Based on the numbers it looks like the M1 Max is in the RTX 3070-3080 performance territory. Sounds like mobile AAA gaming has potential to reach new heights :D
The slides are comparing to a laptop with a 3080 Mobile, which is not the same as a normal RTX 3080. A desktop 3080 is a power hungry beast and will not work in a laptop form factor.
The 3080 Mobile is still very fast as a benchmark, but the full-size 3080 Desktop is in another league of performance: https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-mobile-GeForce-RTX-3080-is...
Still very impressive GPU from Apple!
Whatever AAA games that might have gotten some love on the Mac (and there are some), it's going to be even harder to get game companies to commit to proper support to the M1 models. Bethesda has said they won't even compile ESO for M1. So I will continue to run it on a 12-year-old computer running an ATHLON 64 and a nVidia 9xx-series video card. (This works surprising well, making the fact that my Mac effectively can't play it all the more galling.)
I'm never going to try tricking out a Mac for gaming again. I should have learned my lesson with eGPU's, but no. I thought, if I want a proper GPU, it's going to be built in. Well, that doesn't work either. I've wasted a lot of money in this arena.
My older Intel Macs I'm sure are more or less SOL but they were never intended to be gaming machines.
Your older Intel Macs are probably just fine for gaming, too. I play lots of games on my 2016 Thinkpad's integrated graphics, Minecraft, Noita, Bloons Tower Defense 6, all of these titles work perfectly fine, even running in translation with Proton. If you've got a machine with decent Linux support, it's worth a try.
Top 10 Steam games according to https://store.steampowered.com/stats/
* New World - Amazon Lumberyard
* Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - Source
* Dota 2 - Source 2
* Team Fortress 2 - Source
* Apex Legends - Source
* PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS - Unreal
* Destiny 2 - Custom
* Rust - Unity
* Dead by Daylight - Unreal
* MIR4 - Unreal
Unreal, Unity, Lumberyard, and Source 2 all support iOS and thus Metal on ARM already. A game developer using one of those engines should generally be able to just click a few buttons to target an additional platform unless they've gone around the engine's framework in ways that tie their title to their existing platform(s). Obviously in all but the most trivial cases there will still be work to be done, but those game developers using a major commercial engine are doing so because someone else has already done most of the hardest work in platform support for them.
That means six of the top 10 could add native MacOS support with relative ease (as in significantly less work than doing it from scratch) if they wanted to. The three Source titles are likely stuck on DX/OGL platforms forever because it doesn't really make sense to rework such an old engine, but at least the two Valve in-house titles have had persistent rumors of a Source 2 update for years.
At least we still have Minecraft.
Most of those mobile games you're thinking of are made with Unity, Unreal, or one of a few other general purpose game engines. Those same engines are used for a significant chunk of PC games as well. The AAA developers who have in-house engines like to reuse them as well. It doesn't matter if a given game does or does not support mobile if it uses an engine that does.
1. Vulkan 2. DirectX 3. OpenGL 4. Metal
IIRC, there are some efforts to translate Vulkan to Metal similar to how the WINE project translates DirectX into OpenGL/Vulkan, but that's still an imperfect workaround.
The downvote police is there, am I missing something? are they any modern game on mac?
There has never been a reason to put separate GPU into a laptop, because a laptop can only handle so much juice before frying itself.
In theoretical compute, it's closer to the 3060M which is nothing to sneeze at.
Pretty much the only options are crossover/wineskin engines, or parallels.