Lol i think we are using the same screen. 27 inch screen I take it as well? But it’s true gaming computer are just as costly as a tablet now in days. At least when something of ours breaks we can fix our stuff without having to go to apple and having all our data being deleted when they hand it back to us. But then the cult of apple will always be here to stay and i must say thank you. Because of them they are not buying quality hardware and keeping the demand lower.
Also Xivilaikhys. No one wants that. No one in the development team would want that. Programing anything for apple is a nightmare for developers and i know this for I have to do updates on a application at work. Windows version update can take me about a week to push out. But the apple version of the same update I can take me 2x longer sometimes. Just glad I convinced the higher ups to go full windows system by 2021 to speed things up in production.
They are already more powerful than most laptops. At least the Ipad Pro which has one of the largest large scale production commercial chips currently made.
Just because a processor runs x86 does not make it fast. For example the Core2Quad Q6600 I am having to use while waiting for parts to arrive struggles to run HotS past 20 FPS in team fights, and that has a 105W TDP. The Ipad Pro CPU is much more powerful than the Core2 Quad Q6600.
Yes it will not be reaching the same level of performance as a I9 9900K or a Ryzen 9 3900X, but one does not need such performance to run HotS well.
Need a real world example of what ARM can do? Look at the Nintendo Switch. That console is a joke compared with the Ipad Pro yet still a fantastic selling console which lots of dedicated gamers are willing to play on. Of course the iPad Pro is significantly better than it, given how many times more it costs.
The iPad Pro does have a proper GPU. Although not RTX level of performance it still will give the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro a run and certainly outclasses the Switch massively. Given how little power it uses one cannot really complain.
It does not need much cooling capacity given how it has a miniscule TDP. Further more most games are not “stress tests” and so use a fraction of the worst case TDP. For example HotS is mostly single core with some work on a second thread and as such at least 3/4 of the iPad Pro CPU will be sitting idle and not generating heat while playing HotS. This is why most modern phones and Ipads do not suffer from thermal throttling when playing games even for many hours when plugged in.
They do suffer thermal throttling when running stress tests. However so do discrete AMD reference GPUs so this is hardly saying much. Even your Ryzen 5 3600 desktop CPU will thermal throttle a bit when not running at sub 0 degrees C and lowering core temperature 10 degrees can net you an increase in stress test core clock speed.
That is the only real issue with it, and why the MS Surface is doing a much better job at pushing tablets as PCs than Apple is.
They are trying to improve, with the recent addition of keyboard and mouse support, but it is still a long ways off from OSX or Windows 10.
Mainly because of its user base, and not because it is incapable of gaming. If you are the sort of person who buys a surface you are not the sort of person who uses it to play video games. On the other hand if you are the sort of person who likes to play video games you boy a gaming laptop because you get more performance for your money than buying a surface which has a ton of non-gamer orientated features such as touch support.
Nothing technically stops the iPad pro replacing a laptop other than Apples own tablet OS. They should just port OSX to the iPad Pro and be done with it.
Depends on the generation of the processor and not the clock speed. For example Intels new Ice Lake processors powering laptops hitting store shelves soon will easilly ace HotS. Especially the I7 variants. These should hit over 60 FPS. On the other hand an ancient Core2 Quad Q6600 desktop CPU will struggle to hit 20 FPS despite having 5 times the TDP and higher base clock.
This is IPC (Instructions Per Clock). And just because a processor is labelled in a segment like Core I5 does not mean all processors in that segment have the same IPC. For example an old Core I7 920 has a significantly lower IPC than a Core I7 9700K.
And you tested the thermals for it when running HotS?
Cannot compare IPC between ARM and x86. ARM might require more instructions be used for functionally identical behaviour.
Also a lot of the iPad Pro tests are kind of fudged. The iPad Pro has dedicated hardware to speed up some types of common task. This hardware is mostly not useful for gaming performance. This is in line with how no one uses GPUs to mine crypto currency anymore as dedicated crypto mining hardware does mining orders of magnitude more efficiently and quickly.
Depends on IPC. I know from personal experience that a Core2 Quad Q6600 running at 2.4 GHz struggles to hit above 20FPS in team fights, and that is without a GPU bottleneck. A 2.8 GHz I7 920 never dropped below 40 FPS due to its vastly superior IPC. Yes one can compare IPC in this case as both ran the same x86-64 build of HotS.
Depends on model. Some Surface models, especially the laptops, have discrete NVidia GPUs. These will certainly give the iPad a run if not beat it massively.
For integrated graphics only newer Intel products can compete. Intels new integrated GPUs in Ice Lake are not to be underestimated.
