Not really. Even a small man like him is heavy for me. I’m like Popeye without any spinach in sight.
Now gnomes are another story… 
I mean, you know Apple’s history in terms of their A series in iPhones, iPad and Apple TV. The H1 in AirPods does an amazing job at pairing and switching on iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur. The Apple Watch has been lag free since Series 4. I don’t think you need to doubt their claims, but we will see next week.
I am having a hard time picturing Apple using any sort of eGPU, or a GPU made my nVidia or AMD. This whole thing is about them controlling the chips from start to finish. Soon they will be making the modems for the iPhone also.
Open GL’s deprecation, plus the unified memory where there isn’t a true GPU memory also make a dedicated GPU unlikely.
I expect the M1 chip in the true MacBook Pros will be something like 16 cores CPU and 16 cores GPU. The iMac could be 32/32. I think the iMac Pro is a one-and done. Maybe that one is a 64/64 with heftier cooling.
Also, in case it’s not obvious, I’m just pulling numbers out of the air. The next MacBook Pros could just be 12/12s.
The wildcard is the Mac Pro. We know about 3 they were ready to kill the Mac Pro and have the iMac Pro be the new Pro-level workstation. They pivoted, obviously, and created the new Pro. This Pro is likely to be the last machine that goes to Apple Silicon. That is if it goes. If Apple just doesn’t support anything but their own GPUs, maybe that big box houses a ton of GPU cores. Or, since the Mac Pro will be out for 3 years by the time a new model comes out, maybe that is it for the Pro as well. That is the one machine that is hard to truly see a roadmap on.
Given the precedent set by Afterburner, I wouldn’t be too surprised if future Mac Pro’s made use of discrete Apple GPUs. Heck they might even make Apple GPU MPX cards available for current Intel Mac Pro’s.
Yeah, I was thinking the MPX cards would just be a big honkin’ video card.
Rumors were apple is already working on their own dedicated gpu in house. It might be good it might not be. But i think even they know on pro line or even imac they can’t just ship the M1 and call it a day. Or we would have had updated imacs and mac pros already. they replaced the product line that was using igp only. I expect a higher tier macbook pro, imac, and mac pro in next 1-2 years. But even apple has said it’ll take up to 2 years. They are waiting on their dgpu project. As for fate of egpu and AMD, that remains to be seen. I had really hoped we’d get surprise AMD drivers for big navy in 11.0 but it shipped and no news and egpu was removed from supported projects for M1 so not looking good there. Apple probably has no issue kicking amd to curb and amd considering where they stand now doesn’t need apple either. They just shipped desktop processors that embarass intel, gpus that can actually match nvidia and two next gen consoles both powered by AMD. AMD is sitting pretty fat right now to really care about apple either.
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There’s a new video online in which an Apple VP says Apple has tested World of Warcraft and it runs as fast under Rosetta 2 as it does on Intel chips. https://youtu.be/2lK0ySxQyrs?t=1501 This is fabulous. Imagine how much faster WoW will be when Blizzard compiles it for the M1’s native instructions.
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It’s already compiled for native instruction as of build 9.0.2.36639 on ptr and beta.
I have no doubt it’s going to be a huge step up from previous generation macbooks macbook airs and mac minis. but as tia points out these are not gaming machines by any means. tthey blow intel out of water but they aren’t gonna blow AMD out of the water. Whatever apple has planned for that is probably mid to late 2021 at earliest.
That said if you are buying a nice work machine for travel or just want a laptop that can play wow decently on the go at lower graphics settings, these machines won’t disappoint
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WOW! And I don’t mean WoW! Hey, Intel Macs including integrated graphics has been good enough for me for 15 years, so M1 graphics will be even better.
Some people probably need 60 FPS in 4K, but I don’t. My main interest is simple alt levelling, not even dungeons. I don’t PVP or do anything that needs 60 FPS.
When my Mac Mini arrives around Nov 24th I’ll try the M1 WoW immediately. However some people will get their M1 Mini this week so the results will be known before I can post them.
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Those are great news Omegal! And like I mentioned before, all the previous years we never had to spend up to $2k on a Mac to get a somewhat decent performance to run WoW. Only with latest AMD gpu’s it made it possible, but now with the M1 in low entry Mac’s, you can even play WoW on Low settings. Thats truly amazing.
Quick reminder to anyone considering products with the M1:
Apple has a history of barely supporting first gen products of a new type. There is a good chance that this first generation of Apple Silicon will only be supported for 2-3 revs of MacOS. If you’re looking for something longer term WAIT for the second gen which will be in classic Apple style vastly improved and supported for longer.
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Those talking about GPU performance of M1 would do well to remember WOW is an extraordinarily CPU-bound game. That said, Baldur’s Gate apparently runs extraordinarily well on M1 MacBook Pro. Take from that what you will. I’m also not entirely sure the idea of EGPUs has been canned. I just don’t think it was in their list of priorities for the first go around. There is Thunderbolt in these MacBooks so I’m sure there is SOME kind of EGPU ahead - whether apple makes it, or they support it.
I think the only way Apple makes an GPU not bound to the Mx series is for the Mac Pro, and even then it will be on a MPX slots.
