"Also recall that very few games needing that performance actually work on MacOS"

But many Windows games do run under Crossover (a commercial wrap of WINE - well worth the measly licensing fee for seamless ease of use to me) or the Windows 10 ARM beta in Parallels. I got so many games to run on my M1 MacBook Air I ended up returning it to wait for the next round that could take more RAM. I'm very, very happy I waited for these and I fully expect it will replace my Windows gaming machine too.

Well, Apple G13 series are excellent rasterizers. I‘d expect them do very well in games, especially with that massive bandwidth and humongous caches. The problem is that not many games run on macOS. But if you are only interested in games with solid Mac support, they will perform very well (especially if it’s a native client like Baldurs Gates 3).

"very well" 45 fps top at 1080p medium settings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hROxRQvO-gQ

You take a 3 years old card you get 2x more fps.

Which other passively cooled laptop can do it? And what 3 year old card are you comparing it to? Hopefully something with 20W or lower power consumption.

45fps at medium Full HD is not far off a 1650 Max q

Apple compare themself to a 3080m, the perf from an M1 is not even close to a 3 y/o card. I don't care if it takes 10w if I can't even play at 60fps on "recent'ish" games.

You may have mistaken last year's M1 (the one in the video, available passively cooled in the MacBook Air) with the new M1 Pro and M1 Max (the ones being compared to the more powerful counterparts).

That's the M1. Yes, those numbers are superb for something that's competing with integrated graphics.

M1 Pro and M1 Max will be legit gaming GPUs.

What is the most intensive game you could actually run?

I was going to say Fortnite but I'm guessing that's not the case anymore

Baldurs Gates 3, Metro Last Light, Total War…

It's really hard to compare Apple and Nvidia, but a bit easier to compare Apple to AMD. My best guess is performance will be similar to a 6700xt. Of course, none of this really matters for gaming if studios don't support the Mac.

The mobile RTX 3080 limited to 105W is comparable to about an RX 6700M, which is well behind the desktop RX 6700XT.

The gaming performance will be CPU-bottlenecked. Without proper Wine/DXVK support, they have to settle for interpreted HLE or dynamic recompilation, neither of which are very feasible on modern CPUs, much less ARM chips.

From all reports, rosetta2 performs remarkably well. Apparently they added special hardware support for some x86 features to improve the performance of dynamically recompiled code.

Does someone know how much VRAM the M1X has? Because I bet it's far less than a 3070 or 3080.

There's no vram. It's unified / shared memory. There's no M1X. There's M1 Pro and M1 Max

I think we can safely shorten them to M1P and M1X.

Can't allow that. Either M1P and M1M or M1O and M1X.

M1 Pro & Max (and plain M1 too for what it's worth) have unified memory across both CPU and GPU. So depending on the model it'd be up to 32gb or 64gb (not accounting for the amount being used by the CPU). Put differently - far more than 3070 and 3080.

The memory is unified, and very high bandwidth. No idea what that means in practice, guess we'll find out.

It's very high bandwidth for a CPU, but not that great for a GPU (400GB/s vs 440GB/s in 3070 and 980GB/s in 3090).

It's not quite apples to apples. The 3070 only has 8GB of memory available, whereas the M1 Max has up to 64 GB available. It's also unified memory in the M1 and doesn't require a copy between CPU & GPU. Some stuff will be better for the M1 Max and some stuff will be worse.

>> ...not that great for a GPU...

* almost equals the highest laptop GPU available

But it's also a premium product, so it matching a 3070m isn't really above what you'd expect for the cost (but efficiency is another story)

On the other hand, it's zero-copy between CPU and GPU.

Of course, with a 3070 and up you have to play with headphones so you don't hear the fan noise.

This is the best feature of the new Apple CPUs if you ask me: silence.

Now to wait for a decent desktop...

the memory is unified so whatever ram is on there (16,32,64) can be allocated as vram.

That's why during the presentation they bragged about how certain demanding 3d scenes can now be rendered on a notebook.

I still didn't get their example about the 100Gb spaceship model - max RAM supported is 64Gb...

Up to 64GB…