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 "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.)?