4 ms·

> 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 peop

by 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.
  - musicale 3y ago
    > Lack of that is a weird omission if Apple is trying to act like they have a gaming platform. Apple has a huge gaming platform, and it isn't the Mac. https://www.ign.com/articles/apple-made-more-than-nintendo-sony-xbox https://www.ign.com/articles/apple-made-more-than-nintendo-s... However, I imagine that they'd still like to sell more games in the Mac App Store (in addition to iOS ports, iPad games that can run on Apple Silicon, and Apple Arcade subscriptions) and this might help. It might also make it easier to port games to Apple Arcade.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  Apple silicon wins on performance per watt but not in performance outright and suddenly everyone cares about power consumption. Whichever spec everyone's favorite fruit company excels at gets put on a pedestal.
  - philistine 3y ago
    The PC industry is no longer driven by desktops; laptops have taken over long ago. There is a gaming PC crowd, but that is a small captured audience who wants performance, wattage be damned. Apple is selling around 80% laptops versus desktops, and the rest of the industry is something like 77%. The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race doesn't mean it should automatically be entered into the desktop GPU race, where it is not winning.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      > The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race Fact? Which Apple chips are outperforming the laptop 3070, much less the current-gen mobile 4090?
      - npunt 3y ago
        I would take a guess that Apple is shipping (far) more TFlops of GPU power than Nvidia or anyone else in the mobile GPU market. Few people are buying laptops with 80-150w TDP GPUs, as those start to stretch the definition of both 'laptop' and 'battery powered'. Big gaming laptops with an hour of battery life are more akin to the luggables of yore.
        smoldesu 3y ago
        That's fair. Nvidia has issues scaling their full systems down to laptop spec, and Apple almost has the opposite problem. They're both impressive in their own right, but right now Nvidia has both the performance and performance-per-watt crown in this space. The disparity in 3D applications (like gaming and Blender[0]) so ugly it's not even close. And in all fairness - Apple's products might not need more GPU power. Cyberpunk and Elden Ring appear to be CPU-bottlenecked, if people are comfortable upscaling they could get a pretty comfortable Retina experience. The 2D optimization and media accelerators are a good focus for mobile hardware. For more demanding applications though, it looks like Apple's current approach is not scaling well. [0] https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- abujazar 3y ago
  For $3000 you can get a top end GPU, not a whole gaming PC. Most gamers have mid-range GPUs like those in the M2 Max.
  - samspenc 3y ago
    Actually you can get NVidia's top consumer GPU today, the RTX 4090, for $1500-1600. Go back one generation and you can get a RTX 3090 for $750 which still packs a punch. So it's quite possible to build a well-performing gaming PC for sub-$2000 with RTX 3090 which is still significantly more performant than Apple's latest Mac, in terms of GPU throughput. I snapped myself a gaming PC for $1300 at last year's Thanksgiving sales, came with a AMD Ryzen, RTX 3080 (10 GB VRAM model) and 32 GB DDR4 RAM, no way I could have gotten a Mac with that performance for anything close in terms of price.
    - abujazar 3y ago
      Yea, that’s true as of today in the US. There’s no way you could get such a deal where I live (Norway) due to our weak currency, and it used to be the other way around just a few years ago
  - reroute22 3y ago
    This is wildly false, see https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/143ugg4/comment/jnc201m/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/143ugg4/comment/j... as a real world example of a gaming PC you can buy right now for $2,600 which is the top of the crop and an absolutely wild gaming machine that's vastly better at gaming than $5,000 M2 Ultra Mac Studio even if the comparisons are done only in games that actually work and work well on the Mac. If you were after a comparable experience with the fastest Macs on Earth you could configure a PC that's another $1,000 cheaper than that ($1,600).
    - abujazar 3y ago
      You’re right and my knowledge was outdated about the prices.
olyjohn 3y ago
Great, you can keep playing your old ass game at low frame rates. Enjoy your power savings... the game still runs like crap and the GPU still isn't that great.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Game enthusiasts can be so weird. Do y'all even have fun playing games, or do you just keep buying hardware and optimizing settings until they run at 120fps, declare victory, and move on to the next AAA game? I don't think I have worried about game frame rate since the days of Quake 1. I set my graphics settings to "Medium" and then spend the rest of my time actually enjoying my old ass games.
  - npunt 3y ago
    Its exactly why PC/console gamers (generally, not talking about GP) make terrible customers and Apple is right to not play with fire by courting them too closely - they're loud, cheap, immature, mercurial, and demanding, and being associated with them is probably a net negative for brand. Let them stew in forums arguing over red vs green, tinkering with and breaking the warranty of their PC parts, being disloyal to the brand they loved 5 minutes ago, etc. Better strategy is to make sure the door isn't closed on gaming for those that want to use their expensive Macs to occasionally play (protect the downside), rather than swing the door open enthusiastically for gamers to rush in. Re: worrying about fun vs tinkering, I'm reminded of the 4 quadrants of hobbies. What we see on forums are generally gamers interested in gear & discussing, not 'doing the hobby'. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html
    - granneman 3y ago
      Thank you for that link! Great article with a lot of truth to it.
    - incrudible 3y ago
      Yes, gamers have standards and thats why GPU performance on the PC does not suck and why it is relatively affordable. A tough market to be in for sure, everyone wishes they could just be Apple.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
emn13 3y ago
The M2 Max is closer to the 3060 than it is to the 3060 Ti, let alone 3070. And those numbers are quite possibly overly optimistic; workloads essentially never reach peak tflop, and I would not be surprised if practical workloads are better matched to nvidia's architecture than apple's, if only through sheer industry momentum (But that could go either way). While the perf/watt is impressive, apple is also using 4 times the number of transistors on TSMC's latest process - and the comparison here is samsungs 8nm, I believe. It's not really all that impressive that that huge silicon investment has some results... It's a tantalizing hint at what might be possible, but as it stands, I'm not really all that impressed, personally.
- paulmd 3y ago
  I didn't say 3070, that was from the parent "who is impressed by 3070 performance [in a 25W envelope]"? And the answer is a lot of people. I actually added the 3060 bit myself lol, because yeah, that seems to be more like where it actually lands, more like desktop 3060. edit: also desktop vs mobile is a factor here too... mobile 3070 is not the same thing as desktop 3070, and coming in at desktop 3070 would actually be fairly impressive. Mobile 3060, much less so.
  - emn13 3y ago
    Sure, no quibbles on that front. Comparisons like this are always best taken with a lot of salt anyhow; they're so different. And it's not like tflops are the great predictor of gaming performance. Positively: as a device, having such a solid iGPU is pretty much exactly what I've always wanted in this kind of device. Having performance that's PS5 ballpark clearly is enough for a hell of a lot of things. Who really wants something much faster at the cost of much worse battery life? But the air of incredibly ground-breaking technical greatness that apple manages to weave around its silicon seems a tad overdone. Given the amount of silicon, the process node, and the target tuning - this kind of result seems competitive with rather than outclassing their rivals.

