[kitsunesoba]

> It still has the advantage of a much larger memory pool.

I wonder if given roughly equal power to the GPUs in current gen consoles (PS5/XBSX), it'd yield some advantage in porting console games since those consoles also have a large shared pool of memory (16GB), and neither AMD nor Nvidia want to give up using VRAM as an upsell.

[jeroenhd]

With the M2 Ultra prices, it'd be cheaper to buy a 4090 than to go the Apple route. With the M2 pro you'll probably still be better off with a 4080 unless you really need more than 16GB of VRAM.

I don't know the M2's efficiency for things like machine learning, but the M1's machine learning performance seemed to have been beaten 4-5x by the 3060Ti so I'm pretty sure "more VRAM" is all it's got going for it in ML tasks.

[kitsunesoba]

Well yeah, the market here would be people who already have a reasonably powerful Mac and would rather have that fill their gaming needs instead of having to build or buy a separate dedicated device for that.

But what I was really getting at is the trouble that game studios have been encountering lately when porting PS5 and Xbox titles to Windows, which is that these games are so reliant on those consoles' 16GB shared memory pool that they perform terribly on PCs. The impact is double, because not only are most GPUs in usage right now anemic when it comes to VRAM (even my last-gen high end 3080 Ti comes up short at only 12GB), traditional PCs also have to copy data between RAM and VRAM. Significant re-architecting for the Windows port is required to work around this.

M-series Macs are much more similar to current gen consoles with their shared memory pool, which in theory could make porting from console to Mac (at least when targeting Macs with 16GB+ of RAM) more straightforward than porting to Windows. While some work would need to be done to support Metal, the two most popular engines already do much of that legwork and the work that remains can be shared across multiple titles.

[rbanffy]

I can’t imagine using my work computer for gaming, as maintaining the software install has so many different requirements, but, then, I’m no PC gamer and would rather have a console plugged into the big TV in the living room than on my desktop monitors. It’s also much less of a hassle maintaining a console than a gaming PC.

As a side-note, my living room TV is a rather small 43 inch one (limited in size by the surrounding overflowing book shelves) but, if I were a gamer, I’d probably have gone with a 60+ inch or wall projector.

If I lived alone, I’d get an Apple Vision Pro instead of the humongous TV, as it’d be cheaper.

[avidphantasm]

Cheaper in terms of money, but in terms of time? I have a hard time justifying anything that requires configuration and dicking around. I’m a grown-up and don’t have “free time”. I need things that just work. For me, that’s not Intel and Windows or Intel and Linux. It’s macOS, which is the only true workstation platform left.

[TylerE]

This is exactly why I went from a monster PC rig to a Mac Studio. Just got tired of random components dying every year or so.

[lostmsu]

My previous rig is approaching 6 years, and the only dead component is a cheap external USB drive. The rig was mining 24/7 when it wasn't used for development or gaming. You must be doing something very wrong.