Keep in mind, it's getting 15fps at 1440x900. It's not saying that Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 is a great experience. It's merely pointing out that it's technically possible (which is a massive achievement).
I mean, for the work I do that’s probably true. My work is 99% CPU/RAM/disk dependent.
GPU obviously not, but maybe that claim would hold water at some arbitrary wattage limit.
My takeaway is that the GPU “doesn’t completely suck” and that Apple are dedicating continuing resources to making their platform actually usable, which I was worried about. I mean, it seems difficult just to intentionally use the Apple Neural Engine, and impossible to explicitly use it, which makes testing aggravating. Any continued focus on improving developer experience for the coprocessors (GPU, ANE, R1, etc) is a good signal.
Yeah I don't think laptops should be sold at all with 512GB -- I think that's as absurd of a product as a laptop with 128GB. Personally I spec out 2TB and judge price value based on that.
So the speed issue doesn't affect me personally. I just wish they wouldn't sell that model and then it wouldn't affect anyone.
Given that Baldur's Gate runs at Ultra 1080p60+ on a 3050Ti mobile, that's about what you can expect from a low end gaming laptop - and that GPU runs at 35-50W on most of those
No. There does not exist an M1 Ultra laptop of any kind. Nor an M2 Ultra laptop for that matter. The only machines with Mn Ultra are the Mac Studio and Mac Pro.
Yes. The MBP with an M1 Max will, at max performance, use enough power that it would discharge it's battery in less than an hour. I think Apple throttles it on battery, though.
They've been straight up lying about the M series chips performance from day one. They will show insane graphs of the M chips beating top end desktop parts with an asterisk that explains the very specific BS benchmark they used that clearly favors their chip but won't generalize and then public benchmarks never even come close.
I do not understand. The picture you link clearly does not cut off that way: if it were the case, the curves would be about to cross at the cut, or maybe I am missing something?
It's an impressive turnout, but I wouldn't ignore the power of modern low-end APUs. Here's a 3-generation-old, entry level Ryzen laptop playing the game for comparison: https://youtu.be/Aqgm0zcV7Kw
"this well" is more or less equivalent to a older Ryzen 3's native performance. Apple is really banking on developers recompiling for ARM to reduce overhead here.
13 inch ultra lights? I very much doubt that. You are basically relegated to igpus. I could see Ryzen 7840u beating the M1. But 3 years ago the best there was was the Ryzen 5800u.
M1 has 8 GPU cores, M1 Pro has 16, M1 Max has 32 cores. Apple says the GPU of M1 Max is four times as fast as M1. So 30FPS Ultra on 1080p should be possible?
This is not the M1. You can’t configure a MacBook Pro 16 inch (stated in the tweet) with anything other than an M1 Pro / M1 Max, or M2 Pro / M2 Max on the latest models.
Wine + DXVK disagrees. Graphics API emulation doesn't necessarily provide worse performance, in fact DXVK often wins against raw DirectX 9/10 and sometimes even DirectX 11. VKD3D performance is pretty awesome.
Not sure how much of the bottleneck here is because of Rosetta though (i.e. cpu-bound) although I suspect not much really.
I think it's a network effect thing as much as anything else. If it's good enough to get people playing games on their macs at all (even if at relatively sub-par settings), that builds the market, shows there are people willing to spend money on games to play them on their macs.
Then at that point games developers might be more inclined to give the platform explicit support.
Otherwise it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation: people aren't playing games on their macs because the library isn't there, the library isn't there because no developers will support a platform where there aren't gamers and so on.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Think about how many Steam Decks have been sold. Game devs are already actively targeting the Deck. If porting games to Mac can be made easier, we all need to actively encourage it. Unfortunately, the only way we get Apple to give us more game dev tools is by porting the games.
I have a Steam Deck and a Mac. I would love to play half the games from my Deck on my laptop.
Do you find this is a good solution for playing Steam games?
I have an older PC, and I'm thinking about replacing it with a macbook air and a steam deck. Does the steam deck feel more limiting than just having a windows PC with steam?
only get a steam deck if you're really interested in portable playing. You can build a better desktop from old parts. The steamdeck is an interesting device that's doing a lot for gaming via proton, but that makes tradeoffs for battery life and portability. If you're not interested in the portability just get a desktop. If you're interested in the portability but need a large screen, get a laptop. If you want a sega game gear form factor that can run steam games get a steam deck.
Yeah, but that's the first attempt. The game porting toolkit is designed to shorten the time it takes to launch the game on macOS for the first time by allowing you to take the ready Windows version and just running it directly on macOS with translation. A finished macOS port would have additional work after this step.
"Technically possible" is a non statement. Of course its technically possible. The question is how much money is Apple willing to throw at making games run well on their gpu.
