Gaming benchmarks are completely irrelevant when discussing the actual raw power of the GPU. As the other commenter said- look at the actual GPU benchmark in the first graph.

Legacy games written for x86 CPUs obviously are going to perform poorly. I recommend you actually read the review and don't just scroll to the worst gaming benchmark you can find.

> Gaming benchmarks are completely irrelevant when discussing the actual raw power of the GPU.

Maybe, but the "raw power" is useless if it can't be exploited.

> Legacy games written for x86 CPUs obviously are going to perform poorly.

Not if they're GPU-bound. Even native performance isn't that impressive

If the power is substantial enough it will get exploited eventually. Hopefully even if Metal ports don't occur the eventual Asahi-adjacent open source drivers will open the gaming doors.

There are only two real gaming benchmarks and they are both real bad for the M1. In Tomb Raider it fairs even worse at 4K than it does in borderlands.

It’s a great chip but it doesn’t trade blows with anything Nvidia puts out especially at comparable price points.

Maybe you buy things to run benchmarks. I buy them to run the software I own. For games they come up short on fps and high on price. That is the inverse of what I’m looking for.

If your interest is purely in playing unoptimized games coded for different architectures then absolutely there's better options.

However if your workloads are in a more professional domain as mine are then it's entirely fair to say this chip is trading blows with Nvidia's best at lower prices. Don't forget this is an entire SOC and not just a GPU, power saving aren't irrelevant either if you actually work your hardware consistently as I do.

If you buy a Mac for gaming, you're going to have a bad time. Look at the GFXBench 5.0 benchmark. The first graph on the page.