Apple M1 Max Beats GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU in GFXBench 5.0, but Doesn't Shine in Geekbench

[Metroid]

Is this a joke? Please explain....

 

[Aquinus]

Macs were not 'cheap' but they had good value for money for what they offered. They were also not crazy expensive when taking everything into account.

That's what I think that some people don't understand. When I spec'ed out a Dell with a similar loadout as the MacBook Pro I have now, the Dell was going to cost more, be heavier, with worse battery life. So for me, Apple was actually cheaper, by a significant amount.

Erm few things, I don't see people being That into paying more for something to game on ,that has a serious lack of storage upgrades , games and peripherals but yeah it Could play games.

I mean if you have it already fine, but I can't see it swinging console or pc gamers on mass though.

Someone who is serious about gaming isn't buying a Mac. Someone who games on a Mac is a casual gamer, like me. It's secondary to everything else I do.

 

[glsn]

Macs were not 'cheap' but they had good value for money for what they offered. They were also not crazy expensive when taking everything into account. Now - The base M1 is a $1400 device that in some workloads smashes desktop machines that are almost 2x the price. It's not cheap but it's phenomenal value for the money.

If you compare to:
View attachment 221764

Then these are very competitive for the performance. A $1,400 iPad with an M1X won't be cheap but it will be good value if you can hook it up to your tv and run PS5-quality games on it....

I'll wait for other benchmarks and list of sw compatibility

gaming pcs might be powerfull, but they are bricks, not energy friendly, and to work well they need a powerplug attached

 

[lexluthermiester]

These claims and number are meaningless and without merit unless specific system specs are provided to compare. Simply saying "System X" - "SystemY" - "SystemZ" is not acceptable. It's not Apple providing those numbers either.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Something not getting much attention is that the new MBPs have storage good for up to 7.4GB/s. That should improve load times, right?

Honestly, though, no one is buying a Mac primarily for games. They can get a $329 iPad for that, especially for the current state of gaming on Mac. Why people will buy it is for the applications that it will quite likely excel at. Like video work, which is quite popular these days. Or photography. An M1 Mac running DxO PureRAW can process a 20MP file in about 20 seconds. An M1 Max should significantly reduce that time, probably down to 5 seconds maybe? 20MP RAW is small potatoes these days, 50MP is high end now. If you are a pro photographer that shoots in the hundred or even thousands, the time savings is worth the cost. I bet you’d need a pretty stout GPU in a Windows machine to get the same result. I‘m curious to see just how well these chips can do with such tasks.

 

[medi01]

AMD can lean back and laugh.

Competition from a company selling it's M1 bazinga laptop for $1400, haha, ok.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

While I've always wanted a powerhouse APU from AMD, basically like the Xbox Series X in CU count but with 8GB of integrated HBM2 as VRAM and L4 Cache depending on CPU/iGPU need, and wouldn't care if it needed a socket the size of threadripper.... Here's the big problem, UPGRADABILITY! Who here is ACTUALLY willing to drop $600 on an APU knowing that you're stuck with that CPU/GPU combo forever? The main draw of the desktop PC space is UPGRADABILITY, and that's a major reason PC people don't like Apple products. Perhaps a powerhouse APU does have applicability somewhere, but I'm not sure if it's in the enthusiast PC space, but I could be wrong. Who here would honestly drop $600+ on an AMD APU with 8 Zen3 cores, 40 RDNA2 CUs, and 8GB of HBM2? (In a normal GPU market?).

Perhaps it'd be different IF that APU was socketed and it could be dropped into future motherboards that allowed a separate dGPU, AND the 40CUs could still be used for separate compute, or rendering, or video encoding for streaming while your dGPU solely runs a game, AND/OR the 8GB of HBM2 could be used by the CPU entirely if the CUs weren't doing anything.... That could be a whole different animal, but that'd take a lot of work.

 

[yotano211]

Something not getting much attention is that the new MBPs have storage good for up to 7.4GB/s. That should improve load times, right?

