WWDC 2023 Thread

[exoticspice1]

You also imply that in order to succeed, Apple needs a gaming division and that gaming division needs to concentrate on cheap powerful gpus, aka the same market that’s “nuts”. I don’t think those two line up.

The gaming divison needs to focus on gaming developer relations, not performace leave that to the hardware team. Yes at least make the base M3 thats coming out in Q4/2023 or Q1 2024 as powerful as a PS5. An $1099 M3 Air thats as powerful as a PS5 in GPU performace will turn heads, that to me and a lot of others is what we want at the very least. Has Apple even made a AAA game? Does it own any AAA game studios? They say that gaming is important but don't want to any actual work.

There are over new 8 AAA games coming by the end of this year(after June 12th 2023) and not ONE is coming the Mac. We are getting a native port of a game from 2019 tho. yay...
This is why dev relations are important, its what made the App Store good.

Nvidia and AMD don't have cheap powerful GPUs anymore, the last good midrange GPU was the GTX 1060

 

[Jimmyjames]

The gaming divison needs to focus on gaming developer relations, not performace leave that to the hardware team. Yes at least make the base M3 thats coming out in Q4/2023 or Q1 2024 as powerful as a PS5.

Why? If pcs don’t need that, and Nintendo don’t need that, why would Apple? For years people gamed without 4090 performance.

An $1099 M3 Air thats as powerful as a PS5 in GPU performace will turn heads, that to me and a lot of others is what we want at the very least.

Apple doesn’t care what pc gamers want. Nor should they, by your own account, that market is “nuts”.

Has Apple even made a AAA game? Does it own any AAA game studios? They say that gaming is important but don't want to any actual work.

What? After WWDC you can say they haven’t done actual work? Holy shit.

There are over new 8 AAA games coming by the end of this year(after June 12th 2023) and not ONE is coming the Mac. We are getting a native port of a game from 2019 tho. yay...
This is why dev relations are important, its what made the App Store good.

Nvidia and AMD don't have cheap powerful GPUs anymore, the last good midrange GPU was the GTX 1060

What are you even saying now? You just spent ages saying Apple can’t compete because they don’t make cheap powerful gpus like Nvidia/amd and now you’re saying nvidia and amd don’t make cheap powerful gpus anymore.

I’m done with this conversation.

 

[Cmaier]

The gaming divison needs to focus on gaming developer relations, not performace leave that to the hardware team.

They are doing this directly already for a year. You’d be surprised who they are reaching out to and who they are working with. It’s touching all parts of the company. Apple doesn’t do divisions.

 

[exoticspice1]

They are doing this directly already for a year. You’d be surprised who they are reaching out to and who they are working with. It’s touching all parts of the company. Apple doesn’t do divisions.

This happens every few years at Apple but Gabe the CEO of Valve said that its amounts to nothing at the end, as Linus explains.

 

[Jimmyjames]

Seems like there has been an improvement in the media encoders of the Ultra. Previously, the two encoders could work on two different files, but not one. Now both encoders can simultaneously work on one export, making things much faster (~50%).

 

[exoticspice1]

What? After WWDC you can say they haven’t done actual work? Holy shit.

None of this would have been possible without the work from the opensource community, all Apple did was add the DX12 to Metal Patch. Did they even donate to crossover? They are doing the bare minimum.

 

[Jimmyjames]

This happens every few years at Apple but Gabe the CEO of Valve said that its amounts to nothing at the end, as Linus explains.

LTT is talking nonsense as usual.

 

[Cmaier]

This happens every few years at Apple but Gabe the CEO of Valve said that its amounts to nothing at the end, as Linus explains.

No, what they are currently doing is something they haven’t done before. I know things he doesn’t.

 

[dada_dave]

LTT is talking nonsense as usual.

Reading the video transcript, the video is not so bad … the title is clickbait, but the full title on YouTube adds “… but that’s changing” and for an LTT video on Mac gaming it’s relatively optimistic. I’m not sure that this supports the position that @exoticspice1 thought it did?