Yes if the potato GPU is modern. Older GPUs like the GT 8800 will literally burn out running HotS, or Furmark stress test for that matter.
What is the problem with the feature set? HotS already supports Metal for the Mac OS build.
One cannot compare desktop x86 with mobile ARM. The TDP limits allow for so much performance gains the comparison is not fair. Not only can one push higher clock speeds, but also have higher memory bandwidth, more cache and more functional units per core.
A much more fair comparison would be Amazon ARM server chips against similar purpose Intel Xenon or AMD Epyc server chips. All of these have server TDP limits which are similar to desktop TDP limits.
Within the laptop market the iPad Pro is pretty high up. Sure it is not a gaming laptop but it will easily beat all budget laptops both CPU and GPU wise.
See above. IPC cannot be compared between instruction sets.
Also to reiterate, many of the benchmarks for the iPad Pro are fudged slightly since there is dedicated accelerator hardware just for those sort of tasks. This acceleration hardware generates results similar to a much more powerful CPU. However unlike a powerful CPU like a Ryzen 9 3900X or Core I9 9900K, this is not real CPU power which can be used for any task other than what it was designed to accelerate, and hence the chips actual performance running a game will be much lower. Areas which are extensively accelerated include encryption, hashing and compression, all of which can have impact on benchmarks. Mobile benchmarks specifically factor these in since they are notoriously energy and CPU intensive tasks that mobile devices have to do a lot.
This is why the new Ice Lake CPUs will also feature hardware acceleration for such tasks.
It will not overheat since most of the CPU will be idle. It is like how a Ryzen 9 3900X can use up to 150W of power but running HotS it will likely use less than 20W.
Getting modern phones and tablets to overheat usually requires stress tests. For example Linus from Linus Tech Tips had to run a synthetic benchmark for many minutes before thermal throttling occurred since real gameplay never got the devices hot enough to thermal throttle.
HotS is not CPU heavy. Yes it pushes single core hard, but on modern CPUs it leaves most cores idle resulting in very low power usage. HotS is GPU heavy in that it loads GPUs much more like Furmark than practically every other game other there. It is far more likely that the iPad Pro will suffer GPU caused thermal throttling than CPU caused thermal throttling. Since they are on the same die this might cause general thermal throttling, but it also might not due to the spare thermal budget from the underloaded CPU.
They are making improvements to solve this. However a lot of people get confused between running hot and thermal throttling. Your CPU running at 95 degrees C is not thermal throttling, just running hot. Some recent apple models had bad thermal throttling problems when under demanding work loads, however newer ones have made significant improvements with regard to this and additionally this might not necessarily apply to all workloads.
The conspiracy theorist in me believes that they purposely have bad thermals since running hot for long periods of time will shorten the life of the components and so force you to buy new sooner. However it could also just be trying to push form factor and cost saving too far.
The iPad Pro uses the body as a heatsink to radiate heat away. Thermally conductive material connects the heat producing chips to the body to move and distribute heat. Thanks to the very low TDP this is mostly sufficient for unthrottled performance.
With phones they use the same factor but may also use active cooling from the user. Since they run hitter than 38 degrees Celsius your body acts as an evaporation cooled heatsink to cool the back of the phone. This is why reasonably designed phones never thermal throttle in real workloads when being used and one usually has to place them on an insulating surface while running synthetics to show throttle.
Fixed in newer models. They use more intelligent voltage scaling settings so that the CPU generates similar performance while producing less heat. Effectively it is a kind of overclocking but for improved energy efficiency rather than higher clocks.
This is not really true. Intel CPUs just do run hotter now than they did 15 years ago due to technology node shrinks. Yes many will thermal throttle when under synthetics but then again many desktops CPUs might do the same. You cannot even say they are thermal throttling when gaming because if they have a discrete GPU such as an NVidia RTX then chances are the heat from that is causing the CPU to throttle as the GPU will opportunistically boost clock within power and thermal limits and is why the same GPU performs vastly different between laptop models.
And how would that improve anything? Ultimately the only place to dissipate heat with smart phones and tables is the case. Many already use heatpipes to help spread the heat.
Also one does not even need active cooling to cool the most powerful I9 9900K desktop CPU. Yes a company has made a completely passively cooled I9 9900K system and no it does not thermal throttle at all. It runs a bit toasty but well within operating temperature and will maintain turbo fine.
GCC is a cache test. This is why an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 is twice as fast as a Core I9 9900K.
Many of the tests are computationally complex and so not a good reference for actual CPU performance. For example how will the CPUs compare with real game logic which relies heavily on branch prediction and speculative execution to perform well?