Honestly, though, no one is buying a Mac primarily for games. They can get a $329 iPad for that, especially for the current state of gaming on Mac. Why people will buy it is for the applications that it will quite likely excel at. Like video work, which is quite popular these days. Or photography. An M1 Mac running DxO PureRAW can process a 20MP file in about 20 seconds. An M1 Max should significantly reduce that time, probably down to 5 seconds maybe? 20MP RAW is small potatoes these days, 50MP is high end now. If you are a pro photographer that shoots in the hundred or even thousands, the time savings is worth the cost. I bet you’d need a pretty stout GPU in a Windows machine to get the same result. I‘m curious to see just how well these chips can do with such tasks.

It really depends on what you are loading. 7.4gh/s in games wont cut down loading times vs a SATA drive at 550mb/s on windows PC. But like you said, MAC machines doesn't do games.
I dont have any experience with any kind of MAC, I do own their stock and eat at least 1-2 apples per day.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

AMD can lean back and laugh.

Competition from a company selling it's M1 bazinga laptop for $1400, haha, ok.

I don’t think AMD is laughing, for two reasons. One, everyone wants a part of the $1400 laptop market, and two, AMD also just lost a customer.

 

[Minus Infinity]

3080 mobile < 3070 desktop. Also so called Mac Pro can't run cuda, so useless for most people that actually do real work on this class of device.

 

[Aquinus]

I don’t think AMD is laughing, for two reasons. One, everyone wants a part of the $1400 laptop market, and two, AMD also just lost a customer.

For real. I have some very real reasons for using a Mac. The "it just works" bit is pretty big for something I use for my day job that earns me enough to afford such a laptop. Windows and Linux actually have both burned me on a day when I'm about to work remote (which is all the time now,) so having a reliable device that just works is ultra important. I don't think people realize that a lot of people who buy Apple are people who wants things to "just work." What Apple just did was basically say that we can have our cake and eat it too. Theoretically the performance of the M1 Max should wreck the Radeon Pro 5600m in my 16". I priced out a similar spec'ed machine and the cost was about the same. Honestly, from my perspective, that's big. That's a huge leap for 2 years between gens for the price.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

For real. I have some very real reasons for using a Mac. The "it just works" bit is pretty big for something I used for my day job that earns me enough to afford such a laptop. Windows and Linux actually have both burned on a day when I'm about to work remote (which is all the time now,) so having a reliable device that just works is ultra important. I don't think people realize that a lot of people who buy Apple are people who wants things to "just work." What Apple just did was basically say that we can have our cake and eat it too. Theoretically the performance of the M1 Max should wreck the Radeon Pro 5600m in my 16". I priced out a similar spec'ed machine and the cost was about the same. Honestly, from my perspective, that's big. That's a huge leap for 2 years between gens for the price.

Yeah. I have a love ’em hate ’em relationship with Apple. As much a Linux geek as I can be, I do like the simplicity of an Apple device when it comes down to it. I don’t care for everything Apple does, but the pricing on the hardware really isn’t as crazy as people make it sound. As a hobbyist photographer, I love the displays, and the M1 is lag-free on editing. That is the key demand of my daily driver, not games. When I priced a windows laptop (to put Linux on), finding one with a good, accurate display became just as expensive as a MacBook Air or Pro. So many laptops today make little mention of display specs beyond brightness and refresh. The ones that promote wide gamut and accuracy are the expensive ones.

 

[phanbuey]

Erm few things, I don't see people being That into paying more for something to game on ,that has a serious lack of storage upgrades , games and peripherals but yeah it Could play games.

I mean if you have it already fine, but I can't see it swinging console or pc gamers on mass though.

All my old gear gets handed down to my kids/ gifted to other kids etc. or donated. Stuff that can run games is always a plus. Even older stuff. Anything that can convert from being a serious work device to a gaming device is amazing.

This stuff wont swing console gamers but it will convince quite a few people to buy an apple tablet that can game that over a PC / Android tablet that can't.

 

[Flanker]

Lol Metal on one side and OpenGL on the other

 

[RandallFlagg]

I'm skeptical like many others, but I will say...

