I remember something a few months back from Epic saying they were working very closely with Apple for ray tracing support and other things.
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Apple iPhone 15 Live Event "Wonderlust"
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LodeRunner
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Yes, Unreal 5.3 now can do Lumen and other stuff on Macs in hardware that previously were software only or not working at all.
Mchart
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That could be a big deal for performance reasons if true. It's possible that future Apple SOC's will be raytracing monsters when paired with UE5 if they are working hand in hand optimizing the metal API.
The hardware RT makes me really glad I’m holding out for an M3 MacBook. Not that I’d treat an Air or even a Pro as a gaming laptop, but it’s nice to have the option.
As it is, the big update for me at the event was the Apple Watch Series 9, since I’ve worked my S5 so hard that the battery is clearly run down.
As it is, the big update for me at the event was the Apple Watch Series 9, since I’ve worked my S5 so hard that the battery is clearly run down.
I'm on S5 as well. Looking at the Ultra 2.
Just cause you out here rolling deep in your Jnco jeans doesn't mean the rest of us have forgotten about the golden age of phone sizes when things were reasonable
A I
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JNCO is making a comeback!
UnknownSouljer
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Darunion
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These giant press release events for a phone always seems so underwhelming. Like no one can do big different things anymore so its just "oh yay another phone another number at the end of its name".
I enjoy my iphone, ive enjoyed my samsungs as well. But maybe im just old and crotchety but is there anyone that sits and watches any phone release and gets excited like the fake cheering people at these events? Just want to know if there actually is a person siting there going "48MEGAPIXEL and a SAPPHIRE CRYSTAL LENS COVER!!!!! F*** YES!!!" and calls up their carrier to preorder as soon as they can?
I mean i got that way with my htc inspire 4g. My first 4g phone and had spectacular sound both built in speaker and headphone jack audio imo. It did have 2.1 sound IIRC.
I enjoy my iphone, ive enjoyed my samsungs as well. But maybe im just old and crotchety but is there anyone that sits and watches any phone release and gets excited like the fake cheering people at these events? Just want to know if there actually is a person siting there going "48MEGAPIXEL and a SAPPHIRE CRYSTAL LENS COVER!!!!! F*** YES!!!" and calls up their carrier to preorder as soon as they can?
I mean i got that way with my htc inspire 4g. My first 4g phone and had spectacular sound both built in speaker and headphone jack audio imo. It did have 2.1 sound IIRC.
Stop mocking me for my Wranglers, you monster!
I remember the 2.4" screen on my BlackJack II. It was lame. I'd carry an 8" tablet if it were feasible.
DukenukemX
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It's funny that people say Apple doesn't care for gaming, but why else would Apple put Ray-Tracing into their hardware? I also don't see this feature being used often as hardly anyone is porting their games to Mac. I don't think Apple's toolkit would even get Windows games with Ray-Tracing working on Mac. Just Apple finally catching up to what Nvidia did back in 2018 and what AMD did back in 2020.
Apple cares for gaming revenue, gaming on iOS makes a crapload of money that Apple gets a big cut right off the top. Arcade revenue has also gone up every year and this year was no exception. Apple is slowly building a massive gaming platform, and the more tools they give developers the more options those developers have to build in the Apple ecosystem and the more developers Apple can attract.
UT5 titles in the coming years are seemingly the bulk of the releases. Getting that running natively on Mac with full RT and HDR support is a huge step.
DukenukemX
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Yes on iOS, not MacOS.
Yes but how many of those UT5 titles are coming to Mac? Biggest game coming to Mac is Baldur's Gate 3.
Randall Stephens
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I'd like smaller one, but these eyes aren't young anymore. Totally agree with your PoV.
LodeRunner
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We're focused on games, but keep in mind that UE5 is used in major media workflows now as well. Up to now, if you were working on a UE5 project, you weren't doing it on a Mac. So no reason to spend thousands of dollars per unit on Mac workstations (whatever they have as a workstation these days).
