They do not need to compete with nvidea for the top of the line

I bought the laptop and the video card because they are quiet and their price/performance is better than the high end stuff anyway.

I just tried running steam on the macbook, and was very disappointed. My Linux gaming desktop will live on for another few years, I guess.

edit: I think I got the GPU in ~ 2019, though it was released in 2015.

Also, another 25% of my library actually was ported to MacOS, but it is 32 bit only, so it won't run on an M2. (Also, typing that sentence was painful.)

I guess if I want to run the vast majority of the MacOS software that I have ever purchased on an M2, my best bet is to install Asahi, and use the Windows ports under proton. Lame.

Have no idea why the mislabeling happened. Maybe Steam is working solely off dates despite many games being 64 bit before the 32 bit cutoff.

I'd like to see more Steam games that work on the Mac. Perhaps this could help.

So, great. Apple lets me stay away from bard directed bing advertising and OS level spy ware on my desktop, simplify my computing footprint in my household, and provides me games from a few years ago. Seems like a win win.

Source: I am someone who paid significantly more money for a Max M2 Max

Apple doesn't get to take the moral high ground here either when they push credit card and other services ads in their OS.

The more Microsoft and Google tilt towards becoming persistent privacy threats and advertising companies, the more apple will see it as a differentiator as a hardware company with software services to be the opposite. I’m good with that dynamic, but I think it’s useful to acknowledge that’s the case. Pretending windows isn’t a persistent adware spyware bundle doesn’t help the situation.

Upgrading from full-spec M2 Max to M2 Ultra costs $1200. Nvidia 1650 launched at $190 (inflation adjusted, $159 2019 USD).

Plenty of people are impressed at 3060/3070 performance in a 25W system-power envelope.

You literally can't even run the memory chips for a 3070 in that power budget let alone the whole APU.

Like I'd love to see the AMD equivalent APU to that "also-ran 3070 performance" macbook, please link a laptop with what you think would be comparable.

I think you're missing the point that parent (and Siracusa) made - Apple invests a signficant into the software and graphics stack, only to fumble it at the last minute by not having high-end graphics hardware, and caring enough to court "triple A" game developers to their platforms, despite them creating and maintaining Metal and this 20k-line WINE patch.

There's this weird mismatch of Apple dedicating a non-trival amount of time in their keynote to "Mac Gaming" as if it's supposed to be impressive to finally play a 4 year old game on a Mac because they don't ship high-end graphics devices.

Not that it would've been in my price range anyway, but it could've indicated that thunderbolt eGPU support would make a return.

Lack of that is a weird omission if Apple is trying to act like they have a gaming platform.

Apple has a huge gaming platform, and it isn't the Mac.

https://www.ign.com/articles/apple-made-more-than-nintendo-s...

However, I imagine that they'd still like to sell more games in the Mac App Store (in addition to iOS ports, iPad games that can run on Apple Silicon, and Apple Arcade subscriptions) and this might help.

It might also make it easier to port games to Apple Arcade.

Apple is selling around 80% laptops versus desktops, and the rest of the industry is something like 77%. The fact Apple is winning the laptop GPU race doesn't mean it should automatically be entered into the desktop GPU race, where it is not winning.

Fact? Which Apple chips are outperforming the laptop 3070, much less the current-gen mobile 4090?

And in all fairness - Apple's products might not need more GPU power. Cyberpunk and Elden Ring appear to be CPU-bottlenecked, if people are comfortable upscaling they could get a pretty comfortable Retina experience. The 2D optimization and media accelerators are a good focus for mobile hardware. For more demanding applications though, it looks like Apple's current approach is not scaling well.

[0] https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query

The other half of the story is a lot of software (inc Blender, looking at these crazy results) just isn't well optimized and Apple is still struggling to win over developers in certain sectors of the market. Nvidia's decade+ investment in the software side has paid off so incredibly well for them, it's basically made the company.

but yea you can say the same thing about tons of brands. Last summer all the AMD fans were talking about 1€/kWh electricity and saying they were going to buy whatever dGPU was most efficient... when that turned out to be Ada by a country mile, everybody pivoted to whining about price and bought RDNA2 GPUs with half of the perf/w.

During RDNA2 everyone insisted that a 10% perf/w advantage for AMD was a buying point, back during the Vega years they insisted that a 2x perf/w disadvantage didn't matter. Rinse and repeat.

I generally think power matters when it rises to the level of a tangible difference... 200W difference between 4070 and 6950XT means the latter is really a non-starter even if it's 10% faster (at a 5% higher price), especially considering the big-picture featureset (DLSS improves both perf and perf/w). And really it matters more in laptops. You're right that Mac Studio/Mac Pro are not really a place where it hugely matters, but, in a laptop, the next-best thing would be a Ryzen 6800U which is about GTX 1630 performance, so 3060 performance in the same envelope is a big step upwards!