If this is anywhere near true, like say it gets the performance of a 3060 and not a 3080, well that's near true enough. It will mean the age of the iGPU has, after 25 years, finally arrived. It'll destroy the dGPU space and in particular nVidia. There may be many other side effects, like the end of full size tower PCs and excessively sized PSUs. High end GPUs are made for bragging rights and benchmark wins, without the bread and butter market of 3050 / 3060s the upper end will starve for lack of funds.

Edit: Very skeptical. A 3060 would be 4-6x faster than the fastest iGPU in the x86 world, in some cases more than that.

 

[Mussels]

Apple releases product designed to hardware accelerate one specific task, really fast

News websites: HURRRR M1 BETTER THAN 3090 durrRRAWRrRRRR


It's going to be something along the lines of what we see with H264/H265/HEVC hardware accelerated encoding and decoding: They made it fast for certain tasks, and it will BE fast at those tasks.
However, anything else? Well actually we'll never know because apple wont let people run programs that dont use their approved code

 

[nguyen]

here come gaming on a Mac

 

[Vayra86]

Definitely the power is there if the software is able to use it... and since apple writes their own software well...

Wonder if the game console skunkworks is still in flight over there.

They have:
1. A high performance API (Metal)
2. A high performance Chip and ecosystem across many devices/device types
3. 24-120Hz VRR capability on new devices -- iphone, ipad and macbook with built in displays
4. A decent market share of loyal apple fans who also have a gaming PC/Xbox on the side.

What they need:
2. Market share and gaming content either by:
a. Ability to port content/games
b. Enticing developers to make popular content for their platforms.

Apple could very well be a name in gaming here before too long. They have the capability to roll out AAA game titles across the entire platform.

Yeah... but no. Apple wants its own locked garden and if you see any BIG trend in software land the last ten years, its been a strong desire for more open market(places) and platforms. Even the platforms themselves see that demand, and they also see how an abundance of services is going to limit itself at some point, people are just not going to pay more/month and almost everything is a sub in some way, so consolidation will eventually have to happen if you want your content visible.. Look at Sony, they're already moving that direction, porting games to other systems.

Most apps are produced not for Apple but for smartphones at large. Good games and good devs are attracted to the largest target market. Windows and gaming on it, is still standing because of exactly that, and its also the reason Linux for gaming has still not taken off, despite strong Valve effort. Entertainment is expensive and needs large audiences to show its progress. Bigger, better, newer, more innovative is what drives gaming.

Look at how the M1 works right now and its clear this is not what Apple wants to do wrt gaming. Are they gonna code everything for Metal? How's that Vulkan support coming along by now...? And how are you going to pull those DX titles in? All their gaming efforts so far have made gaming on Mac, well... useless.

We can dream. Sure, but the real question is, is Apple the best caretaker of gaming on its platform... it has a worse history than Microsoft and a policy that totally doesn't fit, all gaming related efforts never really took off (Xbox the exception, but that's a console). Now look at Sweeney or G. Newell and their policies wrt platform management/distribution and how to capture publishers. They're everything Apple is not - they're even actively fighting Apple policy in court.



Also... regarding this failure of a gaming benchmark... the fact it falls apart in Geekbench and can't even catch a totally crippled Nvidia GPU not built for the workload tells us exactly nothing.

Nice soundbite for the dimwits who still see Jobs in their dreams. Gaming is a different beast and Apple is not the best safari for it.

This stuff wont swing console gamers but it will convince quite a few people to buy an apple tablet that can game that over a PC / Android tablet that can't.

That I can get into. Sure it will, and with that it will never evolve beyond casual (browser/smartphone-type) gaming.

 

[Semel]

GFXBench doesn't mean squat when it comes to real GPU performance in real tasks (games etc)

On a side note Apple has done everything to destroy macgaming...

1) Metal API.

There are two major APIs out there: DX12 and Vulkan.

They are both low-level API so they much better utilize hardware than the old and abandoned OpenGL and the not so abandoned but dying out DX11.

DX12 works only on Windows and it's proprietary., so it's not really an option for any OS other than Windows

Vulkan supports all major OS and is cross-platform. And it supports all major features of DX12 if not more.