by paulmd 3y ago

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.
- musicale 3y ago
  > Lack of that is a weird omission if Apple is trying to act like they have a gaming platform. Apple has a huge gaming platform, and it isn't the Mac. https://www.ign.com/articles/apple-made-more-than-nintendo-sony-xbox https://www.ign.com/articles/apple-made-more-than-nintendo-s... However, I imagine that they'd still like to sell more games in the Mac App Store (in addition to iOS ports, iPad games that can run on Apple Silicon, and Apple Arcade subscriptions) and this might help. It might also make it easier to port games to Apple Arcade.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Apple silicon wins on performance per watt but not in performance outright and suddenly everyone cares about power consumption. Whichever spec everyone's favorite fruit company excels at gets put on a pedestal.
- philistine 3y ago
  The PC industry is no longer driven by desktops; laptops have taken over long ago. There is a gaming PC crowd, but that is a small captured audience who wants performance, wattage be damned. Apple is selling around 80% laptops versus desktops, and the rest of the industry is something like 77%. The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race doesn't mean it should automatically be entered into the desktop GPU race, where it is not winning.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    > The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race Fact? Which Apple chips are outperforming the laptop 3070, much less the current-gen mobile 4090?
    - npunt 3y ago
      I would take a guess that Apple is shipping (far) more TFlops of GPU power than Nvidia or anyone else in the mobile GPU market. Few people are buying laptops with 80-150w TDP GPUs, as those start to stretch the definition of both 'laptop' and 'battery powered'. Big gaming laptops with an hour of battery life are more akin to the luggables of yore.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        That's fair. Nvidia has issues scaling their full systems down to laptop spec, and Apple almost has the opposite problem. They're both impressive in their own right, but right now Nvidia has both the performance and performance-per-watt crown in this space. The disparity in 3D applications (like gaming and Blender[0]) so ugly it's not even close. And in all fairness - Apple's products might not need more GPU power. Cyberpunk and Elden Ring appear to be CPU-bottlenecked, if people are comfortable upscaling they could get a pretty comfortable Retina experience. The 2D optimization and media accelerators are a good focus for mobile hardware. For more demanding applications though, it looks like Apple's current approach is not scaling well. [0] https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
abujazar 3y ago
For $3000 you can get a top end GPU, not a whole gaming PC. Most gamers have mid-range GPUs like those in the M2 Max.
- samspenc 3y ago
  Actually you can get NVidia's top consumer GPU today, the RTX 4090, for $1500-1600. Go back one generation and you can get a RTX 3090 for $750 which still packs a punch. So it's quite possible to build a well-performing gaming PC for sub-$2000 with RTX 3090 which is still significantly more performant than Apple's latest Mac, in terms of GPU throughput. I snapped myself a gaming PC for $1300 at last year's Thanksgiving sales, came with a AMD Ryzen, RTX 3080 (10 GB VRAM model) and 32 GB DDR4 RAM, no way I could have gotten a Mac with that performance for anything close in terms of price.
  - abujazar 3y ago
    Yea, that’s true as of today in the US. There’s no way you could get such a deal where I live (Norway) due to our weak currency, and it used to be the other way around just a few years ago
- reroute22 3y ago
  This is wildly false, see https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/143ugg4/comment/jnc201m/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/143ugg4/comment/j... as a real world example of a gaming PC you can buy right now for $2,600 which is the top of the crop and an absolutely wild gaming machine that's vastly better at gaming than $5,000 M2 Ultra Mac Studio even if the comparisons are done only in games that actually work and work well on the Mac. If you were after a comparable experience with the fastest Macs on Earth you could configure a PC that's another $1,000 cheaper than that ($1,600).
  - abujazar 3y ago
    You’re right and my knowledge was outdated about the prices.

