It barely handles that, and even the M5 still cannot cope with 8khz mouse input coupled to a high refresh rate (>240) screen. I laugh every time they try and sell us on these things being able to play games
They really are great gaming machines from a hardware perspective. I wouldn't bother with an x86 laptop for gaming if it weren't for the software (mostly DRM) side.
That is wildly outdated, everyone is using 8khz input now. Keyboards too. This also completely ignores the 600-640hz monitors they are playing on.
Even 1khz mkb input on an apple silicon mac connected to a 500hz screen has insane utilization just doing shit in the OS. They are also struggling with variable refresh rate, improperly dropping down to the minimum (as low as 24hz) with jarring, jagged jumps up to the maximum after a few seconds of use.
This is a solved problem on both windows and linux. Even Asahi does a better job.
No, not "everyone" is using 8 KHz polling now... it breaks a lot of game engines for no benefit (even 4 KHz) but is heavily marketed because higher numbers. Worse yet, 8 KHz eats the kernel with interrupts (even on my 9800X3D) instead of letting the game run as fast as possible.
High refresh rate monitors are great, yes, but those are still sub KHz - you're talking about polling a mouse at 13x the rate of the highest end esports monitors as some minimum bar for when a machine can be for gaming - get out of here with that kind of artificial gatekeeping.
Not "everyone". The G Pro Wireless is one of the most popular mouses and polls at 1KHz, and it works just fine. Polling a keyboard beyond 1KHz is utterly useless. The only time you're gonna want more fidelity is with stuff like Snap Tap, which is considered cheating and is banned.
In a similar vein, >120Hz screens are of doubtful utility. The performance gain is insignificant, considering top human reaction time to visual stimuli is ~150ms and the jump from 120Hz to 240Hz is -4.17ms, 1/36th or 2.77% improvement.
Even then, most pro FPS players also still play on 200-800 DPI when 1600 DPI and preferably even 3200 DPI is much better. Those low DPIs are purely cargo culted from the 2000s era CS Pros their .cfg, when sensors were still pretty crappy, and those players are effectively running lowgrade mouse smoothing.
Uneducated gamers are kin to uneducated audiophiles. Stop drinking the snake oil.
?? isn't it objectively the fastest ST core out there, topping MT benchmarks as well? Depending on the variant the M4 plays cyberpunk at 50-120fps so what are you saying?
Benchmarks are one thing. Real world usage and I/O are another.
There is no world where 50fps is acceptable in any game in 2025. Flagship GPUs on high end systems running Windows manage 4k @ max settings north of 60, nearly double that with RT off. To achieve anything close on a mac, you're dropping down to 1440p, at lower settings, with frame generation.
The problem is the edge cases where people use hardware capable of absolutely ridiculous things that nonetheless are common-ish on Windows and expect macOS to be capable of dealing with as well.
(Don't get me started on macOS and the un-disableable mouse acceleration override coupled together with Steam Link...)
They really are great gaming machines from a hardware perspective. I wouldn't bother with an x86 laptop for gaming if it weren't for the software (mostly DRM) side.