Thanx to Vulkan Linux users can now use Steam Proton or Wine+dxvk and play 80+% of all native Windows games on Linux with little to no performance loss. And Valve is pushing hard for Linux (or rather Linux+Proton) support especially now with their Steam Deck.

Apple decided not to adopt Vulkan and invented their own proprietary API- Metal.

It's worth noting though that Metal was released several years earlier than Vulkan's first release. However, later on nothing prevented Apple from embracing Vulkan when it got much better than Metal especially after seeing what wonders it did for Linux gaming, but Apple just didn't..

Keeping going Metal route instead of Vulkan was a huge mistake.

I'll let myself quote one guy from Reddit:

Metal is missing much of the newer functionality available in Vulkan and DX12. Vulkan isnt the easiest to kick-off in but it's one of the best APIs out there for multicore + added Ray tracing support now. Now mind you MoltenVK doesn't support any of these RT extensions as you can't really translate BVH intersections from one api to another on the fly (it's an intense process anyways). So could Apple put some skin in the game and add vulkan support ? Maybe. Will they do it to kill off their own Metal? eff no. So unless they add hardware Ray tracing accelerators to their Silicon, there is no effin way software ray tracing will render 40-60 fps on M1, M2, whatever in the next few years.

2) They decided to make a drastic move and change architecture from x86 to ARM.

Metal API was issue enough but now ARM? Developers of console\PC games just don't want to bother with this. The tiny market of Macbook fans who can afford a $4-5k laptop and even tinier % of these people who wanna play AAA games on these $4-5k laptops just isn't worth the hassle..

 

[phanbuey]

..

We can dream. Sure, but the real question is, is Apple the best caretaker of gaming on its platform... it has a worse history than Microsoft and a policy that totally doesn't fit, all gaming related efforts never really took off (Xbox the exception, but that's a console). Now look at Sweeney or G. Newell and their policies wrt platform management/distribution and how to capture publishers. They're everything Apple is not - they're even actively fighting Apple policy in court.

Also... regarding this failure of a gaming benchmark... the fact it falls apart in Geekbench and can't even catch a totally crippled Nvidia GPU not built for the workload tells us exactly nothing.

Nice soundbite for the dimwits who still see Jobs in their dreams. Gaming is a different beast and Apple is not the best safari for it.

That I can get into. Sure it will, and with that it will never evolve beyond casual (browser/smartphone-type) gaming.

Why are they in court?
A: To sell on Apple's platform.

What are they fighting for?
A: To be able to sell through Apple's platform without restrictions.

Why?
A: Apple has a giant market that's lucrative to them. Steam and Epic games want to sell to apple and tap into that market (and future growth) without having to pay the apple tax. They MAINLY SELL GAMES. So clearly they disagree with the "never evolve beyond casual (browser/smartphone-type) gaming" assessment.

Microsoft, a walled garden console makes up a huge portion of gaming market, Sony, another exclusive, walled-garden platform makes up a huge portion of gaming. These aren't dreams lol -- Sweeney and Newell are great but they are a minority. Apple isn't going to ignore a $70bn market that they already have a captive audience in on Macs/ipads/appletv. AAA titles on their hardware are for sure in their sights.

They can easily hit all 3 of those markets and are already a huge player in the Mobile. There's another 70bn on the table for them to port content to Metal / or support Vulcan - there will at the very least be an attempt.

 

[efikkan]

On the other hand, all tests seem to support Metal, which is Apple's 3D API, whereas the Nvidia card has to fall back to using OpenGL which tends to offer lower performance than DirectX in games.

The reason for this has little to do with OpenGL as an API, and everything to do with practically every multi-API game implementing this support through some kind of abstraction layer. Typically Direct3D API calls is translated into corresponding OpenGL calls, resulting in suboptimal usage of the APIs. To do this properly would require a separate optimized render engine for each target API, which is something games rarely do these days. As an API, OpenGL is in fact as fast or faster than Direct3D.

Doing a fair benchmark across different platforms is tough, which is why technical details of benchmarks is crucial. If e.g. a benchmark is comparing something well written for API #1 vs. something poorly written for API #2, then it's really benchmarking the implementation rather than the hardware or the APIs.

