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These GPUs aren’t too bad. Theoretically, M2 Max peaks at 14.4 teraflops, and 400 GB/s memory bandwidth. M2 Ultra is too new, but Apple says it’s GPU is 30% fas

These GPUs aren’t too bad. Theoretically, M2 Max peaks at 14.4 teraflops, and 400 GB/s memory bandwidth. M2 Ultra is too new, but Apple says it’s GPU is 30% faster (probably 18.7 teraflops then?), and that it has 800 GB/s memory bandwidth. The numbers for M2 Ultra are comparable to some powerful GPUs. The theoretical TFlops number is close to Radeon 6900 XT and GeForce 3070, theoretical memory bandwidth is close to Radeon 7900 XT and GeForce 4080. However, good point on the pricing. Apparently, Mac Pro starts at $7k, which is way too expensive for most gamers.

madeofpalk 3y ago
Apple's best GPU is close to a mid-range previous gen nvidia GPU? I'm sure it'll run a 4 year old game on medium settings great! But that's kind of the point, that it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry. Who's supposed to be impressed by getting middling performance on Death Stranding 4 years after it came out? Literal definition of "also ran".
- hajile 3y ago
  The most used GPU according to Steam survey is the 1650 -- a low-midrange card from 2019.
  - nightski 3y ago
    Yeah and those people aren't going to pay significantly more money for a Mac M2 Max.
    - hedora 3y ago
      I think you'd be surprised. I just checked, and my desktop gaming GPU is only 31% faster than that nvidia, and I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro M2 Max. I bought the laptop and the video card because they are quiet and their price/performance is better than the high end stuff anyway. I just tried running steam on the macbook, and was very disappointed. My Linux gaming desktop will live on for another few years, I guess. edit: I think I got the GPU in ~ 2019, though it was released in 2015.
      - ohgodplsno 3y ago
        Rosetta translation + D3D12OnMetal (which developers aren't allowed to use to publish their games, so you'll have to do it on your own and work with a subpar version) will happily eat that 30% difference. Not to mention the massive changes that drivers bring, where Apple will never either want or be able to do as much work as Nvidia does.
        hedora 3y ago
        The 30% faster hardware is running Linux. The main reason I'm disappointed with steam on MacOS is that only a third of my library works at all, and that the stuff that does run is hit or miss, performance wise (especially the indie / casual games, which this hardware should laugh at). Also, another 25% of my library actually was ported to MacOS, but it is 32 bit only, so it won't run on an M2. (Also, typing that sentence was painful.) I guess if I want to run the vast majority of the MacOS software that I have ever purchased on an M2, my best bet is to install Asahi, and use the Windows ports under proton. Lame.
        wishfish 3y ago
        Steam has mislabeled many of the older Mac games as being incompatible. Several of them will work just fine. It's worth double checking on one of the Mac gaming wikis if you want a particular game. Have no idea why the mislabeling happened. Maybe Steam is working solely off dates despite many games being 64 bit before the 32 bit cutoff.
      - musicale 3y ago
        > I just tried running steam on the macbook, and was very disappointed. My Linux gaming desktop will live on for another few years, I guess. I'd like to see more Steam games that work on the Mac. Perhaps this could help.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      I paid a ton of money for my top of the line M2 Max because I build large rust systems that are high bandwidth and low latency and it’s as good as it gets for that. I also like to play games, but I don’t need the cutting edge. I would rather eat glass than buy a windows bing advertisement device and find another footprint in my home to install it just so I can get a higher frame rate than my eye can see. In fact, my strategy for gaming over the last 20 years has been to buy games 3 years old and devices that run them at their top end. No bugs, tons of reviews to guide my purchases, tons of mods, full DLC sets, always on sale. As long as I don’t sit around feeling envy looking at what’s cutting edge, following the 3 year wave front gives me precisely the experience folks had 3 years ago - but better. I’ll have their current experience in 3 years, so long as I don’t die, without all the bleeding edge problems. So, great. Apple lets me stay away from bard directed bing advertising and OS level spy ware on my desktop, simplify my computing footprint in my household, and provides me games from a few years ago. Seems like a win win. Source: I am someone who paid significantly more money for a Max M2 Max
      - madeofpalk 3y ago
        > Apple lets me stay away from bard directed bing advertising and OS level spy ware on my desktop Apple doesn't get to take the moral high ground here either when they push credit card and other services ads in their OS.
        fnordpiglet 3y ago
        No corporation gets to take a moral high ground being amoral entities. But windows is pervasively spammy now - the start menu hosting ads was bad enough, but now it’s the task bar too. I’m trying to remember when I saw a cross sell in apples stuff - my memory is only when I’m in something like the TV app or the wallet, or some place where the cross sell is contextually relevant. The more Microsoft and Google tilt towards becoming persistent privacy threats and advertising companies, the more apple will see it as a differentiator as a hardware company with software services to be the opposite. I’m good with that dynamic, but I think it’s useful to acknowledge that’s the case. Pretending windows isn’t a persistent adware spyware bundle doesn’t help the situation.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    A Nvidia 1650 is significantly cheaper also! Upgrading from full-spec M2 Max to M2 Ultra costs $1200. Nvidia 1650 launched at $190 (inflation adjusted, $159 2019 USD).
