A MacBook Pro with M1 chip is capable of hitting 14 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077, according to a video that has been shared online that shows CD PROJEKT RED’s game running on Apple hardware at Ultra settings. The video follows Apple’s announcement of a new Game Porting Toolkit during this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) event that appears to make it very simple for developers to port Windows games to macOS. Apple’s M1 chip features an eight- or seven-core integrated GPU, although it’s been surpassed by more powerful options that include the newly announced M2 Ultra.
“The new Game Porting Toolkit provides an emulation environment to run your existing unmodified Windows game and you can use it to quickly understand the graphics feature usage and performance potential of your game when running on a Mac,” explained Aiswariya Sreenivassan, an engineering project manager for GPUs and graphics at Apple who spoke during WWDC.
From The Verge:
Apple has created a new Game Porting Toolkit that’s similar to the work Valve has done with Proton and the Steam Deck. It’s powered by source code from CrossOver, a Wine-based solution for running Windows games on macOS. Apple’s tool will instantly translate Windows games to run on macOS, allowing developers to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game.
Mac gaming has been a long running meme among the PC gaming community, despite Resident Evil Village and No Man’s Sky ports being some rare recent exceptions to macOS gaming being largely ignored.
Apple's new game porting toolkit is fantastic. Here's Cyperbunk 2077 running at Ultra on an M1 MacBook Pro 16 GB! pic.twitter.com/hylzMU6U46
— Isaac (@isaacmarovitz) June 6, 2023
Discussion (19 replies)
Join Discussion →For the base level integrated graphics on hardware circa 2020, running through a API translator and Ax86->Arm emulation...
not bad.
I want to talk smack but you have to start somewhere and yeah, for an older iGPU that isn't bad. After watching the video they skim through the settings and it's not totally on ultra, there are more than a few settings on high. Resolution 1440x900
In doing a quick search, I'm sure we have a story here somewhere about this too, but the Steam Deck does ~30-40 on high settings at 1200x800. Here's a vid of it with different settings.
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I bet it could do better if it weren't for the inherent limitations of Apples Metal API significantly choking it.
Still, those 4090 claims by apple were bullshit.
What were those? The M1 tested here was introduced years before the 4090.
I think you're talking about this:
https://www.thefpsreview.com/2022/03/17/surprise-mac-studio-with-m1-ultra-cant-beat-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-contrary-to-apples-claims/
The chip in the OP here is the base M1 - it has 1/8 the GPU cores as the Ultra being compared to a 3090 - so I guess if you multiply 14FPS by 8 you would get a very crude estimate of what a M1 Ultra could run CP at? And not sure how that compares to a 3090 - given that you are still going through an API translator and emulator…
apples and limes (closest thing I could think of to NV)? :ROFLMAO:
That they're getting it running at all is kind of a big deal.
Apple has focused primarily on building out their Arm desktop ecosystem, and gaming was predictably on the back burner. They're showing that they can translate modern DX12 games, and it looks like developers have the tools to do much of that work beforehand too.
It's funny that this came up because I was reading a funny story this morning about Whoopi Goldberg asking Blizzard to get Diablo 4 running on Mac. Evidently, she's a longtime fan of the game.
https://www.ign.com/articles/whoopi-goldberg-really-wants-blizzard-to-release-diablo-4-on-mac
From the Whoopi link:
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D4 running at ~60FPS on the DX12 translator + emulation on a M2 Max.
Those M2 mac's are no joke.
The Game Porting Toolkit was the best news to come out of WWDC by far
Maybe I am thinking 3090. I can't remember. At some point at or around the M1 launch it was compared by Apple to a top end Nvidia GPU. I'll have to google it to refresh my memory.
Peter linked it above. You weren't totally off base.
There was a similar thread over on the H recently where someone (DukeNukemX)quoted Codeweavers attempts at API call translations into Apples Metal as follows:
"In general, Metal does tessellation differently, and is missing geometry shaders and transform feedback. Specific to DirectX 12 and Metal, there is an issue with limits on resources. Generally, games need access to at least one million shader resource views (SRVs). Access to that many SRVs requires resource binding at the Tier 2 level. Metal only supports about 500,000 resources per argument buffer, so Tier 2 resource binding isn’t possible. Metal’s limit of half a million is sufficient for Vulkan descriptor indexing, but not for D3D12. This limitation means CrossOver Mac can't support Tier 2 binding and therefore a lot of DirectX 12 games will not run."
So yeah, translating DX12 into Metal on Apple seems like a real problematic affair that will be hit or miss. Vulkan has more promise.
But then there is this:
"Another problem is that DirectX 12 uses GPU virtual addresses (VAs) to refer to resources for several things; most significantly ray tracing. According to Vulkan, their buffer device address (BDA) extension allows for the creation of complex data structures required for ray tracing, and useful for DirectX 12 porting. However, Apple has yet to add support for VAs or BDAs, insisting that existing argument buffer support is sufficient for what games want to do. While this may be technically true, it requires game designers to make a targeted effort to run on Metal. It is difficult for translation layers (i.e., MoltenVK or VKD3D) to support BDAs/GPU VAs on top of argument buffers, because argument buffers require you to encode the buffer reference into a separate argument buffer, which makes it more comparable to a Vulkan descriptor set or a DirectX 12 descriptor heap."
So who knows, other than Yes, this is a real challenge, and it is impressive that they have gotten it to work at all.
Apple have done a lot of things right lately, but their Metal API seems to be the exception, and is holding them back. It's not that it is bad per se, but it is different enough from everything out there that translation layers are very challenging to make work as is porting. You really have to write the thing from the ground up with Apple in mind if you want to run it well on Apple.
All of that said, even if the translation layer were perfect (never going to happen) eschewing differences in architectures and just looking at raw computing power for the GPU we have the following:
M2 Max chip = 13.6 teraflops
2080ti = 12.6
3060 = 13
3090 = 36
4090 = 82.6
(Summarized by Nenu in that same thread)
So we are essentially dealing with 3060 levels of performance at best, which is nothing to scoff at for a built in GPU in a machine from a brand that does not have a gaming focus (I mean compare it to Intel IGP's and AMD's APU's) but it is also not going to excite any enthusiast gamers, and it may make Apple fans a little disappointed considering how they are used to bragging about how superior the hardware their daddy's credit card bought them is.