 

[Nephilim666]

It doesn't shine in Geekbench? Don't worry they'll push an update to more accurately reflect the wishes of those who pay them soon.

 

[Vayra86]

Why are they in court?
A: To sell on Apple's platform.

What are they fighting for?
A: To be able to sell through Apple's platform without restrictions.

Why?
A: Apple has a giant market that's lucrative to them. Steam and Epic games want to sell to apple and tap into that market (and future growth) without having to pay the apple tax. They MAINLY SELL GAMES. So clearly they disagree with the "never evolve beyond casual (browser/smartphone-type) gaming" assessment.


View attachment 221933

Microsoft, a walled garden console makes up a huge portion of gaming market, Sony, another exclusive, walled-garden platform makes up a huge portion of gaming. These aren't dreams lol -- Sweeney and Newell are great but they are a minority. Apple isn't going to ignore a $70bn market that they already have a captive audience in on Macs/ipads/appletv. AAA titles on their hardware are for sure in their sights.

View attachment 221934

They can easily hit all 3 of those markets and are already a huge player in the Mobile. There's another 70bn on the table for them to port content to Metal / or support Vulcan - there will at the very least be an attempt.

I do not question the fact they want things. Im questioning the success rate.

Realistically what we are seeing is platforms for digital distribution are looking to become platform agnostic - Apple is the odd one out here because of the way they design hardware.

And when they produce the software too, we know we are looking at a horribly unfair marketplace. Since the EGS lawsuits devs/publishers have that confirmation too.

Why?
A: Apple has a giant market that's lucrative to them. Steam and Epic games want to sell to apple and tap into that market (and future growth) without having to pay the apple tax. They MAINLY SELL GAMES. So clearly they disagree with the "never evolve beyond casual (browser/smartphone-type) gaming" assessment.

Let's get practical about those numbers and we can distill what's really the desire.

Notice the marketplace that drives mobile revenue - 63.6 Billion of the 70 we're speaking of, is made in smartphone games. By definition as casual as you can get, even just because of the device limitations and use cases / typical audience that cares to play/spend a lot of time on a 5-7 inch mobile screen. Its clear EGS and Steam want a part of that massive potential, sure. But they're not porting the real (PC/console) games to smartphones. They're going to make mobile versions of them, simplified, MTX'ed, etc. This whole affair is about making easy money by using your IP and existing assets to turn them into smartphone games, a'la Diablo. Fortnite characters in what is otherwise a time grinder, ka-ching. You can look at one of the thousands of Chinese spinoffs on mobile, that more often than not just copy over libraries of assets and add a Chinglish looking title to it. If you start looking at them, you just start recognizing more and more assets you just 'simply know from somewhere'.

So in that market, these real game IPs have an immense market value. People who never got into those 'real' games can now taste the 'real' thing, the characters they heard about and the worlds they never got into because it was out of reach. In their minds, all of that 'is coming to smartphones'. And you have to consider the generational push too. Young generations that know only smartphone and some arcane world of PC gaming for the boomers. The timing is no accident, just like all those remasters and reboots aren't.

So that's really what the push is all about, but for Apple, (as you could see with their intent (marketing) with Arcade...) they want to bring the quality games to their store and 'launch real gaming', much like how Epic is a bit more stringent on curation (and how quickly that's falling apart... another thing these two tech companies can't seem to escape ). And for that 'real gaming'... the market isn't 63.6 Billion worth of potential. Its that PC/console number you need to look at.

 

[MMXSSEAVX]

M1 Max will start a new trend. Finally AMD will build PC processors with larger iGPUs (think 32 CU or higher). Intel probably anticipates this, and has Xe HPG on the ready for integration.

CPUs with iGPUs fast enough for mainstream gaming will kill the xx50 or even xx60-class dGPUs. Crypto is driving this change.

Crypto are like tech junks.

 

[medi01]

I don’t think AMD is laughing, for two reasons. One, everyone wants a part of the $1400 laptop market, and two, AMD also just lost a customer.

Let me pretend that there is Apple exclusive "$1400 laptop market" and that that market is somehow paying more for mobile CPUs.
Oh wait, I can't.

Which customer did AMD lose?