Hacker News Reader

Comment by voqv | Hacker News Reader

I heard from random sources that their GPUs are actually (relatively?) very powerful. Better sources/experience appreciated.

"Apple claims the GPU in the iPad Pro is equivalent to an Xbox One S, although how they came to thise conclusion is difficult to say since we know so little about the underpinnings of the GPU." [1]

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13661/the-2018-apple-ipad-pro...

View on HN

Game console GPUs are middle-end at best. They compensate by huge amount of hardware-specific optimizations since game developer can only target few models of hardware during 5 years lifecycle and devkits for hardware become available for game engine developers almost 2 years in advance.

Apple sales for Mac are much smaller numbers compared to consoles, they change generations more quickly and amount of optimization in GPU-intensive apps is nowhere close to consoles.

So they might be able to compete with Intel iGPU, but that's nowhere close to AMD or Nvidia offerings.

That's less true than it once was. Both that the console APIs abstract way more of the systems than they once did so that console manufacturers can do perf refreshes halfway through the cycle, and that the whole point of Vulkan, et al. is to bring console like programming techniques to full computers since the GPU's MMU means that all you'll do is crash your own process anyway. That all adds up to them needing pretty nice hardware to keep up.

> Both that the console APIs abstract way more of the systems than they once did

And PC graphics APIs abstract way less of the system than they once did

I dont see how this helps Apple to compete with AMD or Nvidia GPUe. It's much easier for Apple to just use AMD GPUs for their Pro devices. Macs market is just too small to create custom high-end GPUs.

Apple might have huge leverage on mobile with iPhone because Android graphics drivers are horrible mess, but on Windows GPU drivers are decent and building custom driver stack sounds like too much.

I mean, it's not like the consoles are very custom GPUs. They were pretty standard GCN last gen, and pretty standard RDNA this new gen.

Apple's custom GPUs they use in their SoCs are arguably more effort on their part.

Why wouldn't Apple just reuse everything, including graphics hardware and drivers from iOS?

I guess because one can't just reuse hardware. They cant just take iPhone GPU, make it 5 times bigger and get 5X more performance with 5X of power budget. So more likely they'll just gonna sell laptops with GPU performance closer to iPhone which is not at all impressive.

GPU is actually relatively easier to scale by adding more cores/ALUs. The difficulty lies in figuring out how to handle peak current requirement of the whole IP.

Still a current-gen console grade GPU in a form factor like the iPad is pretty impressive. But then again maybe it wouldn't be able to sustain console-like performance due to thermal constraints

Agreed, plus benchmarks and measures like TFLOPS are always highly subjective.

I'd be curious if Apple's non-mobile SOC roadmap emphasizes on CPU development while still allowing for eGPU setups or even some built-in integration (e.g. Mac Pro with Apple CPU and AMD GPU) initially. Maybe in 5-10 years they'll shift to focusing on the GPU front and bring out their own dedicated GPU.

I don’t see how an integrated GPU can compete with the top of the line chips from nvidia and amd. The discreet GPUs(Radeon vega) in the Mac Pros have 13+ billion transistors and have 1 TB/s memory bandwidth with specialized memory.

The GPU in the Xbox One S was far from top of the line, it's pretty mediocre. A middle of the road GPU from that time frame was easily 200% faster than it.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?architecture=GCN+1.0&...

That being said, frankly I'm amazed at what most modern mobile GPUs are capable of and for most people who are casual gamers, that level of performance will be more than enough. What Apple will bring to the table will certainly be better than that, it's already better than Intel GPUs and they can still support 3rd party GPUs if necessary.

The demo they showed of Shadow of the Tomb Raider running at 1080p looked great for a game, AND it also looked awful if you compared it to the PC version on Ultra settings.

Apple kept mentioning pro apps like maya where you need highend GPUs. Gaming isn’t a big use case on a Mac. Our video production team uses highend macs with discreet gpus. If they don’t plan to offer comparable solutions to current line of desktop machines, we’ll be forced to switch platforms. I don’t see how an integrated gpu can compete with a discreet GPU with specialized dedicated ram and a memory bus that’s 10x of a CPU using ddr4x.

I suspect they aren't going to rule out external GPUs, they were just demonstrating the platform capability without them.

The whole presentation struck me as a big middle finger to Intel and just Intel.

Yeah, but that demo was running under emulation through rosetta 2...

The game natively supports Metal, I suspect that's why they chose it.

Yeah, did you notice they also ran it at 1080p and it really didn't look all that great?

I was actually a bit surprised they would break that kind of a demo out at WWDC -- I've seen that game not running in emulation and it was beautiful. That demo wasn't.

I agree the game definitely did not look like it was intended to and from that perspective it looked bad.

Looking at it without context however, it demonstrated the capability of the platform to run a AAA game without developer optimization/consideration.

And it demonstrates someone could make a stylized game similar to Fortnite.

Yeah, I would agree with that. It definitely demonstrated that gaming is possible even under Rosetta, which is an accomplishment. Watching some other stuff from them this morning, it seems like they're passing the metal calls directly through to the GPU (which makes sense), even while translating CPU calls from x86 to ARM.

I mean, it looked awful compared to what I run on my PC, but considering as well that it was running using Rosetta I thought it was genuinely quite impressive.

An A12x has 10 billion transistors, and being a SoC the CPU, Neural Engine, ISC and GPU are all integrated.

And that was released in 2018. By the time Apple put out desktop class silcon in end of 2020, surely it will be significantly scaled up?

So it can compete with an old, lower-end APU using unreleased metrics. Great. Meanwhile, AMD is set to release much more powerful integrated graphics.

Considering xbox is 1/4 the price, it's not saying much about it. On the contrary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com