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First, Why post an article that just refers to testing done at The Verge instead of linking to The Verge's own article? Second, the article at the Verge is bas

First, Why post an article that just refers to testing done at The Verge instead of linking to The Verge's own article? Second, the article at the Verge is based on running an x86 game under Rosetta's x86 emulation instead of testing the performance of a native ARM and Metal game. Strangely, The Verge's Mac Studio review covers the fact that the Adobe suite of software had to be updated to support ARM and Metal before you could see the full performance of the hardware without emulation, but they completely ignore this for games. >With many recent professional Mac reviews, the story has been: Apple makes great hardware, but the software — specifically Adobe’s Creative Cloud — isn’t optimized for Apple’s ideas. But at this point, Adobe has had quite a bit of time to catch up. Apple has sold a whole bunch of M1 devices — the demand is here, and Adobe has responded. Premiere, Photoshop, Lightroom, Audition, Media Encoder, and more are running natively on Apple Silicon (and After Effects is available in beta). And the story has basically flipped: the Mac Studio now appears to be one of the few computers that can unlock the full power of Adobe’s software. https://www.theverge.com/22981815/apple-mac-studio-m1-ultra-max-review https://www.theverge.com/22981815/apple-mac-studio-m1-ultra-...

smoldesu 5y ago
> Strangely, their review covers the fact that the Adobe suite of software had to be updated to support ARM and Metal before you could see the full performance of the hardware without emulation, but they completely ignore this for games. When do you reckon that Tomb Raider is getting updated for ARM?
- RobertMiller 5y ago
  If a game isn't relevant enough to port to new hardware, is it really relevant enough to benchmark with?
  - falsenapkin 5y ago
    Yes because consumers want to know how the hardware performs for their existing catalog of games, many if not all of which won't be ported? Obviously depends on what you play etc
    - GeekyBear 5y ago
      There's nothing wrong with reporting the level of performance you'll get for emulated games too, but the claim being made is that the hardware can't do better than that. To make the headline accurate, you have to add a disclaimer, going from: >Apple's new M1 Ultra isn't faster than an RTX 3090 to >Apple's new M1 Ultra isn't faster than an RTX 3090 when running x86 games under emulation
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        Or, more comprehensively: >Apple's new M1 Ultra isn't faster than an RTX 3090 when running x86 games under emulation or when directly comparing Geekbench scores Actually, I think I see why they went with the shorter title.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  Why not include testing of a native game, like World of Warcraft or Balder's Gate 3 in addition to testing an x86 game under emulation? They are making it sound like the performance of an emulated x86 game on OpenGL is the only level of performance you can ever expect.
  - bdz 5y ago
    Tomb Raider is only relevant in this discussion because it has a very detailed and fine built-in benchmark system. Not every game does have that (like neither WoW or Baldur's Gate 3)
    - GeekyBear 5y ago
      WoW didn't suddenly lose the ability to report framerates.
      - bdz 5y ago
        No but you can't compare it. Tomb Raider loads a pre-rendered scene that is the same every single time you start the benchmark thus you can compare it across systems. That's the point of it and hence became a staple alongside with other games (some games are even notorious about it because that's their only use case [0]) WoW doesn't have anything like that. And everything can affect the frame rate from the mobs in the zone, the weather, the unique players with unique transmog, the raids are different every single time etc. It's not just loading the game and there you have X framerate and that's the score, that's not a benchmark. 0, https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/01/the-game-thats-more-known-for-being-a-benchmark-is-now-in-beta/ https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/01/the-game-thats-more-known-...
        GeekyBear 5y ago
        Which would be fine, if the story was: >Apple's new M1 Ultra isn't faster than an RTX 3090 when running x86 games under emulation But it's not.
enragedcacti 5y ago
Is there any evidence that running under Rosetta impacts GPU performance measurably? Shaders are compiled on the fly for a given GPU so draw calls coming in from native vs emulated shouldn't have a big impact unless the CPU is the bottleneck. GPUs are usually the performance bottleneck at 4k so Rosetta may not even have a measurable impact on framerate for some of the tests. Beyond that, what games are out there that have otherwise identical implementations that run on Windows/x86 and MacOS/Arm? Why compare games at all? It is a really common use of GPUs so Apple claiming just "faster" rather than "faster in X use case" or "more FP computations per second" opens them up to gaming comparisons.
calo_star 5y ago
It's not just Adobe or games, takes 3D rendering for example, both Redshift and Cycle are now using Metal (the Metal backend for Cycle was even submitted by Apple themselves), Nvidia's GPUs absolutely destroy their (supposed) M1 equivalents, with or without using the ray tracing hardware. https://youtu.be/HF_rMjjPoPs?t=118 https://youtu.be/HF_rMjjPoPs?t=118 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS_uPukPuo4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS_uPukPuo4 https://youtu.be/i4CuZqXA4BM?t=359 https://youtu.be/i4CuZqXA4BM?t=359
- dagmx 5y ago
  In Blenders case, there are still several patches left to merge in and even the Blender page strictly mentions that it's early integration without much performance work done yet.

