Apple has never understood gaming, never will.
They cannot compete against PS5 and Xbox. This is not an easy market to enter, making the hardware itself is just a tiny part of the job.
They cannot compete against PS5 and Xbox. This is not an easy market to enter, making the hardware itself is just a tiny part of the job.
They understand hardware design and have a larger (and more accessible) software distribution platform than the ps5 and Xbox combined.
Many ALREADY use Apple products as a gaming platform.
They have now wiped the floor with CPU performance. If they can provide comparable GPU performance (they are ONLY a generation behind), then I absolutely think they could compete in that arena.
They would if 1) the Apple exclusives could compete with the Microsoft and Sony ones and 2) games would not be mobile stuff but current generation AAA.
Yeah, not in a million years an Apple gaming console would succeed.
Why wouldn't Apple's console be capable (or arguably even better) at running AAA titles? The vast majority of AAA titles aren't platform exclusives.
On top of that, it would seemingly draw less power / generate less heat.
Hell, Apple could release a Nintendo Switch style competitor (that also actually competes with the Xbox and PS) that is purpose built for AAA gaming at home and on the go.
The question is why would a gamer, a hardcore one, not the one that wants to play Candy Crush, spend multiple hundred of dollars and find space in his living room when he already has a PS5 and the new Xbox? What could possibly entice him?
And which game studio would port their game to a console that uses their own API, own OS, and is basically incompatible to anything else? Yes, the PlayStation is its own thing as well, but it's the bloody PlayStation, not some big unknown.
I spend a ton of money on what is basically my hobby, video games, and right now, nothing would make me buy an Apple console. Absolutely nothing. Who cares about performance, show me the game lineup first.
EDIT: One quick word about the Switch: the reason it exists among giants like Sony and Microsoft is because it has Nintendo exclusives, and Nintendo is a common household name and has always been associated with "games for the whole family". Well, the form factor too. But again, the emphasis is on exclusives and game lineup.
I don't really even understand how the noise even is an issue. The only time I actually hear my PS4 being loud is when I stop playing my games and put the console to rest mode, since I won't have any game audio at that point and the fans are still spinning. I've never heard the PS4 over my game audio.
To get to this level, cost would significantly increase, add in expensive cooling and so on and you'll get to a price higher than the consoles. Indeed, the slower Mac Mini is more expensive.
Also, even then the margins would be too low for Apple to be interested.
I assure you it's not comparable to a 1060, and when people start benchmarking them on Vulkan or DirectX instead of decade old OpenGL this is will be apparent.
Obviously we will have to wait for more sophisticated benchmarks that can take advantage of otherwise unsupported features - but based on raw performance, they ARE comparable. That is not even up for debate.
As should be clear - these aren't consoles. But apple certainly have the knowledge to create one.
Markup on apple products is typically 50%. That gives a LOT of wiggle room for them to meet the pricing of your famed loss leaders (that are ALREADY a generation behind at release!).
If you want to know just how much of a disaster NVidia GPUs are on Mac OS, you can test them on Windows vs Mac OS and you will notice a huge difference.
It's so bad that people were working on OpenGL to Metal translation layers.
The 1050Ti is indeed much more powerful than the GPU in the M1, as even on OpenGL, where it is generally 30% slower than the competition vs on DirectX, and even though it has to deal with horribly bad drivers, and even though it's extensions are not fully supported on Mac OS, it stays competitive. And Apple does not have the knowledge to be competitive with AMD in GPUs, not even remotely close.
If you want to look at raw performance, we can. The M1 GPU does 2.6 teraflops. The GPU in the PS5 does 10.28 teraflops.
The PS5 is, in raw performance, 4 times faster than the M1 chip.
The 1050ti is 2.1 teraflops, vs the 2.6 for the M1! Also, M1 GPU has "extensions" that aren't being benchmarked...
> The PS5 is, in raw performance, 4 times faster than the M1 chip.
I already said that the ps5 GPU is a generation ahead of M1, so it is no wonder it is more performant.
Anyway, like I said, we will have to wait for some comparable benchmarks. Not sure how that will ever happen though.
As for the 1050Ti, while it has a bit less raw compute power, it uses many tricks like variable rate shading, streaming memory compression, and vastly faster memory, that the M1 doesn't have.
The difference between those features, exposed via extensions but not used on macOS, is that they actually significantly speed up the rendering of video games. If there were in the M1 chip, I don't know why Apple wouldn't expose them. NVidia does, on every platform except macOS because Apple doesn't want them to.
As for benchmarks, the best you're going to get is a Vulkan benchmark running on the Nvidia card via the native driver and on M1 via MoltenVK.
M1 has "variable rate shading", and "streaming memory compression" (since, at least, A12) - in addition to many, many more features both before and since. I don't understand why you would think otherwise. Go read the docs.
We can't just talk about "faster memory", as the architecture is so completely different. But lets just start by saying that it is DDR4 in the M1 vs DDR3 (GDDR5) in the 1050ti. i.e. its MUCH lower latency, and has a higher bandwidth per module. It is also utilises a unified memory pool. i.e. the CPU can GPU access the same memory - so there is no "transfer" involved. This isn't your "shared memory integrated GPU" of old.
As I said, there is no fair benchmark to compare theses two. Based on openGL, the m1 wins. You think the 1050ti features would make it more performant - I'm saying the m1 has those same features (and more), that also wouldn't be utilised up by a simple openGL benchmark.
By all means enjoy your ps5. It is a great console (I want one myself), and it isn't being threatened by the m1.
But don't deceive yourself into thinking it is something magical, or cutting edge - or that a trillion-dollar computer hardware designer and manufacturer doesn't have the know-how to create something as performant.
Stadia is perfectly capable of running AAA titles (more or less, though it's a pain to develop for, as an Apple ARM box would be).
It's still a miserable failure, because gaming is about understanding a huge ecosystem play and, in many ways, culturally going for a market segment that Apple flat out doesn't like and doesn't understand.
Apple have products other than mobiles - this very article is about one of them...
The PC platform has huge amounts of exclusives, and lots of other advantages that aren't remotely available to Apple's sensibility (end user modding, porn, heavy discounting etc).
Apple would fail miserably at a games console, which is why people have been predicting for years the Apple TV would turn into a games console and it doesn't, because it's a terrible idea and they have no competency in this area, and because to succeed they would have to start doing things completely alien to Apple.
For casual mobile games, which is a whole different segment.
It's like comparing ping pong and tennis.
In the same way Nintendo isn't a super direct competitor to Xbox/PS, I would expect the same of Apple's offering.
People don't want to play mobile games on their TV. They want to watch TV while playing mobile games.
If you combine the existing iOS games (some of which are actually kinda impressive visually) with an actually beefy machine that the AAA titles can easily target (shouldn't be that difficult), you have an offering unlike the others.
Sure, they may not be "real" games according to some, but their opinion is irrelevant to the actual revenue figures.
Both of whom spent a lot.