The M3 can run modern 3D games at high frame rates, surely it was something else about the update than the glass effect in the UI causing slowness??
It's a more appreciable burden on older iPhones though.
It's a more appreciable burden on older iPhones though.
Likewise, while it performs "fine," interacting with the UI still feels sluggish on Tahoe on my M4 Pro compared to Sequoia. I still have another M4 Pro with sequoia on it and it's a night and day difference, in favor of Sequoia.
There may not be any real performance loss but there is definitely UI latency and it's very noticable.
That said, who knows how efficient the implementation is compared to other changes in iOS 26. I turned liquid glass off with "reduced transparency" because even 1% extra battery usage for it would be too much even though I kinda appreciated the new look.
I remember it being kinda like placebo - you did, you marvelled at how much faster it's working, but in reality nothing changed. I really liked the look, and it did run smooth unless you had something below the minimum spec(which a lot of people did at the time).
My friend had an Alienware laptop which absolutely screamed with Vista
They really are great gaming machines from a hardware perspective. I wouldn't bother with an x86 laptop for gaming if it weren't for the software (mostly DRM) side.
Even 1khz mkb input on an apple silicon mac connected to a 500hz screen has insane utilization just doing shit in the OS. They are also struggling with variable refresh rate, improperly dropping down to the minimum (as low as 24hz) with jarring, jagged jumps up to the maximum after a few seconds of use.
This is a solved problem on both windows and linux. Even Asahi does a better job.
High refresh rate monitors are great, yes, but those are still sub KHz - you're talking about polling a mouse at 13x the rate of the highest end esports monitors as some minimum bar for when a machine can be for gaming - get out of here with that kind of artificial gatekeeping.
No complaints about Asahi though :).
In a similar vein, >120Hz screens are of doubtful utility. The performance gain is insignificant, considering top human reaction time to visual stimuli is ~150ms and the jump from 120Hz to 240Hz is -4.17ms, 1/36th or 2.77% improvement.
Even then, most pro FPS players also still play on 200-800 DPI when 1600 DPI and preferably even 3200 DPI is much better. Those low DPIs are purely cargo culted from the 2000s era CS Pros their .cfg, when sensors were still pretty crappy, and those players are effectively running lowgrade mouse smoothing.
Uneducated gamers are kin to uneducated audiophiles. Stop drinking the snake oil.
There is no world where 50fps is acceptable in any game in 2025. Flagship GPUs on high end systems running Windows manage 4k @ max settings north of 60, nearly double that with RT off. To achieve anything close on a mac, you're dropping down to 1440p, at lower settings, with frame generation.
They’re about the level of a 4060 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LWfM7Ktsal0
(Don't get me started on macOS and the un-disableable mouse acceleration override coupled together with Steam Link...)