smoldesu 5y ago

> Strangely, their review covers the fact that the Adobe suite of software had to be updated to support ARM and Metal before you could see the full performance of the hardware without emulation, but they completely ignore this for games. When do you reckon that Tomb Raider is getting updated for ARM?

RobertMiller 5y ago
If a game isn't relevant enough to port to new hardware, is it really relevant enough to benchmark with?
- falsenapkin 5y ago
  Yes because consumers want to know how the hardware performs for their existing catalog of games, many if not all of which won't be ported? Obviously depends on what you play etc
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    There's nothing wrong with reporting the level of performance you'll get for emulated games too, but the claim being made is that the hardware can't do better than that. To make the headline accurate, you have to add a disclaimer, going from: >Apple's new M1 Ultra isn't faster than an RTX 3090 to >Apple's new M1 Ultra isn't faster than an RTX 3090 when running x86 games under emulation
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Or, more comprehensively: >Apple's new M1 Ultra isn't faster than an RTX 3090 when running x86 games under emulation or when directly comparing Geekbench scores Actually, I think I see why they went with the shorter title.
GeekyBear 5y ago
Why not include testing of a native game, like World of Warcraft or Balder's Gate 3 in addition to testing an x86 game under emulation? They are making it sound like the performance of an emulated x86 game on OpenGL is the only level of performance you can ever expect.
- bdz 5y ago
  Tomb Raider is only relevant in this discussion because it has a very detailed and fine built-in benchmark system. Not every game does have that (like neither WoW or Baldur's Gate 3)
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    WoW didn't suddenly lose the ability to report framerates.
    - bdz 5y ago
      No but you can't compare it. Tomb Raider loads a pre-rendered scene that is the same every single time you start the benchmark thus you can compare it across systems. That's the point of it and hence became a staple alongside with other games (some games are even notorious about it because that's their only use case [0]) WoW doesn't have anything like that. And everything can affect the frame rate from the mobs in the zone, the weather, the unique players with unique transmog, the raids are different every single time etc. It's not just loading the game and there you have X framerate and that's the score, that's not a benchmark. 0, https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/01/the-game-thats-more-known-for-being-a-benchmark-is-now-in-beta/ https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/01/the-game-thats-more-known-...
      - GeekyBear 5y ago
        Which would be fine, if the story was: >Apple's new M1 Ultra isn't faster than an RTX 3090 when running x86 games under emulation But it's not.

enragedcacti 5y ago

Is there any evidence that running under Rosetta impacts GPU performance measurably? Shaders are compiled on the fly for a given GPU so draw calls coming in from native vs emulated shouldn't have a big impact unless the CPU is the bottleneck. GPUs are usually the performance bottleneck at 4k so Rosetta may not even have a measurable impact on framerate for some of the tests. Beyond that, what games are out there that have otherwise identical implementations that run on Windows/x86 and MacOS/Arm? Why compare games at all? It is a really common use of GPUs so Apple claiming just "faster" rather than "faster in X use case" or "more FP computations per second" opens them up to gaming comparisons.

calo_star 5y ago

It's not just Adobe or games, takes 3D rendering for example, both Redshift and Cycle are now using Metal (the Metal backend for Cycle was even submitted by Apple themselves), Nvidia's GPUs absolutely destroy their (supposed) M1 equivalents, with or without using the ray tracing hardware. https://youtu.be/HF_rMjjPoPs?t=118 https://youtu.be/HF_rMjjPoPs?t=118 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS_uPukPuo4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS_uPukPuo4 https://youtu.be/i4CuZqXA4BM?t=359 https://youtu.be/i4CuZqXA4BM?t=359

dagmx 5y ago
In Blenders case, there are still several patches left to merge in and even the Blender page strictly mentions that it's early integration without much performance work done yet.