Given that Apple does seem intent on unifying as much of their code and hardware base as possible, it makes sense for the iPhone and iPad hardware to have similar, if reduced capability, in relation to the desktop and laptop lines.
Darunion
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I like smaller phones. I got the 13 pro and the wife got the 13mini. I would have bought the mini but the camera was just not up to what I wanted. The mini is a great size phone for me. Anything important i just go do on my desktop anyways.
But the lines between iOS and MacOS blur a little more every year.
How long you think until iOS apps are able to run inside MacOS? The currently have different stores or at least different parameters that make up the searches so apps not tagged as being for MacOS don’t appear but what if they could suddenly run inside a container screen natively.
But an M2 for for all it’s worth when it’s special accelerators and such are taken away runs slightly better for gaming than a 1660S, no slouch for sure, but not good enough for anything modern.
MacOS proper for years has not been a thought for gamers, and much of their market is creative types and work environments, important demographics for sure but also ones surveyed to game on PlayStation so for the most part their needs are covered. So it’s not something the active Mac consumer base has wanted. That is slowly shifting and Apple is trying to deliver, their success rate to date is for lack of a better word abysmal but they are building the tools. And if you build it, they will come, keeping them there is the hard part, and Apple seems to be ensuring they have the tools in place so when the developers do arrive they like what they see.
Apple needs the M3 to deliver closer to a 3060 than a 1660S and need to ensure that engines like Unreal can make use of their fixed function and acceleration chips. Once they can deliver that they have an actual chance of pulling something off, but until they can deliver that MacOS gaming is an afterthought at most.
But BG3 is all they need for this year, I mean sweet Jesus is it good, even Opera is pushing it, my mom wants that game. And she can barely manage the ones she plays on Facebook.
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Not even reduced, iPad Pro, iPad Air, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro. All using identical SoC’s currently with the M1 chips but realistically there is not a lot different between the M1 and the M2. Apple is quickly unifying their hardware base as well.
Unreal is also needed for much of the work at Disney and Sony as well for using the Infinity Stage Sets, as those run Unreal 5, and are currently powered by Nvidia. Those stages are getting built fast and Apple can’t afford to let Nvidia claim that work space from them. It’s a slippery slope, first Nvidia is powering the stages, then the tools that make the models that go in them, procurement contracts are funny that way. If the big studios step away from Apple then others slowly do too, then the job seekers get the hardware they are using and schools start pushing them as well, it’s not a fast process to change but it’s hard to stop once it does.
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UnknownSouljer
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To a certain degree this is already possible but it has been left up to devs thus far. It only takes a couple of box ticks and a recompile to end up on macOS vs iOS. Of course optimizing for desktop resolutions (or vice versa) and having the correct inputs be mapped are also necessary for proper desktop vs mobile versioning, but in terms of simply getting something to run, that’s all it takes.
I think that’s interesting as well. Base level hardware being what it is vs top end hardware. I’ll make the leap and assume what you’re trying to say is that Apple’s value proposition doesn’t make any sense when a base level M2 Mac Mini (or Air or whatever), costs $1000 and has a graphics card, in terms of gaming performance, similar to the ones you mentioned. Which I think is fair.
But then, also what visual fidelity is acceptable? And what level of gamer they’re trying to attract? A lot could be done simply by moving to ArmV9 and building drivers again and simply running Radeon GPUs or eGPU’s (or internal in the case of Mac Pro) or both. If Apple refuses and is dead set on single monolithic architecture, then they’re going to have to build a much bigger chip. Intel is already eclipsing Apple in terms of GPU performance with their discrete GPUs.
Apple also has the money to afford top CPU and GPU chip design. And hopefully the people at the top recognize all of these challenges and are making appropriate suggestions/steering of the company to be able to keep up and stay competitive.
Value proposition for sure isn’t there, but also the performance isn’t up to snuff, if they can’t put up the performance of a PS5 then why bother. No Dev is going to put in that work to cut down a game that far for such a small market.