- Yujf 3y ago
  Do they need to most powerfull gaming hardware? Maybe just the fact that it might get reasonable to play most games on a macbook is enough to get people who also want to game to buy a macbook instead of a windows laptop. And maybe this is enough to get developers to consider mac. They do not need to compete with nvidea for the top of the line
  - kitsunesoba 3y ago
    Yeah, high end enthusiast hardware is in fact pretty niche, and I say this as someone with a 5950X/3080Ti tower. The vast majority of people playing games are doing so on pretty old/average hardware, a bar which is met and exceeded by several M-series Macs.
    - mrtranscendence 3y ago
      High-end hardware is niche, but the state of AAA game performance these days ... ugh. I can't even get a stable 60fps on Jedi Survivor with my 5800x/3080 Ti rig, even with lower settings. How bad is it on something like a 1060?
- paulmd 3y ago
  > Who's supposed to be impressed by getting middling performance on Death Stranding 4 years after it came out? Literal definition of "also ran". Plenty of people are impressed at 3060/3070 performance in a 25W system-power envelope. You literally can't even run the memory chips for a 3070 in that power budget let alone the whole APU. Like I'd love to see the AMD equivalent APU to that "also-ran 3070 performance" macbook, please link a laptop with what you think would be comparable.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    That's neat and impressive, but that's all they have. They don't have a high end. For $3000 you can get a top end gaming PC. There's no amount of money you can spend on a Mac to equal that. I think you're missing the point that parent (and Siracusa) made - Apple invests a signficant into the software and graphics stack, only to fumble it at the last minute by not having high-end graphics hardware, and caring enough to court "triple A" game developers to their platforms, despite them creating and maintaining Metal and this 20k-line WINE patch. There's this weird mismatch of Apple dedicating a non-trival amount of time in their keynote to "Mac Gaming" as if it's supposed to be impressive to finally play a 4 year old game on a Mac because they don't ship high-end graphics devices.
    - notSupplied 3y ago
      https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/?sort=pct https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/?sort=pct The most popular GPUs in use TODAY are 1650, 1060, 3060, 2060. If Apple can get the M2 Macbook Air to run like one of these, it essentially makes the most popular laptop also the equivalent to the most popular gaming rig.
    - wlesieutre 3y ago
      Two days ago we could speculate that maybe the $6000+ Mac Pro would bring better graphics performance, but now we know it's a $7000 Mac Studio with PCIe slots. And as far as we know you can't put a GPU in those slots. Not that it would've been in my price range anyway, but it could've indicated that thunderbolt eGPU support would make a return. Lack of that is a weird omission if Apple is trying to act like they have a gaming platform.
- llm_nerd 3y ago
  >it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry Apple seems to be doing okay. I mean, a magnitude more people game on iPhones than game on PCs. Apple is trying to support ancillary gaming for users who chose their platform for other reasons. That's it. They aren't targeting the 1200 watt, 12-fan 4090 PCMR sorts. And that's okay.
- KingMachiavelli 3y ago
  The latest consoles are also running mid range cards from a few years ago and are doing just fine. They are running games at medium at lower FPS/resolution than PC so games will mostly continue to target and work well on medium hardware. High end PC gaming is the exception, not the norm. The Mac audience is not trivial and has deep pockets so as long as porting games is fairly easy the it's an obvious choice.
- brundolf 3y ago
  I feel like you've got a chip on your shoulder about this for some reason I've got a gaming desktop and also a MacBook Pro. If the next time I go on a trip, I'm able to play some games in my hotel room on (gasp) medium settings, with a device I already own, that I probably was already going to bring with me, that's a positive thing!
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    They should’ve showcased a game that’s actually new and not just a port.
    - musicale 3y ago
      ... to demonstrate their porting toolkit?
      - Apocryphon 3y ago
        Sure, why not? Unreleased games need to be ported to macOS too.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    I also have a gaming desktop and a Macbook Pro, but I wish I didn't have to have a gaming desktop because I much prefer Macs and MacOS and I wish Apple was interested in competing. Then, they dedicate a segment to 'gaming on mac' to brag about porting a 4 year old game to the Mac.
- caycep 3y ago
  Apple's best [integrated] GPU is close to a mid-range previous gen [discrete] nvidia GPU [consuming 10x the power]? -fixed that for you
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I see, so in the world you propose we live in the Nintendo Switch must be a tremendous flop?
o1y32 3y ago
Practically speaking a $300 (often sold at $250) Xbox Series S would provide a much better gaming experience than this.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  Sure? It's definitely never going to deliver you anything other than a gaming/video experience though. It also doesn't come with a battery or a display in case we're doing an apples to apples comparison of the Xbox Series S with an M1 MacBook Pro.
mekpro 3y ago
This video sample use base M1 chip.

