Hacker News Reader

Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

The GPU is increasing a lot though.

Another point is the CPU improvements are constant. In about two years the base M3 is now on par with the M1 Max.

It’s true but the problem with the GPU is Apple’s addiction to RAM money. Yes the GPU is improving in performance but it does you no good if it has to share a tiny amount of system RAM with the CPU.

Tiny? My M2 Air has 24g, which is more ram than any other laptop video card I've had.

Sure, if you pay for it. The 14” starts at 8GB. Eight! 200$ more for another 8GB.

The GPU is critical to future profits though. Apple really wants your monthly subscription to Apple Arcade and they want to expand in other game areas which is why they've been paying AAA companies to optimize for Mac. This also ties into their VR headset where gaming will be one of the core features.

Hardly any AAA companies are optimising for the Apple GPU. MoltenVK is where all the interest is.

Even if they did, there is very little in Apple Arcade which taxes the GPU, most target the lowest common denominator in terms of supported iOS/phone combinations.

The original Apple Arcade strategy was for AAA titles, but for whatever reason that wasn’t pursued, so now we have a tonne of casual games and re-releases of old titles.

Apple just seems to run hot and cold on gaming.

> The original Apple Arcade strategy was for AAA titles

Can you prove that statement? I bet you can't, cause it's simply not true. Every Arcade title is playable from an iPhone to a Mac by way of Apple TV. It was never going to get AAA titles.

I mean, they keep putting desktop class CPU+GPUs in their mobile devices - all just to play an Angry Birds remake?

I own almost every Apple device in the ecosystem, but I never game on them…

Here you go. A simple google would have found that.

Apple wants more Grindstones.

https://9to5mac.com/2020/06/30/apple-arcade-strategy-shift/

How is cancelling contracts with some developers equal to they wanted AAA titles but messed it up.?

There’s no correlation.

> The GPU is increasing a lot though.

Is it? Does it matter? Unified RAM is cool. But I’d rather have an Nvidia 4090.

In a laptop?

I was thinking about the desktop variants.

Apple Silicon is amazing. But if you’re doing heavy GPU it’s not very exciting.

It's very exciting in the local LLMs space, where the unified memory allows fast inference of large models.

I read that the bandwidth is 50% lower on the M3 combined with a lower CPU core coun. This reduction will impact inferrence performance. It maybe better to stick with M2 series if you really really think spending $10k on a laptop mac to do inferrence slowly (but faster than a plain PC of course) make sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com