I mean a fair number of my friends and colleagues game on Xeons and Threadripper’s because they also work from home. A 5995wx and an RTX6000 are not at all price competitive frame for frame but they need to be able to do their jobs and they want to play games, but space/money doesn’t afford them the ability to have dedicated rigs for both. So value is of lesser concern in this space, because livelihood trumps hobbies when it comes to needs.
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UnknownSouljer
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With the exception perhaps RT performance, I think Apple is close in regards to performance similar to a PS5. They, after all, are getting multiple current gen (by PS5 standards) games to come to iOS, which I mentioned previously. They are certainly close to being there with their higher end Max/Ultra silicon. But obviously that’s significantly more expensive than base level hardware.
It will be interesting to see what M3 brings to the table. M3 being what M2 was supposed to be. Since they’ve had more than a year and another generation, I’m certain of course that it has been substantially changed to be even more performative (since they’ve had more dev time) while TSMC 3nm was getting spun up. And as we know, Apple bought all of 3nm production for the time being. Certainly I can see big improvements to their GPU’s being a part of that.
Apple may have all their 3nm supply but they lost out on the advanced packaging to Nvidia so they don't get to do some of the things they wanted, TSMC also didn't keep up their end on increasing their capacity there, but Intel forced them on that when they bought out ASML's entire supply for the next year and change. So M3 at launch is going be be very different than it's initial designs may have called for before the N3 delays and production problems.
Apple can deliver similar performance to a PS5, but only if you are using all their accelerators and fixed functions while running in native with no Rosetta translations, which is a tall order for many studios right now for the off chance of selling a few more units as the investment for most engines does not at all balance out there. UE5 changes that I believe, but I also believe that the current hardware configs for most MacOS devices would choke on those announced titles, 8GB shared system, and GPU memory is not enough for them, the 8GB configuration makes up something like 70% of the M1 and M2 devices in the wild be it iOS or MacOS, and that is the significant bottleneck existing on that platform.
UnknownSouljer
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Unified RAM is only a straight up systems benefit as far as I can see. It’s one of the main advantages of Apple’s ARM design. It makes Apple’s memory subsystems a massive leap faster than x86 (in this one area). While maximum RAM could be argued is an issue (that is if you only have 8GB as compared to a whopping 96GB), I think it also comes down to optimization and performance targets.
As far as optimizations vs not and whether or not it’s worth it or not, is purely up to devs and is a chicken vs the egg problem. The great advantage of Apple’s ecosystem vs PC ecosystem is that Apple’s hardware platform is a lot easier to test and validate. There are logarithmically fewer configurations to test for if indeed they want to target a specific configuration. And indeed if they want to target M1 8GB, they could easily make a profile for that vs trying to target “low settings” on a PC which contains two (or three) graphics cards vendors, 50+ CPUs, at least a dozen motherboard chipsets. In other words if they want to make 1080p low settings available to M1 as a given platform and have it hit 60fps, they can more or less guarantee that level of performance across every Mac machine with pretty low effort (relatively speaking). At least compared to PC counterparts.
The chicken and the egg part comes on needing games to attract gamers and it being a large unknown how many people would choose to play games on Macs. And I think that the percentage of people willing to play at least certain types of games on Mac is much higher than people here in the hardcore gaming community believe. Certainly Larian sees the point in making BG3 come to Mac. But an even bigger, more audacious move, might’ve been porting DOS:2 to iPad in its complete special edition state (and it’s actually cheaper than desktop versions at $24.99, and graphically it looks/runs the same!). And Civ6, which I would be willing to buy again on iPad if not for Firaxis’ way of nickel and diming purchases (I would probably be willing to pay $25 one time purchase for all the content).
