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Comment by kllrnohj | Hacker News Reader

The gaming performance of the existing M1 GPUs is, well, crap (like far behind the other laptop competition, to say nothing of desktop GPUs). The Ultra probably isn't changing that, since it's very unlikely to be a hardware problem and instead a software ecosystem & incentives problem.

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I don’t think the performance is that bad. On a whim I tried running WoW on a 16” M1 Pro MBP and it consistently got FPS higher than the refresh rate (120hz) with the game rendering at 1x scale and most effects maxed out. Granted, that’s not as good as what you’d get with a mobile RTX 3080 or something, but it’s nothing to sneeze at for a laptop that doesn’t get scorching hot and doesn’t sound like a leaf blower when being pushed.

I could definitely see the Max and Ultra with a beefier cooling system (like the Studio’s) having pretty respectable performance.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

M1 Max struggles to keep up with an RTX 3060 mobile.

Now that's with the overhead of Rosetta 2 and all that, so it's of course "not fair" for the M1. But that's also the current reality of the market, so ya know.

WoW isn't exactly the pinnacle of demanding performance. It's like saying you can run counter strike at 200FPS: congrats, so can everyone else, without paying $2000

Yes, it's "crap" not because GPU is slow but rather that most triple A title games are optimized for Windows. So it's difficult to expect a good performance from a game that runs with API conversion layer(s) (Windows -> Mac) and then CPU emulation (x86 -> arm).

So publishers/developers need to make more native games. Even though every Mac port will probably make 1/10th revenue of a Windows title I guess Mac users would be happy to pay more for better games. I certainly would.

It is a video memory problem. Unified memory is nice but you need GDDR6 to feed a powerful GPU. But you don't want GDDR6 for the cpu.

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