> Compared to what? There are no laptops quite like these new Apple laptops. Anything with faster graphics also uses LOADS more power and runs WAY hotter.
Using 2x the power for 2x the bandwidth (on top of significantly more compute power) is a good tradeoff, when the NVidia chip is 8nm Samsung vs Apple's 5nm TSMC.
In any case, the actual video game performance is much much worse on the M1 Pro. The benchmarks show that the chip has potential, but games need to come to the system first before Apple can decidedly claim a victory.
> If the native version doesn't exist then... gamers don't care?
I don't think it's a fair assessment of the machine capabilities. Also, games WILL be ported to the platform AND if you really need your games running at full speed, you can keep the current computer and postpone the purchase of your Mac until the games you need are available.
Next-generation games will be made on the platform. Current-generation and last-generation games no longer have much support / developers, and no sane company will spend precious developer time porting over a year-old or 5-year-old game to a new platform in the hopes of a slim set of sales. (Except maybe Skyrim. Apparently those ports keep making money)
Your typical game studio doesn't work on Skyrim though. They put in a bunch of developer work into a game, then by the time the game is released, all the developers are on a new project.
And that's why gamers are buying the Surface Book instead?
The "gamer" community (or really, community-of-communities) only cares if their particular game runs quickly on a particular platform.
Gamers don't really care about the advanced technology details, aside from the underlying "which system will run my game faster, with higher-quality images" (4k / raytracing / etc. etc.)?
No, that's why having x86 emulation performance be this good is a minor miracle.
Native performance would be expected to be inline with what the benchmarks are showing.
The MacBook Pro Max would beat the 100 watt mobile variant of the 3080, especially if you unplug both laptops from the wall where the 3080 has to throttle down and the MacBook does not.
> No, that's why having x86 emulation performance be this good is a minor miracle.
No gamer is going to pay $3000+ for a laptop with emulation when $2000+ gamer laptops are faster at the task (aka: video games are faster on the $2000 laptop).
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Look, gamers don't care about all games. They only care about that one or two games that they play. If you want to attract Call of Duty players, you need to port Call-of-Duty over to the Mac, native, so that the game actually runs faster on the system.
It doesn't need to be an all-or-nothing deal. Emulation is probably good enough for casuals / non-gamers who maybe put in 20 hours or less into any particular game. But anyone putting 100-hours or more into a game will probably want the better experience.
> No gamer is going to pay $3000+ for a laptop with emulation
They pay $3000 for a laptop whose fans hit 55 decibels at load and that has to throttle way down slower than the MacBook if you use it like a laptop and go somewhere without a power outlet.
The Mac doesn't even do raytracing, does it? So you're already looking at a sizable quality downgrade over AMD, NVidia, PS5, and XBox Series X.
I think the eSports gamers will prefer FPS over graphical fidelity, so maybe that's the target audience for this chip ironically.
But adventure gamers who want to explore raytraced worlds / prettier games will prefer the cards with raytracing, better shadows, etc. etc. (See the Minecraft RTX demo for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bb7wKIHpgY)
Look, my Vega64 raytraces all the time when I hit the "Render" button on Blender.
But video-game raytracing is about hardware-dedicated raytracing units. Software (even GPU-software rendering) is an order of magnitude slower. Its still useful to implement, but what PS5 / XBox Series X / AMD / NVidia has implemented are specific raytracing cores (or in AMD's case: raytracing instructions) to traverse a BVH-tree and accelerate the raytracing process.
"Can do Raytracing" or "Has an API for GPU-software that does raytracing" is just not the same as "we built a raytracing core into this new GPU". I'm sure Apple is working on their raytracing cores but I haven't seen anything yet that suggests that its ready yet.
> the actual video game performance is much much worse on the M1 Pro
This is a workstation. For games one should look for a Playstation ;-)
2x power also means half the battery life. Remember this is a portable computer that's thin and light beyond what would be reasonable considering its performance. Also, remember the GPU has full 400GBps access to all of the RAM, which means models of up to 64GB won't need to pass over the PCIe bus.
Using 2x the power for 2x the bandwidth (on top of significantly more compute power) is a good tradeoff, when the NVidia chip is 8nm Samsung vs Apple's 5nm TSMC.
In any case, the actual video game performance is much much worse on the M1 Pro. The benchmarks show that the chip has potential, but games need to come to the system first before Apple can decidedly claim a victory.