Anyway. My tl;dr is that the PC maxum of Ultra graphics on everything isn’t really based in reality even on the PC platform. This is coming to light with people playing Starfield as an example. Ultra is supposed to be for future hardware IMHO. And playing games on Low/Med is more than acceptable to hit performance targets. If games can hit 1080p/60 ”low” settings on M1, that is more than enough to get the ball rolling. WIth hardware update cycles coming every 18 months from Apple, 3-5 years from now (post M3 I mean), the hardware landscape of Apple + ARM will look radically different than today. In the interim, I expect that Apple will continue to pay devs to port, and I think the right devs will find out that porting to Mac will be incredibly lucrative all themselves (like Larian, and originally Blizzard before their buyout, Valve, and ironically Epic [despite all of their legal entanglements with Apple]).
Mchart
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I will tell you that my max-spec M2 Max 14 MacBook Pro runs games at about the equivalent to a decent PC with something on-par with around a 2060-ish type of GPU. Problem is just general lack of game support, but the games with full MacOS/ARM/Metal compatibility run quite well. BG3 as an example I can run to a 1440 display with basically medium/high settings with basically 60 FPS.
If Apple does the work to include a DLSS type features baked into Metal and their work with UE5, it'll be a pretty big deal.
If Apple does the work to include a DLSS type features baked into Metal and their work with UE5, it'll be a pretty big deal.
A I
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Do a lot of people use their Apple phones without cases? Mine's been in one since day one with a screen protector and I've dropped it at least 50 times. I have medical conditions that contribute to this but a slight bulk on the case, even on my max, seems like a better option than a broken screen or damaged body.
UnknownSouljer
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Right, exactly. The higher end configurations are more than enough for people who use their machines for work and casually game. That same machine also would easily hit CS:GO at 120fps and likely Valorent (if it was on macOS) the same.
They already have. I’m just not certain if it’s in UE 5 yet. Here is the top search engine result, but there are more in-depth articles than Tom’s should you want it.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-metalfx-upscaling
Statistically? No. This is why even Apple sells first party cases because they recognize people who don’t use cases are the extreme minority and they might as well make more money from first party accessories. I’ve seen people not use cases out in the wild, but I would venture to say it‘s far less than 1%.
A I
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This is me in a nutshell, new PC hardware all day every day. New phone? Every hopefully 5+ years when they break.
I have some managers here who are very adamant about their 2 year upgrade cycle and I swear when I get them a new phone they put that shit in their calendars because they are on it.
I’ve already got 4 messages in my inbox asking that their 13’s be upgraded to a 15, meanwhile I’m here being a basic bitch with a busted 12. Super tempted to upgrade myself to a 15 pro, and tell them their upgrades aren’t in the budget this year. CFO said sure as long as he gets the Max, he’s still on an XR because his old eyes needed the screen size.
Not 100% if he was joking or not, but he does need a new phone regardless his battery lasts like 20 min. His case has a charging pack built in and that’s the only reason it’s usable.
LightsOut41
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It’s beyond pathetic that an $800 phone is stuck with a 60Hz screen in 2023.
Mchart
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Is it? If you want the better screen you get the Pro model.
Randall Stephens
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What sort of ray tracing performance are we looking at here? 4060Ti or last gen?
Lifelite
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Eh, it evens out for me.
Buy a phone every 2 years for around 400-500 bucks after selling my old phone vs buying a phone full price every 4 years after the non-replaceable battery can't hold a charge for shit. Aside from the annoyance with selling shit, upgrading every 2 years seems more economical and less frustrating.
LightsOut41
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It is. And then you have to pay $1000 for a 120Hz screen. Ridiculous.
I haven’t looked, however I can’t imagine the price point is the same on the Android side.
Mchart
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I'm willing to bet 90%+ of iPhone users don't care.
A I
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I can see that, my moto was worthless by the time I upgraded, not that it was a high end phone to begin with.
It's not terribly different, flagship to flagship comes out in the wash.
A I
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Don’t most phones get financed into plans anyway? I doubt too many people fret about a couple hundred dollars and just see an extra few dollars a month.
Mchart
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Most people just don't need the pro features - And that includes the 120hz display TBH. I don't see the point of making it in the 'base' product.
UnknownSouljer
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Okay? And if it had one, would you buy one? No?
Then who gives a shit?