[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.