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Comment by SXX | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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