AMD has blown Intel out of the water… There is very little reason to buy Intel CPUs when building a desktop at the moment as AMD might have a tad worse single thread performance at the high end but their multi thread annihilates Intel at all cost brackets. To put it in perspective a $200 CPU from AMD nets you comparable (a small percentage less) gaming performance to a core I9 9900K in most games. Yes it is slower but it costs a fraction of the price and will likely leave you GPU bottlenecked in most games anyway.
HotS exhibits power virus like symptoms on the GPU. There is a reason StarCraft II was infamous for murdering GT 8800s. Estimating how much GPU power it will use is not really possible. It might be that such low power GPUs cannot execute the SC2/HotS shaders efficiently and hence will heavily GPU bottleneck off clock or power limits.
StarCraft II/HotS easily. Needs 1-2 cores at high clock speed and also needs extreme GPU power (actual power, not calculations).
Phones have nothing to do with tablets. Their tablet SOC is industry leading not only as one of the largest chips in mass production but also as far as specs go. The other thing lagging behind is the tablet OS.
This has nothing to do with how capable their hardware is. If you want expensive look up IBM, which is also industry leading and also has some of the largest mass production chips.
NVidia RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti beat it massively…
Until it comes to making the games and realizing that Apple only supports Metal and not Vulkan like everyone else does. Then you need to use hacky compatibility layers to wrap your portable Vulkan code so it can run with Metal and then run into a whole host of compatibility issues as the wrapper is not perfect.
One has to compare by cost. Seeing how much 7nm they are using it is obvious that their SOCs are very expensive. I would not be surprised if the production cost of the iPad Pro SOC was $700, seeing how it has one of the highest transistor counts of all mass produced chips.
Bin has nothing to do with performance. It will still run the same as any other stock CPU of that type.
Instead you just have people like me running a Core2 Quad Q6600 in your games because I am waiting parts to upgrade. Yes I am playing HotS and yes I get 20 FPS in team fights.
I bet you are wishing I was using a modern Mac now lol. Also Mac OS already supports HotS, so if Apple was to hurry up and unify their tablet OS with mac OS then people could already be playing HotS on their iPad Pro. Kind of like what one can do with a MS Surface…
Fuse is to protect from extreme overcurrent situations. Specifically it is to prevent the cables from becoming too hot and catching/starting fire. The cable failing is likely unrelate to the current flowing through it and more likely due to physical damage from use.
AMD is ahead with IPC atm thanks to its new 7nm parts like the Ryzen 9 3900X. At least against all 12nm Coffee Lake Intel CPUs. 10nm Ice Lake changes this and pushes AMD back behind but no desktop Ice Lake CPUs will be hitting the market until 2021. Intel is only leading single thread due to pushing frequency at the cost of any sort of power efficiency.
That is how it is done… Yes some GPUs allow for acceleration but it does not give you fine fidelity over the resulting quality or has major technical issues with some processing pipelines. Hence a lot of streamers still use software based encoders. Not like this is an issue thanks to AMD with chips like the Ryzen 9 3900X.
Depends on “run”. I know a 12 year old Core2 Quad Q6600 can “run” HotS, but I would not recommend the experience to anyone.
Do not buy the R5 2600. Rather save up an extra 70 and get the R5 3600. It is significantly faster.
I somehow doubt it will game better than the new mac pro workstation, let alone 10 times.
It does not have 1/10 of the performance of a similar priced PC. It is much closer to 1/2. It is better than many game consoles that people love to play.
HotS already runs on Mac OS…
Sorry for the long reply. Congratulations if you persevered through all this nerd talk lol.
Most manufactures for hardware will do some kind of test and mark them accordingly. Some will do better than other for quality and they get put into the a “bin” according to their tests. You have the ones that pass and they are the ones that are marked higher in price and then you have the ones that passed but did not do so well and they get their own bin but can still be sold. Then you have the ones that get tossed because they ether fail quality or can’t perform the test. Its a way to help make sure things are not dead on arrival. Apple is known to get parts from the bin that do pass quality tests but get them on the lower end of the spectrum. Plenty of videos show casing this. That is what i meant by bin.
I don’t have an issue with people using older hardware. Hell i have a buddy i play with who ran with a older mac and all his setting had to be on low and his FPS was around 20fps if that. The fact is that blizzard needs to take into account of 10 year old hardware which they should not be needing to do when the life span of a computer is around 4-5 years tops before its fully obsolete. Yes i understand not everyone can afford a new machine all the time, I fully get that.
The issue is that i have games where people will say “I’m lagging” and a few times was “I have an older computer sorry if i lag” I should not be hindered by you because you are running on hardware that is not meant to play a game from 5-6 years ago.
