IDK, "look how good our CPU support is by running a several year old GPU limited game" fell a bit flat for me.
> You didn't see Microsoft demoing games for their Surface on ARM systems at all and for good reason.
Those were also lower-end computers with poor GPUs.
You mean the Surface Pro X? It has similar price tiering to the iPad Pro whose SoC was used in these demos.
Still, the Pro X has poor graphics. I'm going to assume that a dedicated GPU was being used for Tomb Raider—they would have said something otherwise.
They said exactly what SoC they were using, and it's not known to have spare PCIe lanes lying unused in existing products. Apple pretty much just demoed an x86 game running on an overclocked iPad Pro.
Don't be surprised if there is no Thunderbolt 3 at all, but just USB-C.
Makes me wonder how the Pro Display used in the demos was being driven. DisplayPort with USB-C alternate mode?
Were you under the impression this $500 developers kit shipping with an iPad Pro CPU/ GPU is a high end computer? While it's a decent chip, it's essentially the same CPU as the prior generation iPad Pro with 1 additional core.
It's not impressive at all.
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Edit 2: Please disregard my first edit, below—I was right the first time, then I got the games mixed up.
Edit 1: Oh wait, I forgot, SotTR actually did have an Xbox 360 port! It was one of the last big titles to have one. I think what they showed on screen looked better than the 360 version though, although it's admittedly hard to tell on a stream.
Whereas I can emulate 4k60fps PS3 games with improved textures.
It did not, previous game in series (Rise of the Tomb Raider) did have but Shadow(...) was released only on current-gen consoles.
An unlocked A12Z is likely all you can get away with in a laptop, and inferior to SOTA x86 low power CPUs.
Plus they insinuated they were running on the A12 but later demos including the game did not state exactly the hardware being used.
If they are limited to games support Metal then that is jettisoning a large number of games. Granted Catalina already did a of that work for them.
Are they going to support non Apple video cards? The skipped right over that but I suspect they don't think they need to
*edit on that last note it would be a good reason they never brought nvidia chips back as they would know they would not need them
They didn't demo gaming to suggest this is a great machine for gaming, they demoed it to show that it was possible at all. The previous version of Rosetta during the PowerPC->Intel transition was not known for performance.
If gaming is important to you and you want a Mac then you want an Intel Mac or whatever games are released for Mac ARM. Emulated games are not going to compete with native.
It doesn't really matter what the graphics performance is, on high end macs they'll still ship a dedicated GPU from AMD. What matters is that the game is GPU-limited instead of CPU-limited.
Having gone and checked, no. Not even close.
(Nor would it be plausible to expect to. But it's clear Apple have made a choice here, and that is that if you're a user who wants legacy software or desktop gaming, Apple do not care about you compared to their margins. It's that simple.)