 

[theorist9]

John Gruber interviews John Ternus, Mike Rockwell, Craig Federighi, and Greg Joswiak to discuss Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2023:


A lot of the responses were political, as expected, where the Apple folks don't really answer the question and/or spin it. But one answer that was clear and direct was by Ternus about expandable graphics, starting at 24:11:
Gruber: Are there technical barriers to having expandable graphic through PCI that would be only used for compute as opposed to video? Or is that just a design choice?
Ternus: I think, I mean, fundamentally, we've built our architecture around this shared memory model and that optimization. And so it's not entirely clear to me how you'd bring in another GPU and do so in a way that is optimized for our systems. It just hasn't been, it hasn't been a direction that we wanted to pursue.

Another interchange, at 22:40:
Gruber: One, I mean, obviously industry wide, the theme of the year clearly is AI and AI training. And that whole area, it seems like all of the compute takes place on graphic cards. And so I'm just wondering with this new Mac Pro, what is the message to Mac users, Pro Mac users who are looking to experiment or if it's after work to do their own AI training. Is the idea that they're best off renting GPUs in the cloud and doing that, that that's not something you envision as something you do on the desktop in front of you? Is the answer that they should buy a Windows PC? I mean, that doesn't-- That doesn't seem like-- [LAUGHTER]
Ternus: Look, NVIDIA is doing a good job with that. There's no doubt about it. We wanted to focus on the things that are most important to our customers, and we do those things well.

[To which I would have responded: So are you saying you don't you consider those interested in GPGPU compute to be among your customers?]

Gruber also asked about gaming, saying, essentially "we've heard this before". In response, the Apple folks said this time it really will be different, because every AS Mac is a a serious gaming machine. They added that, internally, within the company, there is a lot of excitement about this.

And at 29:37 Gruber asked about whether Apple just wants to make fast&efficient CPU's, or would really like to have the fastest desktop CPU, period. Ternus's response here seemed to be a bit of a political dodge:
Gruber: But what if your concern is that what you want is you want Apple to be making the fastest CPUs in personal computing period full stop. And I know that Apple Silicon's, at the very highest level, the advantage that it has, the profound advantage, that seems to, if anything, only be growing,
is performance per watt. And performance at almost every other tier is also good on its own. not just performance per watt is great and you're going to get this great efficiency and battery life, but yeah, it's fast. It's fast, fast, fast, and everything is snappy. But what if what you really want is for Apple to make the race car of computing? Is that still something that you guys are like hungry for?
Ternus: Yeah. And I think, I mean, we kind of touched on it before. There's, you can say you want to make the most performant thing. There's a bunch of different ways to look at that. And we clearly have examples where we are hands down the most performance solution with M2 Ultra. And so we want to keep pushing on those. We want to find other areas that we can make better. But I don't think we want to get all hung up on the legacy architecture of how many of this do you have, how many of that do you have, because we're bringing real benefit that's measurable that people can see.

 

[leman]

Right but most don't do that highly complex scenes that require 48GB+. For high ending gaming an RTX 4080/90 will be enough. Apple wants to get into PC AAA gaming market and you cannot do that with middling GPU performance even though you got access lots of VRAM.

The Ultra and even the Max are irrelevant to gaming. Just too expensive. Base M-series is where it is. And with MetalFX the M2 Air is capable of running pretty much any game at decent settings.

If your talking production and AI no one is leaving Nvidia any time soon.

This is very true, although Apple does have some advantage on large datasets. Even if their performance is 1/3 of Nvidia, for some models having large amount of RAM matters. I can imagine that for some use cases M2 Ultra can end up being cheaper.

I've been curious about this myself. As you know, this is something that was mentioned as a theoretical advantage since the inception of AS—that it afforded substantially more effective VRAM. Since then, there's been ample time to test this and determine how often this theoretical benefit translates into real-world practice, but I've not seen any published reports.

Are they any classes of GPU-limited tasks that have been demonstrated to run faster on an M1 Max (64 GB RAM) than whatever the cost-equivalent RTX is (say a 3080 Ti, 12 GB VRAM), or on an M1 Ultra (128 GB RAM) than, say, an 3090 Ti (24 GB VRAM). And if so, how common are they? I.e., are they more than just corner cases?

I remember reading that M-series outperforms Nvidia on Disney Moana Island scene, but unfortunately, that's not something reviewers like to focus on...

 

[theorist9]

I remember reading that M-series outperforms Nvidia on Disney Moana Island scene, but unfortunately, that's not something reviewers like to focus on...