olyjohn 3y ago

Great, you can keep playing your old ass game at low frame rates. Enjoy your power savings... the game still runs like crap and the GPU still isn't that great.

ryandrake 3y ago
Game enthusiasts can be so weird. Do y'all even have fun playing games, or do you just keep buying hardware and optimizing settings until they run at 120fps, declare victory, and move on to the next AAA game? I don't think I have worried about game frame rate since the days of Quake 1. I set my graphics settings to "Medium" and then spend the rest of my time actually enjoying my old ass games.
- npunt 3y ago
  Its exactly why PC/console gamers (generally, not talking about GP) make terrible customers and Apple is right to not play with fire by courting them too closely - they're loud, cheap, immature, mercurial, and demanding, and being associated with them is probably a net negative for brand. Let them stew in forums arguing over red vs green, tinkering with and breaking the warranty of their PC parts, being disloyal to the brand they loved 5 minutes ago, etc. Better strategy is to make sure the door isn't closed on gaming for those that want to use their expensive Macs to occasionally play (protect the downside), rather than swing the door open enthusiastically for gamers to rush in. Re: worrying about fun vs tinkering, I'm reminded of the 4 quadrants of hobbies. What we see on forums are generally gamers interested in gear & discussing, not 'doing the hobby'. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html
  - granneman 3y ago
    Thank you for that link! Great article with a lot of truth to it.
  - incrudible 3y ago
    Yes, gamers have standards and thats why GPU performance on the PC does not suck and why it is relatively affordable. A tough market to be in for sure, everyone wishes they could just be Apple.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

emn13 3y ago

The M2 Max is closer to the 3060 than it is to the 3060 Ti, let alone 3070. And those numbers are quite possibly overly optimistic; workloads essentially never reach peak tflop, and I would not be surprised if practical workloads are better matched to nvidia's architecture than apple's, if only through sheer industry momentum (But that could go either way). While the perf/watt is impressive, apple is also using 4 times the number of transistors on TSMC's latest process - and the comparison here is samsungs 8nm, I believe. It's not really all that impressive that that huge silicon investment has some results... It's a tantalizing hint at what might be possible, but as it stands, I'm not really all that impressed, personally.

paulmd 3y ago
I didn't say 3070, that was from the parent "who is impressed by 3070 performance [in a 25W envelope]"? And the answer is a lot of people. I actually added the 3060 bit myself lol, because yeah, that seems to be more like where it actually lands, more like desktop 3060. edit: also desktop vs mobile is a factor here too... mobile 3070 is not the same thing as desktop 3070, and coming in at desktop 3070 would actually be fairly impressive. Mobile 3060, much less so.
- emn13 3y ago
  Sure, no quibbles on that front. Comparisons like this are always best taken with a lot of salt anyhow; they're so different. And it's not like tflops are the great predictor of gaming performance. Positively: as a device, having such a solid iGPU is pretty much exactly what I've always wanted in this kind of device. Having performance that's PS5 ballpark clearly is enough for a hell of a lot of things. Who really wants something much faster at the cost of much worse battery life? But the air of incredibly ground-breaking technical greatness that apple manages to weave around its silicon seems a tad overdone. Given the amount of silicon, the process node, and the target tuning - this kind of result seems competitive with rather than outclassing their rivals.