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Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

Any indication on the gaming performance of these vs. a typical nvidia or AMD card? My husband is thinking of purchasing a mac but I've cautioned him that he won't be able to use his e-gpu like usual until someone hacks support to work for it again, and even then he'd be stuck with pretty old gen AMD cards at best.

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The fine print:

>Testing conducted by Apple in September 2021 using preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 Max, 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 64GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD, as well as production Intel Core i9-based PC systems with NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 graphics with 24GB GDDR6, production Intel Core i9-based PC systems with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics with 16GB GDDR6, and the latest version of Windows 10 available at the time of testing.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211018005775/en/Gam...

In terms of Hardware M1 Max is great. On paper you wont find anything match its performance under load. As even Gaming / Content Creation Laptop throttle after a short while.

The problem is gaming isn't exactly a Mac thing. From Game selection to general support on the platform. So really performance should be the least of your concern if you are buying a Mac for games.

He typically just dual-boots windows anyway so selection isn't much of an issue, though I also don't know if that is working yet on the M1 platform

>though I also don't know if that is working yet on the M1 platform

Dual booting isn't working and likely not any time soon as Microsoft does not intend to support Apple M1 [1]. And I doubt Apple have intention to port their GPU Metal Drivers to Windows. ( Compared to using AMD Drivers on Windows in the old days )

He will likely need to use some sort of VM solution like Parallel. [2]

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/13/microsoft-says-wi...

[2] https://www.engadget.com/parallels-desktop-17-m-1-mac-perfor...

I'm not aware of a single even semi-major game (including popular indie titles) that run native on M1 yet. Everything is running under Rosetta and game companies so far seem completely uninterested in native support.

World of Warcraft & Eve Online are both native.

Neither of which are exactly AAA recent games, WoW is from 2004 right ? The other ones I can think of are the old GTA titles which run "Natively" since they have an iOS port

While at the same time you have (running on Rossetta):

* Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

* Dying Light

* Rise of the Tomb Raider/Shadow of the Tomb Raider

* Dirt Rally

* Metro: 2033, Last Light, Exodus

* Mafia III

* Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

* Mad Max

* Sleeping Dogs

* Batman Arkham City

* Bioshock 1 & 2

* Borderlands 2

Disco Elysium, EVE Online, Minecraft*, Timberborn, Total War: Rome Remastered, World of Warcraft.

Minecraft is kinda cheating, because Java, and even considering that it takes a bit of hacking. Alternatively you can sideload the iOS version.

Graalvm makes Minecraft kinda native heh.

If you're looking for some to test try EVE, WOW, or Baldur's Gate 3. That's about it as far as major games AFAIK.

Wow, I had no idea M1 doesn't support eGPUs. I was planning on buying an external enclosure for Apple Silicon when I upgraded; thanks for pointing that out.

Not only that, but you're stuck with cards from 5 years ago with current macbooks. It's a shame too because the plug and play support is better than the very best e-gpu plug and play on linux or windows.

I don't see Apple personally adding support any time soon, either. Clearly their play now is to make all hardware in house. The last thing they want is people connecting 3090s so they can have an M1 Max gaming rig. They only serve creators, and this has always been true. Damn waste if you ask me.

You could use the new AMD cards at least though right? I don't think Nvidia support will ever happen again though (I got burned by that, bought a 1060 right before they dropped Nvidia).

I'm on a RX 5700XT with my Hackintosh, and it works well.

Edit: Thinking about this more.. I bet third party GPUs are a dead end for users and Apple is planning to phase them out.

I think I'd wait to see what the Mac Pro supports before coming to that conclusion. Could be something they're still working on for that product, and then when it's working on the Apple Silicon build of macOS will be made available on laptops as well.

I guarantee you this is them finally ripping the Band-Aid of having to support _any_ outside hardware

Oh that's cool, last I checked the best AMD card you can use is a Vega 64.

Radeon 6900XT works with eGPU. But yes, intel macs only. And of course, you're not getting all 16 lanes!

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544

I wouldn't get one of those for games, better get a Windows PC and a M1 MacBook Air, cost should be about the same for both. Game support just won't be there if you care about gaming.

The video moved a bit too fast for me to catch the exact laptops they were comparing. They did state that the M1 Pro is 2.5x the Radeon Pro 5600M, and the M1 Max is 4x the same GPU.

The performance to power charts were comparing against roughly RTX 3070 level laptop cards.

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