Did a bit of searching and found a post by user jujoje on MR from Dec. 17, 2021, in which they cited these results from Maxon's website for rendering the Moana scene with Redshift:

2x 2080ti = 34m:17s
Single 3090 = 21m:45s
2x 3090 = 12m:44s
Apple M1 Max 64gb = 28m:27s

Here's the link, but it requires a Maxon account to access, which I don't have:

Sign in

Login file

id.maxon.net

 

[leman]

Did a bit of searching and found a post by user jujoje on MR from Dec. 17, 2021, in which they cited these results from Maxon's website for rendering the Moana scene with Redshift:

2x 2080ti = 34m:17s
Single 3090 = 21m:45s
2x 3090 = 12m:44s
Apple M1 Max 64gb = 28m:27s

Here's the link, but it requires a Maxon account to access, which I don't have:

Sign in

Login file

id.maxon.net

It would be interesting to see results with M2 and the current software versions...

 

[Cmaier]

Looks like the Mac Pro runs at the same clock as the Studio.

You really have to value cable management to justify that price jump.

 

[Colstan]

Let's be honest, as always this comes down to "Apple won't make a modular gaming desktop PC" That's it. Certain groups want that and refuse to believe anything else is legitimate. They aren't pros usually, they are people who spend time boasting about benchmarks and trolling on r/pcmr.

The PC gaming crowd are the most obnoxious group of spec whores in the tech sphere. I should know, I used to be one. I cared about nonsense stats like terrorflops and gigglehurtz and all of the other talking points and boilerplate pablum that mean nothing during daily use. I hated the Mac, thought it was a toy, not realizing the hypocrisy that gaming PCs are the height of expensive recreational trinkets. I looked down my nose at the Apple cult and derided them for their proprietary parts, strange niche operating system, and turtleneck-clad leader. I was a total PC fanboy, I even owned stock in Microsoft and Intel, back in the day.

I thought like Linus and his cronies, LTT is the temple at which the gaming crowd worship, and their typical response to Mac users amounts to: "Just ditch the computer you enjoy for 90% of its uses and build a PC with one of those overpriced GPUs and the ad-littered OS that even we bitch about constantly!"

Then, Steve Jobs announced the switch to Intel in 2005. Out of curiosity, I put OS X on my custom hotrod gaming PC that I was so proud of, back before "Hackintosh" was a term. A few months later, I had purchased my first Mac mini. Now, I'm on Mac mini number four. My next Mac, and first Apple Silicon model, will either be a high-end Mac mini or a Mac Studio, which are essentially the same form factor and serve a similar market segment. It just depends on how speedy you want your little silver box to be.

As @Cmaier has stated, Apple doesn't care about the niche Hackintosh segment, but it did bring me onboard the Apple ranch; had I never tried OS X on my bog standard PC box, then I'd probably still be suffering in Windows hell, as I repeatedly pushed my boulder up a forlorn hill in Tartarus. Instead, I'm living in the Elysian fields, picking from the foliage of my favorite fruit company.

I don't waste my time fighting it out with the PC crowd, I have better things to do with my time, and just scroll right on by. Getting into spec fights is a Sisyphean endeavor. Never argue with idiots, they'll just bring you down to their level, and then beat you with experience. I only discuss specs when choosing my next Mac, very narrow in scope, and the options for headless Macs are limited.

I'm done with the spec harlots and simply tell them that I'm never going to purchase another PC. That shuts them down in an instant, because then there's no wiggle room for them to slither under.

Life is too beautiful for Windows, too short for Linux, and I don't hate myself enough to go PC ever again. If I wanted to pay good money to be repeatedly abused, then I'd take a trip to the backrooms of the local goth club, it would be a lot cheaper and quicker.

 

[exoticspice1]

The PC gaming crowd are the most obnoxious group of spec whores in the tech sphere. I should know, I used to be one. I cared about nonsense stats like terrorflops and gigglehurtz and all of the other talking points and boilerplate pablum that mean nothing during daily use. I hated the Mac, thought it was a toy, not realizing the hypocrisy that gaming PCs are the height of expensive recreational trinkets. I looked down my nose at the Apple cult and derided them for their proprietary parts, strange niche operating system, and turtleneck-clad leader. I was a total PC fanboy, I even owned stock in Microsoft and Intel, back in the day.

