[jeroenhd]

Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their gaming related advertising. Sure, you can do 1080p gaming with the highest SKU, but you're paying through the nose if you bought an M2 to play games.

It seems strange to me for Apple to advertise something they haven't exactly mastered yet on stage.

Maybe they have some kind of optimization up their sleeves that will roll out later? I can imagine Apple coming out with their own answer to DLSS and FSX2 based on their machine learning hardware, for example. On the other hand, I would've expected them to demonstrate that in the first place when they shoed off their game port toolkit.

[tstrimple]

With crossover and Apple's latest release of gameportingtoolkit I'm able to maintain over 120FPS on ultra settings at native resolution on Diablo 4 with my M2 Max MBP. It was fair to be skeptical before that release this week, but there's plenty of evidence out there now that Apple silicon can handle gaming just fine. Other users are reporting 50-60 FPS with ultra settings on their 6k Studio displays.

[numpad0]

Apple consistently advertised gaming performance without any substance to it.

[mcny]

I thought the whole idea of M2 was “exceptional product given the power consumption”.

I don’t mind that it has nothing to show for all the talk once you throw out the need to basically sip power (like a notebook computer).

Is this something inherent with ARM though? Why can’t there be ARM based desktop and server computers that need a kilowatt of power at peak? Like how much more performance can you get for each additional watt of power? (I don’t know. I’m genuinely asking.)

[numpad0]

I was one told that memory and bus bandwidth often creates disparity between benchmark and application performances in ARM CPUs. That was years ago and supposedly don’t apply to custom designs like M2, but maybe both Intel and AMD are still advantageous in that region?

[astrange]

No, M2's memory bandwidth is much better than theirs since it's a unified memory design. (Latency isn't any better though.)

[GeekyBear]

> I thought the whole idea of M2 was “exceptional product given the power consumption”.

When running native code.

Look at the performance of Microsoft's ARM Surface Pro when running emulated code.

> My frustration with this computer wasn’t a workload thing. It didn’t start out fast and gradually slow down as I opened more things and started more processes. It was peppered with glitches and freezes from start to finish.

I’d have only Slack open, and switching between channels would still take almost three seconds (yes, I timed it on my phone). Spotify, also with nothing in the background, would take 11 seconds to open, then be frozen for another four seconds before I could finally press play. When I typed in Chrome, I often saw significant lag, which led to all kinds of typos (because my words weren’t coming out until well after I’d written them). I’d try to watch YouTube videos, and the video would freeze while the audio continued. I’d use the Surface Pen to annotate a PDF, and my strokes would either be frustratingly late or not show up at all. I’d try to open Lightroom, and it would freeze multiple times and then crash.

It quickly became clear that I should try to stick to apps that were running natively on Arm.

https://www.theverge.com/23421326/microsoft-surface-pro-9-ar...

[saagarjha]

Why are you bringing up Microsoft’s translator here? I don’t see why it is relevant?

[GeekyBear]

> Apple consistently advertised gaming performance without any substance to it.

> Why are you bringing up Microsoft’s translator here? I don’t see why it is relevant?

It should be pretty obvious that emulating x86 slows performance, regardless of whose ARM OS we're discussing.

[saagarjha]

Ok, but their performance characteristics are pretty different.

[astrange]

Rosetta is much more efficient than this translator, partially through hardware acceleration.

[achandlerwhite]

They announced MetalFX for their upscaling tech last year and by all accounts it works well if developers take advantage of it.

[littlestymaar]

Not familiar with DLSS at all, does it requires developers to do something in order to take avantage of it too? I had imagined it was automatic but then again I know nothing about it beyond the marketing pitch to consumers.

[jml78]

Yes, games have to do work to support DLSS.

I am not knowledgeable enough to know how much work it is but I have played games that didn’t initially support it but eventually released an updated that added support.

There are also multiple “levels” for DLSS in games that support it, eg. Quality, performance, etc

[littlestymaar]

Thanks

[GeekyBear]

> Not familiar with DLSS at all

Here's a video comparing DLSS and MetalFX upscaling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iXx9lfe62w

[GeekyBear]

> Apple's GPU performance is what makes me sceptical about their gaming related advertising.

The issue is that people compare games running under emulated x86 and emulated graphics APIs, when making claims about what the SOC is capable of.

There's nothing wrong with knowing how well the SOC performs when emulating games, but if you claim to be talking about what the SOC can do, then include the performance of native games as well.

[pornel]

Apple's x86 emulation is otherwise very impressive, and not many games are bottlenecked on the CPU, especially at high resolutions.

Bigger overhead for AAA games is likely due to emulation of DirectX or Vulkan on Metal, but that's just Apple's stubborn choice to have it that way.

In the end, none of that matters. I won't be playing Cyberpunk at 14fps, without RTX, and comforting myself that the SoC could do maybe 28fps without emulation. Lower-tier Nvidia cards perform better, even when paired with slower CPUs.

[GeekyBear]

> Bigger overhead for AAA games is likely due to emulation of DirectX or Vulkan on Metal, but that's just Apple's stubborn choice to have it that way.

This is a weird take. None of he major gaming platforms use the same graphics API.

Microsoft has DirectX on Windows and XBox, Apple has Metal on iOS and Macs, Sony has Gnmx on Playstation.

It's like saying Android gaming is terrible because they didn't use DirectX.

[thraizz]

The major platforms do use the same graphics API, Vulkan. It should be preferred due to more low-level access and wider platform support (Linux, Android, Nintendo, MacOS, Windows).

On another note, problems that keep major AAA games from running on Linux (Anti-cheat solutions for example) will block many games from running ob MacOS, too.

[GeekyBear]

> The major platforms do use the same graphics API, Vulkan.

By all means, share a list of XBox games that only use Vulkan.

[cmovq]

The CPU is rarely a bottleneck for AAA games, so unless the x86 emulation is particularly terrible (Rosetta isn't) it shouldn't be the issue.

WINE on Linux is able to match the performance of games on Windows, so the DirectX translation layer shouldn't be a problem either.

So it's not unreasonable to assume that the M2 just doesn't have a GPU capable of running these games. And it's really not that surprising that an integrated GPU doesn't match the performance of a dedicated GPU.

[dijit]

> The CPU is rarely a bottleneck for AAA games

I mean… No?

CPU bottleneck is super common, especially on slightly older engine bases like source or unreal.

I think you are assuming big AAA games at 4k, which puts an especially big strain on the GPU.

Maybe I’ve been developing games too long, but we are constantly fighting CPU bottlenecks.

[astrange]

PC game players tend to believe you can't play a game unless you bought the latest custom hardware for all of it and put all the settings on maximum.

Game developers are much more willing to run their work on lower end machines if they'll get paid for it, or at least they're more capable of tuning for it.

[GeekyBear]

> So it's not unreasonable to assume that the M2 just doesn't have a GPU capable of running these games

Without including comparison data on native games? It's entirely unreasonable.

For instance, The native version of the DirectX 12 game "The Medium" was shown running side by side with the emulated version at WWDC, and the native version had double the frame rate.

[alpaca128]

> the M2 just doesn't have a GPU capable of running these games.

As long as AAA games are published on the Xbox Series S and shipping with graphics settings they will have no problem when running natively on an M2 chip.