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Is there any evidence that running under Rosetta impacts GPU performance measurably? Shaders are compiled on the fly for a given GPU so draw calls coming in from native vs emulated shouldn't have a big impact unless the CPU is the bottleneck.

GPUs are usually the performance bottleneck at 4k so Rosetta may not even have a measurable impact on framerate for some of the tests. Beyond that, what games are out there that have otherwise identical implementations that run on Windows/x86 and MacOS/Arm?

Why compare games at all? It is a really common use of GPUs so Apple claiming just "faster" rather than "faster in X use case" or "more FP computations per second" opens them up to gaming comparisons.

It's not just Adobe or games, takes 3D rendering for example, both Redshift and Cycle are now using Metal (the Metal backend for Cycle was even submitted by Apple themselves), Nvidia's GPUs absolutely destroy their (supposed) M1 equivalents, with or without using the ray tracing hardware.

https://youtu.be/HF_rMjjPoPs?t=118 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS_uPukPuo4 https://youtu.be/i4CuZqXA4BM?t=359

In Blenders case, there are still several patches left to merge in and even the Blender page strictly mentions that it's early integration without much performance work done yet.

> Strangely, their review covers the fact that the Adobe suite of software had to be updated to support ARM and Metal before you could see the full performance of the hardware without emulation, but they completely ignore this for games.

When do you reckon that Tomb Raider is getting updated for ARM?

If a game isn't relevant enough to port to new hardware, is it really relevant enough to benchmark with?

Yes because consumers want to know how the hardware performs for their existing catalog of games, many if not all of which won't be ported? Obviously depends on what you play etc

There's nothing wrong with reporting the level of performance you'll get for emulated games too, but the claim being made is that the hardware can't do better than that.

To make the headline accurate, you have to add a disclaimer, going from:

>Apple's new M1 Ultra isn't faster than an RTX 3090

to

>Apple's new M1 Ultra isn't faster than an RTX 3090 when running x86 games under emulation

Or, more comprehensively:

>Apple's new M1 Ultra isn't faster than an RTX 3090 when running x86 games under emulation or when directly comparing Geekbench scores

Actually, I think I see why they went with the shorter title.

Why not include testing of a native game, like World of Warcraft or Balder's Gate 3 in addition to testing an x86 game under emulation?

They are making it sound like the performance of an emulated x86 game on OpenGL is the only level of performance you can ever expect.

That's probably why they included the Mac-first, native Geekbench score.

They also test the native performance of Photoshop's notoriously computationally intensive brushes.

>Ultra also enabled Alex to use features of Photoshop that he’s never been able to use before. The process that blew all of our professionals’ minds was the brushes. Alex was able to paint a white layer with a media brush, and it was instant — it really looked like he was painting with a physical brush. That tool requires so much computing power that many current machines can’t handle it. It was a breeze for the Studio.

“Having a machine like this in my daily process would change everything,” Alex told me after his testing period.

https://www.theverge.com/22981815/apple-mac-studio-m1-ultra-...

That would have been a much better take to include than the graphics apple shared in the announcement. Probably would have sold more units faster, not that it was needed.

How is this relevant to a comparison between the 3090 and the M1 Ultra? They're comparing it to the Macs they already own.

Because Adobe software doesn't tap into CUDA if you have an NVidia graphics card on a PC?

Tomb Raider is only relevant in this discussion because it has a very detailed and fine built-in benchmark system. Not every game does have that (like neither WoW or Baldur's Gate 3)

WoW didn't suddenly lose the ability to report framerates.

No but you can't compare it.

Tomb Raider loads a pre-rendered scene that is the same every single time you start the benchmark thus you can compare it across systems. That's the point of it and hence became a staple alongside with other games (some games are even notorious about it because that's their only use case [0])

WoW doesn't have anything like that. And everything can affect the frame rate from the mobs in the zone, the weather, the unique players with unique transmog, the raids are different every single time etc.

It's not just loading the game and there you have X framerate and that's the score, that's not a benchmark.

0, https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/01/the-game-thats-more-known-...

Which would be fine, if the story was:

>Apple's new M1 Ultra isn't faster than an RTX 3090 when running x86 games under emulation

But it's not.

Perhaps, but this discussion would be moot if Apple did the same, “M1 GPU faster that RTX [under specific scenario]”. But they didn’t do that and here we are.

Are you expecting Intel or AMD to announce a new chip and only tell you the level of performance you can expect while running ARM software under emulation?