madeofpalk 3y ago

Apple's best GPU is close to a mid-range previous gen nvidia GPU? I'm sure it'll run a 4 year old game on medium settings great! But that's kind of the point, that it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry. Who's supposed to be impressed by getting middling performance on Death Stranding 4 years after it came out? Literal definition of "also ran".

hajile 3y ago
The most used GPU according to Steam survey is the 1650 -- a low-midrange card from 2019.
- nightski 3y ago
  Yeah and those people aren't going to pay significantly more money for a Mac M2 Max.
  - hedora 3y ago
    I think you'd be surprised. I just checked, and my desktop gaming GPU is only 31% faster than that nvidia, and I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro M2 Max. I bought the laptop and the video card because they are quiet and their price/performance is better than the high end stuff anyway. I just tried running steam on the macbook, and was very disappointed. My Linux gaming desktop will live on for another few years, I guess. edit: I think I got the GPU in ~ 2019, though it was released in 2015.
    - ohgodplsno 3y ago
      Rosetta translation + D3D12OnMetal (which developers aren't allowed to use to publish their games, so you'll have to do it on your own and work with a subpar version) will happily eat that 30% difference. Not to mention the massive changes that drivers bring, where Apple will never either want or be able to do as much work as Nvidia does.
      - hedora 3y ago
        The 30% faster hardware is running Linux. The main reason I'm disappointed with steam on MacOS is that only a third of my library works at all, and that the stuff that does run is hit or miss, performance wise (especially the indie / casual games, which this hardware should laugh at). Also, another 25% of my library actually was ported to MacOS, but it is 32 bit only, so it won't run on an M2. (Also, typing that sentence was painful.) I guess if I want to run the vast majority of the MacOS software that I have ever purchased on an M2, my best bet is to install Asahi, and use the Windows ports under proton. Lame.
        wishfish 3y ago
        Steam has mislabeled many of the older Mac games as being incompatible. Several of them will work just fine. It's worth double checking on one of the Mac gaming wikis if you want a particular game. Have no idea why the mislabeling happened. Maybe Steam is working solely off dates despite many games being 64 bit before the 32 bit cutoff.
    - musicale 3y ago
      > I just tried running steam on the macbook, and was very disappointed. My Linux gaming desktop will live on for another few years, I guess. I'd like to see more Steam games that work on the Mac. Perhaps this could help.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    I paid a ton of money for my top of the line M2 Max because I build large rust systems that are high bandwidth and low latency and it’s as good as it gets for that. I also like to play games, but I don’t need the cutting edge. I would rather eat glass than buy a windows bing advertisement device and find another footprint in my home to install it just so I can get a higher frame rate than my eye can see. In fact, my strategy for gaming over the last 20 years has been to buy games 3 years old and devices that run them at their top end. No bugs, tons of reviews to guide my purchases, tons of mods, full DLC sets, always on sale. As long as I don’t sit around feeling envy looking at what’s cutting edge, following the 3 year wave front gives me precisely the experience folks had 3 years ago - but better. I’ll have their current experience in 3 years, so long as I don’t die, without all the bleeding edge problems. So, great. Apple lets me stay away from bard directed bing advertising and OS level spy ware on my desktop, simplify my computing footprint in my household, and provides me games from a few years ago. Seems like a win win. Source: I am someone who paid significantly more money for a Max M2 Max
    - madeofpalk 3y ago
      > Apple lets me stay away from bard directed bing advertising and OS level spy ware on my desktop Apple doesn't get to take the moral high ground here either when they push credit card and other services ads in their OS.
      - fnordpiglet 3y ago
        No corporation gets to take a moral high ground being amoral entities. But windows is pervasively spammy now - the start menu hosting ads was bad enough, but now it’s the task bar too. I’m trying to remember when I saw a cross sell in apples stuff - my memory is only when I’m in something like the TV app or the wallet, or some place where the cross sell is contextually relevant. The more Microsoft and Google tilt towards becoming persistent privacy threats and advertising companies, the more apple will see it as a differentiator as a hardware company with software services to be the opposite. I’m good with that dynamic, but I think it’s useful to acknowledge that’s the case. Pretending windows isn’t a persistent adware spyware bundle doesn’t help the situation.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  A Nvidia 1650 is significantly cheaper also! Upgrading from full-spec M2 Max to M2 Ultra costs $1200. Nvidia 1650 launched at $190 (inflation adjusted, $159 2019 USD).
Yujf 3y ago
