News Don't Believe the Hype: Apple's M2 GPU is No Game Changer

[hotaru.hino]

Anyway, I am a GPU guy so that was my focus, mostly because I was irritated by Apple's GPU comparisons with meaningless hardware. I really want to get an M2 MacBook in hand and do some serious GPU testing. The problem is that the options for comparing Windows to Mac performance for GPUs are far more limited, often requiring the use of completely synthetic benchmarks like GFXBench, 3DMark, Geekbench, etc. I don't use Macs (at all), but if I can borrow one for a bit I'll have to see what recent Steam games work on both Windows and Mac and try to put together some comparisons. I suspect it will end up being GPU performance about on par with the Ryzen 6800U.

What makes the comparison even worse is there's too many variables in the mix too. If the game developers are doing things the Apple way, we also have to add the caveat that Metal was used, which (in theory) would give a runtime advantage over the Windows version if it only had a DX11 render path.

It's also why I'll ignore GFXBench comparisons. For Apple they only offer tests in Metal, but only OGL or DX11 for Windows.

 

[magbarn]

No one is talking about TDP which is heat dissipation, not power consumption. Also, I've seen no evidence of them shipping under powered adapters, there are several tests of recent releases of Macs that all use less power than their Adapters. The M1 Max uses a max of 110 watts with High Power Mode enabled and it ships with a 140 watt adapter. The M1 Mac Air maxed out at 25 watts and shipped with a 30 watt adapter. You can find all of this at AnAndTech if you feel the need to verify.

Majority of Intel Macbook Pros with dGPUs routinely pulled more power than the adapter they came with.

 

[shady28]

I really think Apple originally intended for this M2 generation to be on 3nm. Same thing is happening with the iPhone 14, it'll be on 5nm - for the 3rd time. So, what we are getting are smaller incremental improvements. I'm not thrilled with Apple anyway, their product range really narrowed with this new strategy on ARM. Specifically, they cannot claim to be fastest because that's out right untrue, what they can claim is 'fastest thin and light with integrated graphics', which is true. But what if I want a more powerful conventional laptop? Well, that's AMD and Intel. A really powerful desktop is AMD and Intel as well.

I think that might change in 2023, but they aren't there yet, which goes back to my first point that I think Apple wanted to put this gen on 3nm but TSMC just wasn't ready. 2023 will IMO be a more interesting year for Apple Silicon.

 

[AndreX86]

We dig deeper into Apple's M2 GPU specs and discuss what sort of graphics performance you can expect from the new chip.

Don't Believe the Hype: Apple's M2 GPU is No Game Changer : Read more

Why compare Desktop GPU's to Apple's integrated chips? Sure a 3050 and/or RX6600 have 8.9 Teraflops of performance but the mobile version of the 3050 only has 4.329 TFLOPS... And i'm sure its eating up much more power while gaining that performance when compared to Apple's GPU.

This article could have been much better if you actually compared current top end laptop GPU's to what apple is advertising as opposed to giving benchmarks for full fledged desktop GPU's 🤦🏽

 

[joneskind]

Now that Resident Evil Village is out with native support of Apple Silicon architecture, it would be nice to see how the M2 compete with other discrete mobile graphic cards