And really this "big differences matter, small ones don't" applies to most stuff in general. 5% this way or the other, who cares. That kind of thing is often less important than general UX/quality/features, I'll take a laptop that's 5% slower but way longer battery life or better screen/trackpad/whatever. When things start rising to the level of 25% or 30% difference in some spec, or in price... yeah that's immediately noticeable.

But yea I generally agree that desktops like Studio or outright workstations like Mac Pro are dGPU territory and people are generally not looking for a super efficient iGPU with 3060 performance. On the other hand, being able to talk to 192GB of VRAM is definitely novel, especially with large AI models being the talk of the town this year (and accessible to even the most casual of artists/developers), and the unified APU approach with uniform memory/zero-paging has other advantages for development too. AMD had a lot of this stuff hammered out 10 years ago, supposedly, and then... just never did anything with it, other than sell it to consoles. It's great for PS5 and Xbox, why can't I buy a PC laptop with 96GB of unified/uniform memory with 3060-level performance in a 25W envelope?

Really I think a lot of the people who have bought Macbooks recently are not "traditional" apple customers. The MBP and even MBA are legitimately really nice laptops with a good screen, good keyboard, good trackpad, good sound, etc. I have said before that I really think a lot of MBP customers would be interested in a "Macbook Tough" toughbook if they ever did that, although of course that's the most un-Jony Ives product possible.

There is a clear demand for a high-quality AMD-based non-GPU ultrabook using a 6800U or 7040U or whatever. Framework is the first company to even try, and they're using crappy 13" hardware on the upcoming AMD model while the market clearly wants more like a 15" or 16" (and their 16" will not have AMD boards). Why didn't anybody else do it first? Apple is catching on because they're filling a market niche that everyone else is ignoring, and they're not even really exactly filling it squarely, they just happen to be vaguely closer than the rest of the market.

And now that the nerd crowd has the hardware... the software is following. It's the same reason that CUDA has taken off while AMD's GPGPU programme has spun its wheels for 15 years, and the same reason AMD has good Linux drivers now. Give the nerds the hardware and innovation will follow - when they tinker they'll be tinkering with your platform.

Big missed opportunity for AMD, yet again. Or Intel, but, they're so far behind on APUs/integration that I think disappointment is basically the baseline expectation at this point. AMD had all the pieces, and yet again just chose not to do anything with them.

So it's quite possible to build a well-performing gaming PC for sub-$2000 with RTX 3090 which is still significantly more performant than Apple's latest Mac, in terms of GPU throughput.

I snapped myself a gaming PC for $1300 at last year's Thanksgiving sales, came with a AMD Ryzen, RTX 3080 (10 GB VRAM model) and 32 GB DDR4 RAM, no way I could have gotten a Mac with that performance for anything close in terms of price.

If you were after a comparable experience with the fastest Macs on Earth you could configure a PC that's another $1,000 cheaper than that ($1,600).

The most popular GPUs in use TODAY are 1650, 1060, 3060, 2060.

If Apple can get the M2 Macbook Air to run like one of these, it essentially makes the most popular laptop also the equivalent to the most popular gaming rig.

I don't think I have worried about game frame rate since the days of Quake 1. I set my graphics settings to "Medium" and then spend the rest of my time actually enjoying my old ass games.

Better strategy is to make sure the door isn't closed on gaming for those that want to use their expensive Macs to occasionally play (protect the downside), rather than swing the door open enthusiastically for gamers to rush in.

Re: worrying about fun vs tinkering, I'm reminded of the 4 quadrants of hobbies. What we see on forums are generally gamers interested in gear & discussing, not 'doing the hobby'. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html

While the perf/watt is impressive, apple is also using 4 times the number of transistors on TSMC's latest process - and the comparison here is samsungs 8nm, I believe. It's not really all that impressive that that huge silicon investment has some results...

It's a tantalizing hint at what might be possible, but as it stands, I'm not really all that impressed, personally.

I actually added the 3060 bit myself lol

Positively: as a device, having such a solid iGPU is pretty much exactly what I've always wanted in this kind of device. Having performance that's PS5 ballpark clearly is enough for a hell of a lot of things. Who really wants something much faster at the cost of much worse battery life?

But the air of incredibly ground-breaking technical greatness that apple manages to weave around its silicon seems a tad overdone. Given the amount of silicon, the process node, and the target tuning - this kind of result seems competitive with rather than outclassing their rivals.

The Mac audience is not trivial and has deep pockets so as long as porting games is fairly easy the it's an obvious choice.

Apple seems to be doing okay. I mean, a magnitude more people game on iPhones than game on PCs.

Apple is trying to support ancillary gaming for users who chose their platform for other reasons. That's it. They aren't target the 1200 watt, 12-fan 4090 PCMR sorts. And that's okay.

I've got a gaming desktop and also a MacBook Pro. If the next time I go on a trip, I'm able to play some games in my hotel room on (gasp) medium settings, with a device I already own, that I probably was already going to bring with me, that's a positive thing!

-fixed that for you