Do they need to most powerfull gaming hardware? Maybe just the fact that it might get reasonable to play most games on a macbook is enough to get people who also want to game to buy a macbook instead of a windows laptop. And maybe this is enough to get developers to consider mac. They do not need to compete with nvidea for the top of the line
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  Yeah, high end enthusiast hardware is in fact pretty niche, and I say this as someone with a 5950X/3080Ti tower. The vast majority of people playing games are doing so on pretty old/average hardware, a bar which is met and exceeded by several M-series Macs.
  - mrtranscendence 3y ago
    High-end hardware is niche, but the state of AAA game performance these days ... ugh. I can't even get a stable 60fps on Jedi Survivor with my 5800x/3080 Ti rig, even with lower settings. How bad is it on something like a 1060?
paulmd 3y ago
> Who's supposed to be impressed by getting middling performance on Death Stranding 4 years after it came out? Literal definition of "also ran". Plenty of people are impressed at 3060/3070 performance in a 25W system-power envelope. You literally can't even run the memory chips for a 3070 in that power budget let alone the whole APU. Like I'd love to see the AMD equivalent APU to that "also-ran 3070 performance" macbook, please link a laptop with what you think would be comparable.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  That's neat and impressive, but that's all they have. They don't have a high end. For $3000 you can get a top end gaming PC. There's no amount of money you can spend on a Mac to equal that. I think you're missing the point that parent (and Siracusa) made - Apple invests a signficant into the software and graphics stack, only to fumble it at the last minute by not having high-end graphics hardware, and caring enough to court "triple A" game developers to their platforms, despite them creating and maintaining Metal and this 20k-line WINE patch. There's this weird mismatch of Apple dedicating a non-trival amount of time in their keynote to "Mac Gaming" as if it's supposed to be impressive to finally play a 4 year old game on a Mac because they don't ship high-end graphics devices.
  - notSupplied 3y ago
    https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/?sort=pct https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/?sort=pct The most popular GPUs in use TODAY are 1650, 1060, 3060, 2060. If Apple can get the M2 Macbook Air to run like one of these, it essentially makes the most popular laptop also the equivalent to the most popular gaming rig.
  - wlesieutre 3y ago
    Two days ago we could speculate that maybe the $6000+ Mac Pro would bring better graphics performance, but now we know it's a $7000 Mac Studio with PCIe slots. And as far as we know you can't put a GPU in those slots. Not that it would've been in my price range anyway, but it could've indicated that thunderbolt eGPU support would make a return. Lack of that is a weird omission if Apple is trying to act like they have a gaming platform.
llm_nerd 3y ago
>it doesn't stand a chance against the rest of the industry Apple seems to be doing okay. I mean, a magnitude more people game on iPhones than game on PCs. Apple is trying to support ancillary gaming for users who chose their platform for other reasons. That's it. They aren't targeting the 1200 watt, 12-fan 4090 PCMR sorts. And that's okay.
KingMachiavelli 3y ago
The latest consoles are also running mid range cards from a few years ago and are doing just fine. They are running games at medium at lower FPS/resolution than PC so games will mostly continue to target and work well on medium hardware. High end PC gaming is the exception, not the norm. The Mac audience is not trivial and has deep pockets so as long as porting games is fairly easy the it's an obvious choice.
brundolf 3y ago
I feel like you've got a chip on your shoulder about this for some reason I've got a gaming desktop and also a MacBook Pro. If the next time I go on a trip, I'm able to play some games in my hotel room on (gasp) medium settings, with a device I already own, that I probably was already going to bring with me, that's a positive thing!
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  They should’ve showcased a game that’s actually new and not just a port.
  - musicale 3y ago
    ... to demonstrate their porting toolkit?
    - Apocryphon 3y ago
      Sure, why not? Unreleased games need to be ported to macOS too.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  I also have a gaming desktop and a Macbook Pro, but I wish I didn't have to have a gaming desktop because I much prefer Macs and MacOS and I wish Apple was interested in competing. Then, they dedicate a segment to 'gaming on mac' to brag about porting a 4 year old game to the Mac.
caycep 3y ago
Apple's best [integrated] GPU is close to a mid-range previous gen [discrete] nvidia GPU [consuming 10x the power]? -fixed that for you
fnordpiglet 3y ago
I see, so in the world you propose we live in the Nintendo Switch must be a tremendous flop?

o1y32 3y ago

Practically speaking a $300 (often sold at $250) Xbox Series S would provide a much better gaming experience than this.

Hamuko 3y ago
Sure? It's definitely never going to deliver you anything other than a gaming/video experience though. It also doesn't come with a battery or a display in case we're doing an apples to apples comparison of the Xbox Series S with an M1 MacBook Pro.

mekpro 3y ago

This video sample use base M1 chip.