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Comment by anaisbetts | Hacker News Reader

At some point can we finally admit that Apple's GPU claims just aren't....true? Like, every Apple keynote they put up incredible performance claims, and every time people actually get their hands on the product, it doesn't even come close to holding water in any domain where GPU performance matters (Game performance, ML training perf)

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> GPU performance matters (Game performance, ML training perf)

No one plays games on a Mac.

And it has nothing to do with GPU performance but rather the fact that the audience simply isn't interested in gaming on it and so there is no economic incentive to target them.

So the GPU performance that matters to Mac users and is relevant to Apple is not games but rather content creation, production etc.

M1's blender rendering performance also wasn't very good, though. Assuming the scene was small enough to fit in the smaller VRAM of competitive consumer GPUs anyway.

Video content creation specifically is where it mostly achieves what the graphs indicate, and that's mostly a "well yeah, video decoder ASICs are really efficient. I'll take things we already knew for $100, Alex"

Blender didn’t even run on metal until a few months ago. It’s on beta now and the performance has increased substantially.

If the software is optimized, the graphics hold up fine.

The other elephant in the room is OptiX. Are Apple seriously indicating that they can outperform that with a iGPU?

Unless you specifically configure Blender for GPU rendering, it renders on the CPU(s).

> No one plays games on a Mac.

My wife does (I play games on Linux).

I have friends who own Macs who reluctantly dual boot to Windows just to play some games -- they would completely ditch Windows if they could just play every game on Mac.

I see there are Mac games on Steam.

All of this points to the situation being more nuanced than "no one plays games on Mac".

I interpret these sorts of statements to be short for "a statistically insignificant number of people play games on macos (or linux)" rather than the literal case where as long as a single person does, it is false.

According to the steam hardware survey, Windows is 95%, Macos is 4%, and Linux is 1%. And to dig deeper you'd need to see what games that 5% of the non-Windows is playing - are they simpler games that don't need graphics acceleration (e.g. puzzle games, roguelikes, etc) or ones that do?

My desktop is an Intel NUC running Ubuntu, and yeah I play games on it. Slay the Spire, Spacechem, even some older MMOs like DDO or LoTRO (which run but at 15-20 fps since that system just has Intel Iris). I'm unable to even start many others (e.g. Grim Dawn) due to not having dedicated graphics.

So yeah it's nuanced but lots of games that need a graphics card don't run or even display on that system.

That's why I have a windows gaming system too. I'm realistic, the market just isn't there. I used to have a Mac (dropped it in 2018) and if I still did I'd subscribe to Geforce Now or just do console gaming.

Grim Dawn is just poorly implemented. I have a Ryzen 3700x with a 2070 super and Grim Dawn runs like crap.

You’re right but i think there’s an immensely valuable lesson here for people who communicate with engineers as part of their job: be mindful of casual precision mistakes. “no one” and “a statistically insignificant number of” are colloquial synonyms to civilians, but they are black and white to engineers, especially software people. They are the difference for example between a safe code path and a edge case bug. In my experience, people who use casual imprecision in technical conversations are sometimes seen as inexperienced or not fully understanding a problem, which may actually not be the case. Learning to speak with precision without being pedantic is an excellent soft skill that can be developed over time.

I understood it was about statistical significance, but my point remains:

Who says Mac users aren't gamers? It's a self perpetuating vicious cycle: gamers use Windows because that's where the majority of games are, so developers keep targeting Windows, so gamers use Windows, and so ad infinitum.

But people who use Macs enjoy games as well. They would rather not dual boot to Windows.

It's not true that Mac users don't play games. Rather, it's that most games are on Windows, which is a shame.

If you want to get a bit more into significant numbers, Apple has the largest number of games for any platform and it has the largest number of gamers. They're mobile games, but on the M1 people can play them on their desktop.

What I think you mean is competitive gamers and AAA gamers do not play on Apple hardware. This is mostly true today ofc, but keep in mind that's actually not the majority of the gaming market. Apple is raking it in from its gaming market.

The interesting question would be: out of all Mac users, how many of them play games on their Macs?

I have no idea what the answer is. Personally I have run a number of games on macOS, via Steam, and via Boot Camp and virtualization. Some popular MMOs like Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, and Eve Online have macOS clients, though Guild Wars 2 discontinued theirs.

Apple Arcade apparently has enough Mac users that Apple has a reason to support it on macOS as well as iOS.

And Apple apparently has some reason to support iOS/iPadOS games on Apple Silicon Macs as well (though it could just be a side effect of a future iOS-macOS merger or hybrid device.)

> The interesting question would be: out of all Mac users, how many of them play games on their Macs?

...and how many would play more games on their Macs if they were available?

I refuse to believe Mac users are less fond of videogames. Based on my personal observation of the Mac users I know, they enjoy games as much as anyone.

At least casual games on iTunes for the iPad have a vast library, with many genuine good games (source: me, my iPad 2 was mainly a gaming platform for me, never found other uses for it).

I do realize more complex games are a different beast. But casual? I'd say Apple fans love them.

Huh? I know lots of people who play games on a mac.

I thought that would be a given by now.

Won't even get into that it can't run most things you'd want that kind of hardware for.

even their graphs don't look legit. they look like what you see in boxes of vitamins found on ransom websites. Got to wait for independent benchmarks with well explained scenarios. anything can run twice faster than anything with some specific tweaks to the program that runs.

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