I just can’t picture a world where Apple is ceding anything for their Mx series of chips to anyone. It would be hard for them to argue that “our chips are the best ever seen, well, except for the AMD video chips. Those still bring us out to the schoolyard.”
I also think Apple’s approach to gaming is if we can make what people used to now work better, fine. Apple ceded the gaming race – a race they were never in to begin with – a long time ago. How developers handle Apple Silicon is going to be interesting. Looking at how many noped right out of making apps 64-bit, I can image the Apple Silicon will cull that list even more. While I expect macOS to support Intel for several years – at least 4 – I think next year’s macOS to be the last that has Rosetta 2, and that is being generous. They want to cut that cord as fast as possible.
The problem with an eGPU is the drivers. If Apple stops making drivers for their Mx series of chips for AMD, and refuses AMD to install their drivers on Mx, even with Thunderbolt, an eGPU is just a chunk of metal, in the non-gaming API.
I’m curious to see how Apple approaches gaming at this point… there are some signs that favor the community.
1.) Look at how they stressed the graphical improvements for gaming and the demos
2.) With M1 bringing in iOS nativity, look to Arcade, another section they are starting to give more attention to and push harder than the past. Apple is focusing more and more on services, and gaming is no longer a fringe segment by any means, they’ve got to know if they can get AAA game developers on board to bring titles to their platform they’ll be able cash in BIG.
3.) the VP interview named World of Warcraft, there has to be some level of care in house and special attention to gaming for that particular title to pop into the guys head as he rifled off titles as examples, otherwise it surely would’ve been a list of productivity applications as one would expect.
It’s no crystal ball, but for this optimistic Mac gamer who built a hackintosh dedicated for it, and with the death of hackintosh slowly rolling in via the eventuality of updates for older hardware stopping several years from now, those signs give me a lot of hope.
Very true, though I’d add that if you’ve got insatiable early adopter fever trading in your first gen as soon as the second gen comes out can work out.
It’s definitely apparent that Apple hates scheduling its product releases by anybody else’s clock, so I could totally believe that their lackadaisical approach to graphics power in the past decade or so is a result of having to source their GPUs from other companies.
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Don’t get your hopes up. Apple has shown game titles in their dog and pony shows in the past… and nothing ever came of it.
If you build it, they will come doesn’t apply in this case.
Why?
History my friend.
Remember when we were supposed to go to Metric in the US? The logic of using Metric was undeniable. And yet, something called tooling ended up preventing it from ever happening. What is tooling? Tooling is what is used to manufacture everything. Tooling is based on a unit system. In the US, it’s the Imperial system. The cost for manufacturers to retool everything was going to be astronomical as well as time consuming so we abandoned the idea of going Metric. And we have been Imperial ever since.
In this case, instead of tooling, it’s code. I would go so far as to say that bootcamp was the actual death knell for Macs for gaming because it offered everyone an “out”. We don’t have to write for Mac because they can just boot into Windows and run the game there.
The reality is, there are more of them than us. Even if we had the superior hardware and software, you still would have an uphill climb to get them to take notice.
Gamers in the Windows world are the tooling that drives an entire industry. If you want to play Windows games, you literally have to play it in their world.
And it’s easy to rifle off titles for the Mac platform… because so few have ever been written for it.
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Apple… has always had a complicated relationship with gaming, the true hackers in the company have always embraced it going back to Woz. But the business folks don’t really understand it and don’t design for it per se. Unfortunately since Woz left the majority of the people in control don’t care about desktop gaming. They care only about mobile gaming because that makes them money. If anything the M1 is a cynical attempt to double milk that market by making iOS games available on desktop.
But looking back… the mac has never been exactly gaming dev friendly. Breaks are extremely common with MacOS (using this as a generic term going back to OS 7) where a game that did just fine on one version breaks horribly on the next. Apple has always put the onus on the developer to deal with that, and the cost. That means that a lot of classic mac games, can only be played on retro hardware and OS versions because it’s not financially viable to port them forward.
The best comparison I can find to anyone else on this is oddly Microsoft, who didn’t understand why a team wanted to make an (Direct)XBox and not use most of Windows (Bill let them do it anyway, Balmer wanted to kill the project).
Funny you say that… because the Apple II and Apple IIGS had an amazing number of titles, exceeded only by Commodore… and then Steve Jobs got it killed in favor of the mac. (The Apple IIGS has an extremely MacOS style operating system that was full color long before the mac was.)
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Not just games, generally speaking any company that expects to be able to dump a binary have it work as-is for years or decades on end don’t do well on macOS. TBH I think Windows has set unrealistic expectations for backwards compatibility, because as a dev myself I can say that software is a continuous investment — you can’t just toss an app over the wall and have it act as a never-ending cash pipe.
This is actually a big reason why the old Mac standbys likes Panic and Omni are as loved as they are, because their apps are constantly evolving and perfectly in sync with the platform. You don’t have crap like companies trying to pass off a pile of spaghetti that’s been accumulating duct tape for two decades as a legitimate salable product.
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Good points all, I’ll still keep my death grip on optimistic hope lol
Just got done talking with Apple. The M1 is not supported by WoW
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