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Comment by kcb | Hacker News Reader

From the reviews I've seen so far, seems like Apples "Relative Perfomance Points" benchmarks were as misleading as expected for the GPU. The M1 Max is more like a 3060 in performance not a 3080.

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If you look at Anandtech[0], you can get a clearer picture. In synthetic, isolated benchmarks, the GPU could have similar hardware performance to an RTX 3080 mobile. However... once you throw in the lack of games compiled for ARM and designed to run on Metal, most of that potential is wasted.

Having never owned an Apple product, these sound like excellent machines, but I still want to be able to play the games on my expensive, powerful hardware. So I'd like to see what they can do if they are targeted. The M1 from last year didn't seem to change anything. It'll be interesting to see if this does. Will increasing market share and consumer demand be enough to push some more development of games for these machines?

At least in theory the hardware is there now for reasonable gaming performance.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

Wasted potential is a common theme between all of Apple's platforms now - lots of great benchmarks but little if anything that can exploit the hardware's capabilities.

On iOS/iPadOS the OS and walled garden restricts it, on the Macs looks like the old all games are on Windows problem made worse by Metal.

Apple should showcase real-world apps using the M1 and compare it to Windows/x64.

The pro media apps can exploit it. I suppose game developers are uninterested though.

Apple could reduce their commission on macOS to 5% now, wait until many developers play along, and after a few years return to 30%. A lot of uproar, maybe a small slap one the wrist, but a huge financial gain in the long run.

You don’t have to pay Apple any commission to distribute on macOS because you don’t have to use the App Store to install software. Steam works fine. That’s not why games aren’t made available on Mac.

macOS is not a closed platform. You don't have to pay a penny to Apple. I would actually expect most developers to use Steam rather than App Store.

> Apple should showcase real-world apps using the M1 and compare it to Windows/x64.

This reads as they should showcase apps I use. From Anandtech's review re: Adobe Premiere Pro:

> What we find is that both Macs perform well in this benchmark – a score near 1000 (the score is 955) would match a high-end, GTX 3080-equipped desktop – and from what I’ve seen from third party data, this is well, well ahead of the 2019 Intel CPU + AMD GPU 16-inch MacBook Pro.

That seems like it's unlocking the hardware's capabilities.

World of Warcraft compiled for ARM and uses Metal. I'm very interested in benchmarks for this particular game. Right now I'm playing on desktop 1060 and it's more than enough for me (not on ultra settings, but I think that I'm limited my CPU). I expect M1 to keep up with it at least.

>However... once you throw in the lack of games compiled for ARM and designed to run on Metal, most of that potential is wasted.

If you build it, they will come? Has Apple ever had this much GPU ability to actualy run decent games (if they were available)?

Yes and no?

For example, the previous Macbook Pro had a Radeon 5600M which was plenty to run decent games.

But I don't know the breakdown across the Mac product line for ownership. In other words, how many Mac computers have the hardware to run decent games?

Even now, the M1 found in the Air/13" Pro can run "decent" games but comparable to a low level discrete GPU. So if most Apple users own those rather than something with an M1 Pro/Max, then this particular market still has a very small addressable market of gamers.

In terms of numbers, I'm sure the vast majority of Macs in active use are still Intel-based and will be for at least a few years.

I'm going to be honest, I didn't have the expectations that any custom hardware would perform like a companies benchmarks claim they do. Since they would be cherry picked to hell and back, especially apple.

The fact it has a geekbench score that makes my gen2 threadripper look bad and can still have 3060 performance in a laptop is still very impressive to me.

As much as I give Apple crap for some of their marketing, their CPU and battery claims usually tend to be quite spot on and reproducible by reviewers. That's what I've noticed over the years.

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