Apple OS is very different on each device at it’s core and needs to take into account of it. Now programing wise there is not much of a difference but enough for the individual who is programing to have to check documentation to ensure something is supported. Sure if one thing can run on a given version of mac os it can run on everything BUT if something is not supported or you have to do difference calls to the hardware so that the software gets the right info. Thankfully I only ran into this issue once and only took a few hours to figure out the proper calls.
This only matters from a long term reliability and overclocking point of view. For chips operating at stock performance they will still perform as good as identically.
If a chip is sold as an I9 9900K then it will perform like all other I9 9900K in stock operation. It might be a bad bin so have 0 overclocking headroom and fail in 5 years or a good one which can reach 5.2 GHz and last 15+ years. However both of them will still achieve as good as the exact same framerate in HotS or any game for that matter.
I think you might also be getting confused with yield based product separation. Some standard chip designs are binned during production and separated into different products based on the binning result, with better bins fetching more. This is best seen with the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X and AMD Ryzen 7 3800X. Both of these use the same pieces of silicon except that binning is used and all the high end dies end up in the AMD Ryzen 7 3800X while all the low end ones with defects end up in the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X. No AMD Ryzen 7 3700X will perform as well as the AMD Ryzen 7 3800X as a result, despite during manufacture the die having the potential to end up as either before it was binned. However this also proves my argument since as a normal gamer there is no reason to spend more money and buy the AMD Ryzen 7 3800X since the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X performs very close in gaming workloads.
My I7 920 lasted ~10 years. Only reason I am getting a Ryzen 9 3900X as a replacement (and having to use the other system until then) is because a PSU fried either the motherboard or the CPU and it was not worth replacing like for like with something 10 years old.
It is perfectly reasonable to consider supporting 10 year old hardware. Especially if the game has not added anything significant since then that justifies the need for more powerful or modern hardware. This is especially important for keeping target audience large since people in developing countries can only really afford 5-10 year old hardware.
Which is exactly what many modern Mac systems are doing, not hindering you. The new iPad pro would run HotS acceptably, certainly at 30+ FPS I would imagine. The main concern is to make sure that the player is using a keyboard and mouse, as the game was designed for. Playing with a track pad or touch screen will not result in a high skill experience. However maybe match making will cancel this out since it is unlikely they will reach higher skill MMR with such a handicap.
macOS (OSX) is only for x86. IOS is only for phones and then there is their tablet OS. Within the product stack and supported devices the same OS version is used. It is only devices that fall out of support keep using old versions of the operating system, and such devices are usually unsupported by game developers anyway. This is not an argument of if Mac products are value for money, rather that the new ones are capable for running games like HotS, including their flagship tablet and possibly even phone.
The same could be said about Windows 10. Every major release brings new APIs and might change existing ones.
I already addressed this issue. as long as they are current generation, the x86 will blow ARM out of the water. Why? because of the instruction set. the x86 can perform complex operations in a single cycle, whereas ARM needs several cycles to do the same operation. This makes the x86 design much more complex, and ARM is simpler, hence the difference in power consumption.
OFC, a 10 core2quad cannot measure against top of the line ARM CPUs. if it did, then i’d be very surprised.
Except in laptops/desktops, you can up the cooling capacity yourself, the ipad pro is literally limited by how hot your environment is. And passive radiation of heat is very inefficient. Air is a very inefficient coolant unless it gets moved around, this is why we have fans in the first place, to move hot air away from the CPU.
Yes.
Because the GT8800 doesn’t support directx11.
No, you really don’t. Modern GPUs (especially AMD - nvidia is kind of meh about it) have dedicated video encode/decode cores which support most popular formats, including h264.
Both of them operate as good as identically internally since all CISC instructions are translated using microcode to run on the internal RISC engines which all use pipelines, speculative execution and register renaming. This makes x86 inherently slower since the instructions need a longer pipeline to execute, and also more energy intensive to run as a result of the logic for these extra steps.
Very few instructions execute in 1 cycle. In fact I do not know of any x86-64 instructions that do so. They usually have a latency of anywhere from 4 to 90 cycles varying based on processor and even the state involved. This is assuming that some other pipeline stall does not occur such as a cache miss or RAM read, or even functional unit contention in the case of cores with HT/SMT. However modern processors will execute as many as 5 of them per cycle and run them in parallel thanks to pipelining.
ARM even has a performance advantage as the instruction set inherently supports more registers than x86-64 and registers are the fastest type of storage for a value, faster even than the fastest cache.
The only reason that ARM is mostly slower than x86-64 is that to be more power efficient they have to run at lower clock speeds, have less complex pipelines and fewer internal core resources which can cause more contention. However the same likely applies for low power x86-64.
