The issue is that people compare games running under emulated x86 and emulated graphics APIs, when making claims about what the SOC is capable of.
There's nothing wrong with knowing how well the SOC performs when emulating games, but if you claim to be talking about what the SOC can do, then include the performance of native games as well.
Bigger overhead for AAA games is likely due to emulation of DirectX or Vulkan on Metal, but that's just Apple's stubborn choice to have it that way.
In the end, none of that matters. I won't be playing Cyberpunk at 14fps, without RTX, and comforting myself that the SoC could do maybe 28fps without emulation. Lower-tier Nvidia cards perform better, even when paired with slower CPUs.
This is a weird take. None of he major gaming platforms use the same graphics API.
Microsoft has DirectX on Windows and XBox, Apple has Metal on iOS and Macs, Sony has Gnmx on Playstation.
It's like saying Android gaming is terrible because they didn't use DirectX.
On another note, problems that keep major AAA games from running on Linux (Anti-cheat solutions for example) will block many games from running ob MacOS, too.
By all means, share a list of XBox games that only use Vulkan.
WINE on Linux is able to match the performance of games on Windows, so the DirectX translation layer shouldn't be a problem either.
So it's not unreasonable to assume that the M2 just doesn't have a GPU capable of running these games. And it's really not that surprising that an integrated GPU doesn't match the performance of a dedicated GPU.
I mean… No?
CPU bottleneck is super common, especially on slightly older engine bases like source or unreal.
I think you are assuming big AAA games at 4k, which puts an especially big strain on the GPU.
Maybe I’ve been developing games too long, but we are constantly fighting CPU bottlenecks.
Game developers are much more willing to run their work on lower end machines if they'll get paid for it, or at least they're more capable of tuning for it.
Without including comparison data on native games? It's entirely unreasonable.
For instance, The native version of the DirectX 12 game "The Medium" was shown running side by side with the emulated version at WWDC, and the native version had double the frame rate.
As long as AAA games are published on the Xbox Series S and shipping with graphics settings they will have no problem when running natively on an M2 chip.