Apple’s new M2 chips introduced this week, which will “help console-excellent gaming (opens in new tab).” So claims Apple, but is it real? What does it even suggest?
Unsurprisingly, specified this Apple we are chatting about, no additional details are offered. Apple isn’t going to say which activity console it might be contemplating of, permit alone any other components like the video game in query, resolutions, refresh premiums, just about anything definitely.
But we’ll take Apple at its term and review the new chips to the most current consoles. In pure graphics rendering terms, prime of the current console pile is the Microsoft Xbox Sequence X (opens in new tab). Its AMD RDNA 2-derived GPU is fantastic for 12.1 one-precision FP32 TFLOPS.
Now, TFLOPS is just 1 measure of performance, that of the pixel-processing shader cores. There are loads of other important metrics, like texture processing or memory bandwidth, that lead to the vital conclusion result, specifically frame charge.
Also, it can be challenging to examine GPUs throughout application platforms and APIs. 10 TFLOPs on a console is just not pretty the identical issue as 10TFLOPs managing on DirectX in Windows or Metallic in MacOS.
But as a tough tutorial to the gaming graphics ability of a specified GPU, it provides a realistic steer. With all that property retaining squared absent, how do those people new M2 chips stack up?
The top rated M2 chip is the M2 Max, with its 38 GPU cores, up from 32 GPU cores on the aged M1 Max. All advised, it really is rated at 13.6 TFLOPS. Yup, that is somewhat a lot more than the Xbox Series X. What’s a lot more, the M2 Max has good bandwidth in and out of that GPU. Its shared memory architecture provides 400GB/s of overall bandwidth for the GPU and CPU.
That is approximately in the similar ballpark as the Xbox Series X, which peaks at 560GB/s for 10GB of its 16GB complete memory allocation and 336GB/s for the remaining 6GB.
Of system, the quickest Laptop GPUs blow all of this things out of the drinking water. The Nvidia RTX 4090 (opens in new tab) is great for just under 83 TFLOPS and packs just more than 1TB/s of memory bandwidth. The RTX 4080 (opens in new tab)? That is 49 TFLOPS and 717GB/s.
Possibly the closest doing Personal computer GPU, in terms of raw TFLOPS, is AMD’s Radeon RX 6700 XT (opens in new tab), which clocks in at 13.2TFOPS backed up by 384GB/s of bandwidth.
On the other hand, these are discrete GPUs and arguably not a honest comparison to what, with the M2 loved ones, are GPUs built-in with CPU and other features into a comprehensive SoC. Perhaps a fairer comparison would be AMD’s most current notebook APU, codenamed Phoenix and declared at CES (opens in new tab)? That sports activities an RDNA 3-based mostly built-in GPU that achieves 4.3 TFLOPS.
So those new M2 chips do include some quite spectacular graphics hardware, primarily for built-in GPUs, which is broadly similar with the newest consoles and some respectable desktop GPU components, as well.
Apple’s chips are also searching fairly unique when it comes to effectiveness. Apple promises up to 22 several hours of battery lifetime with the M2 Max fitted to its most current 16-inch MacBook Pro. That may well be fairly optimistic, but even slashed in fifty percent that is epic battery existence for a laptop computer with desktop 6700 XT overall performance. Personal computer gaming laptops really don’t even appear near.
You might be still still left with a relatively pitiful collection of online games that are constructed to operate on MacOS and Apple silicon building any discussion of hardware abilities really a lot moot. Acquiring an M2 Mac for gaming is a recipe for around whole disappointment as a consequence. But, grudgingly, we have to confess there is some wonderful graphics grunt in these new M2 chips.