Also be aware that there are different tiers of ARM processors. The lowest tiers of ARM are very slow as they are designed to use sub milliwatt power and be very cheap. The iPad Pro and such use the highest end of ARM which is designed to compete against the big players like Intel, AMD and IBM. In fact Intel is lagging massively behind as they have failed to change their desktop CPU designs for 3 years and it will be at least another 1-2 before they do so. Intel’s flagship I9 9900K and its KS variant are proof of this as they are nothing more than pushing the same tech to the limits and effectively becoming a space heater in the process.
Did you make sure to cap frame rate? Tried 30 FPS?
Any thermal limitations on the Surface would likely be the result of the GPU since SC2/HotS is very GPU power intensive. The GPU and CPU are likely physically near each other and share the same heat sink solution so it is possible the GPU may encourage the CPU to thermal throttle. However the process should be self limiting as throttled CPU will draw fewer frames per second so throttle the GPU. Might also be a power limit on the GPU.
If using integrated graphics then it could well be a power limit as the GPU and CPU may share the same power limit.
Still does not stop it from running HotS…
Updated: 4 weeks ago
NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600 GT
It does support D3D11. Just not all features of it. D3D11 is nothing more than a feature extension to D3D10 which the 8800 GT does support. StarCraft II was originally played on cards like the 8800 GT, until it murdered most of them and the cards were replaced by more reasonable modern ones. When Blizzard says D3D11 is required they mean that the driver must state that it is a D3D11 GPU (even if using the D3D10 feature subset) and that it is not a D3D9 card which are no longer supported as they never supported D3D10 to begin with.
AMD’s video encoder is only slightly better than Intel’s and is considered useless for professional streaming due to the low output quality. NVidias new encoder on the RTX and high end GTX cards is considered gold standard for hardware encoders, however it has major technical limitations such as not supporting encoding of composed output such as with overlays or webcam required by some live streamer formats.
Professional live streamers now are using either software encoding, or have dedicated computers to either hardware or software encode a captured display output. The latter is especially the case for console streamers who have to video capture anyway, in their use case NVidia encoder is sufficient but as the PC just has to do encoding a software encoder is also sufficient.
All hardware encoders produce low quality output when it comes to non-realtime encoding such as for YouTube upload encoding. Such encoders will either use CUDA (not the dedicated hardware encoder units) or fall back to CPU which is why the test is important.
Most of that is Greek to me. Lol. But will the A12X chip, on the iPad, be able to run HotS over 30-45 fps? If it can, then it will run as well as my $700 HP laptop with an AMD FX 9800P processor and the integrated Radeon R7 graphics which I bought in September 2017. 2 years ago. That’s what my laptop runs HotS at. About 40 fps. I’m sure the iPad has AT LEAST that much power.
Cooling, software development, the % of the player base that will actually play on iPad, and other things I can’t think of right now, are speed bumps that may be hard to truly make it possible but I just think it will be cool to see. Really the only people who would benefit from it are younger players who don’t actually have a laptop, which is a really small percentage anyway.
Now personally, I wouldn’t mind having a tablet version of this game with simplified graphics. Would be nice to play some heroes while laying in the bed, getting some dailies done and I feel a game like this can translate well. For casual play this could be awesome.
On the negative side, PC will be the superior version with a better control scheme, and likely better connection. You (and your allies) would be at a disadvantage playing with the tablet over another team.
I would say a tablet version would either need to only work with other tablet players or limit the play options on a tablet (IE no rank mode but Quick Match and VS AI okay).
Then of course this pretty much being a near dead game means we likely won’t get anything like this added. Hell not sure if even with full support the games design work work well enough with this… game has one of the worse reconnect features I have ever seen.
Regardless of everything, I would be all for this. Just don’t ever expect it to happen.
If the forums were only about things Blizzard would actually go through with then most of the posts would be worthless. This is a thread about the thoughts of the community and whether it would be cool or not, not whether Blizzard would do it.
I would love to see it on iPad Pro. I‘m also in that ecosystem and have some Windows Laptop for works. But i would love to play it also on my ipad. I think the gab would not be longer in about a year and its in my opinion possible that Blizz gonna do something about it. if the new macbooks and imacs coem with arm, a new os that is based on arm and about the same as the ipad os, yeah maybe we see it come for ipads.
I think the arm based chip would rock the game like nothing.
I vote for a Carbot version of Heroes of the Storm without cosmetics and has only stick horse and segway mount that has crossplay with the main client with Ranked disabled for mobile devices
This way people can play the game on their toilet(The Frozen Throne) even without downloading more than fourteen gigabytes
