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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 performa
by 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.
- eoerl 5y agopushing all this to "un-optimization tax" is an easy pass on apple. - nvidia really is a software company, it's the running joke in the industry. when you buy a nvidia gpu, you pay for the drivers & the frameworks (cuda, dlss, optix, ..). Apple does close to nothing there, they support Metal and CoreML and call it a day, you can decently lay some of the blame at their feet - the workloads in games can vary a lot, vertex/fragment shaders imbalance, parallel compute pipelines, mixed precision (which the M1 gpu does not do), .. So another explanation is that you can get some 3070 parity on a cherry picked game, like a broken clock is right twice a day, but that does not make it generally true. Objective benchmarks have put the M1 gpus way slower than 3070 on average, and software support seems like an easy but false distraction given the Proton tax on Linux (which is not 30/50%) - the M1 gpus are lacking a ton of hardware, matrix mul, fp16 again, ray tracing, VRR probably (not sure about this last one). These are used by modern games or applications, you may find a benchmark which skip them, but in the grand scheme of things it's something that the M1 gpu will have to emulate more often than not, and this has a cost Waving all that as "the GPU is about the same speed" is technically wrong, or not really backed by facts at the very least
- spacedcowboy 5y agoI know that Baldur’s Gate 3 looks pretty frigging awesome on my mbp-max, and it has a native arm binary, so no need for Rosetta and uses Metal2.