for $2000. Meanwhile a system based on on the 64 core GPU will run you $5000 and as such is affordable to nearly nobody thus few will get a chance to see it drastically under perform in the gaming arena on any of the games that don't support mac on arm. With an absolutely invisible market share in the gaming desktop there will never be any incentive for anyone to change this insofar as direct support leaving you reliant on translation from x86 and from windows executables paying doubly in terms of compatibility and performance from an already very expensive and lackluster starting point.
• eyegor 5y ago
  Ehh, I wouldn't put too much stock in graphs of "relative performance" on a 0-200 scale like these. Marketing can cook up whatever they like when they want to make a product look good. Wait for actual benchmarks before trying to judge the product. Their base claim is >2x the m1 max, which is still nowhere close to the performance of a 3090. Apple's footnotes don't even pretend to explain what these charts are. > Performance was measured using select industry‑standard benchmarks.
  • mwint 5y ago
    Remember last time Apple put out these weird relative performance charts, and we all thought they were hiding something? The M1 announcement. They turned out to be pretty accurate. So I’ll wait and see real benchmarks, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this does have incredible performance.
    • batiudrami 5y ago
      Their GPU claims weren’t accurate though. The M1 max doesn’t have real world performance anything like the 3070 as claimed.
      • josephg 5y ago
        For what its worth, they were comparing the M1 max to nvidia's mobile 3070, which is a completely different card than the desktop 3070. My understanding was that it was a reasonable comparison in some benchmarks, though when plugged in to power the mobile 3070 still had more headroom.
      • gilgoomesh 5y ago
        On raw Metal performance, yes it does get the same performance. The benchmarks showed this. The problem was the implication that you'd get 3070 gaming performance. That was never going to be true because of the un-optimisation tax for games on Mac. There doesn't exist a AAA game built for Metal and the Mac. The closest are games like World of Warcraft, Divinity Original Sin 2 – and even they are just "good ports" not originally designed for Mac (and are far from AAA graphics). This is why on Intel Macs, games under Bootcamp always ran 30%-50% faster, even though the hardware was the same. Games on M1 Max run as you'd expect – about 30% slower than a 3070 for the same old reasons (and some new ones, like not being compiled for Apple Silicon at all). The GPU is about the same speed as a 3070 and it's doing what you'd expect, given the 30% unoptimization-tax workload.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• tanduv 5y ago
  HL Alyx is actually quite well optimized, and you can definitely run it on Ultra with super-sampling on a 3090. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjNaC0-hiPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjNaC0-hiPE
  • Geee 5y ago
    I didn't see display resolution (or the model of HMD) mentioned in the video. I'm using Varjo Aero, which has 2880x2720 per eye, which is almost quapruple (per eye) compared to Valve Index. I think this resolution is enough for a good VR experience; pixels are almost invisible, and even small text is readable. However, HL Alyx doesn't run at 90 fps on full resolution.
    • ihuman 5y ago
      The author of that video is using the valve index, which is 1440×1600 per eye
    • needle0 5y ago
      Uh, Varjo Aero is a clear outlier in terms of resolution and definitely does not represent the current typical VR headset experience (which in early 2022 would be around Quest 2 or Valve Index). If you went out of your way to get an expensive niche high-end headset, it struggling on a 3090 is your problem, not HL:A's.
      • Geee 5y ago
        I'd say that its just a couple of years ahead of the mainstream curve. My thinking is that Apple probably wants to make a very high resolution VR headset (similar or close to Varjo Aero), and it seems that with their new chips, they might be able to pull it off.
        • ralfd 5y ago
          How is the foveated rendering? Is it noticeable?
• namlem 5y ago
  The 3090 should have no problem playing all but the most poorly optimized VR games at max or near-max settings. Often times the difference between "very high" and "ultra" is indistinguishable btw, with "ultra" just being shit that wasn't well optimized to begin with.
• arvinsim 5y ago
  After their comparison claims on the M1 Pro/Max and Nvidia GPUs, I would take these comparisons with a huge grain of salt.
• wyager 5y ago
  > you need this kind of GPU performance for high resolution VR gaming at 90 fps, but its just barely enough I run VR games on the index at 144hz with high settings without issue on a 3060 Ti. I've been on the market for a 3070-3090, but only because I want a card for which a water block is available, not because I need more power for any extant game.
• ceroxylon 5y ago
  I play Rust (the game, not the language) with decent graphics on an M1 Air with no issues other than heat, which an external fan quickly mitigates. Really looking forward to Apple's VR offering after seeing the performance of their compact SoC
  • Synaesthesia 5y ago
    But Rust runs even on intel integrated graphics without any problem (HD4000)
• bodge5000 5y ago
  The problem is, last time I checked, you're not able to really make use of it for gaming. Obviously MacOS doesn't run all that many games compared to Windows and now Linux (with Proton, or to be honest quite possible even without), and something like parallels can't take advantage of the M1's power. Not to say it'll never happen, but its not a done deal basically, and to my knowledge the process hasn't yet started
• ChrisRR 5y ago
  You're right, it is insane, but this is Apple. So expect what that graph actually means is some extremely specific, cherry-picked benchmarks
• willis936 5y ago
  The relative graphics claims are particularly dubious. M1 Ultra has 10% less memory throughput than a 3090. I somehow doubt that nvidia has left performance on the table that Apple is picking up, even with the power savings of being on a smaller node. On the balance of things this just seems wrong. The intuitive range of relative performance for a 3090 in flat-out single precision vector workloads should top out at 90% but more likely 75% or less.