I thought like Linus and his cronies, LTT is the temple at which the gaming crowd worship, and their typical response to Mac users amounts to: "Just ditch the computer you enjoy for 90% of its uses and build a PC with one of those overpriced GPUs and the ad-littered OS that even we bitch about constantly!"

Then, Steve Jobs announced the switch to Intel in 2005. Out of curiosity, I put OS X on my custom hotrod gaming PC that I was so proud of, back before "Hackintosh" was a term. A few months later, I had purchased my first Mac mini. Now, I'm on Mac mini number four. My next Mac, and first Apple Silicon model, will either be a high-end Mac mini or a Mac Studio, which are essentially the same form factor and serve a similar market segment. It just depends on how speedy you want your little silver box to be.

As @Cmaier has stated, Apple doesn't care about the niche Hackintosh segment, but it did bring me onboard the Apple ranch; had I never tried OS X on my bog standard PC box, then I'd probably still be suffering in Windows hell, as I repeatedly pushed my boulder up a forlorn hill in Tartarus. Instead, I'm living in the Elysian fields, picking from the foliage of my favorite fruit company.

I don't waste my time fighting it out with the PC crowd, I have better things to do with my time, and just scroll right on by. Getting into spec fights is a Sisyphean endeavor. Never argue with idiots, they'll just bring you down to their level, and then beat you with experience. I only discuss specs when choosing my next Mac, very narrow in scope, and the options for headless Macs are limited.

I'm done with the spec harlots and simply tell them that I'm never going to purchase another PC. That shuts them down in an instant, because then there's no wiggle room for them to slither under.

Life is too beautiful for Windows, too short for Linux, and I don't hate myself enough to go PC ever again. If I wanted to pay good money to be repeatedly abused, then I'd take a trip to the backrooms of the local goth club, it would be a lot cheaper and quicker.

Well said. I do like to argue about GPU performance but not on the level and scope that the PCMR peeps go to.

I gave up PC gaming because it was so spec focused. The FPS wars and VRAM wars. Ugh it was so draining and add onto that the insane costs. When I got my PS5 it was like I was a kid again. Having a box that does one thing and does it well is not be underestimated and it's fun play.

I want Apple to be good at gaming as I don't Microsoft to buy even more game devs. Their Xbox management is so horrible.

 

[exoticspice1]

Looks like the Mac Pro runs at the same clock as the Studio.

You really have to value cable management to justify that price jump.

They really did the bare minimum

 

[MEJHarrison]

I gave up PC gaming because it was so spec focused. The FPS wars and VRAM wars.

I just recently got back into PC gaming. I'm a VR/Quest user and wanted access to the PCVR world. I focused on the specs a ton ahead of time. Then I jumped and built my new PC. I learned years ago to stop researching when I start buying or I'd end up with too much buyers remorse. I know nothing about any ongoing wars. I put together a good machine. It handles whatever I've thrown its way so far. I built it to be as future proof as possible while still staying in my budget. I'm quite happy with my purchase. I don't see why specs would make me want to give anything up. If people want to fight about various spec or hardware or whatever, so be it. I don't need to be involved.

 

[theorist9]

Looks like the Mac Pro runs at the same clock as the Studio.

You really have to value cable management to justify that price jump.

Ternus seemed to be saying that PCIe cards allow higher-speed network connections than are available with TB4. I'm not familiar with that tech myself, but I did find some 4.0 x 16 lane PCIe cards capable of 16 GT/s = 128 Gb/s, which is far above TB4's 40 Gb/s (ignoring overhead in both cases). Is that a legitimate distinguishing use case for the Mac Pro?

And what about the ability to add large amounts of very fast internal storage using PCIe RAID cards, like this one: https://www.newegg.com/highpoint-ssd7540-pci-express/p/N82E16816115312?Description=nvme raid&cm_re=nvme_raid-_-16-115-312-_-Product Would this give significantly faster transfer speeds than are possible through the TB4 ports of the Mac Studio?

 

[Cmaier]

Ternus seemed to be saying that PCIe cards allow higher-speed connections to external storage than are available with TB. I'm not familiar with that tech myself, but I did find some 4.0 x 16 lane PCIe cards capable of 16 GT/s = 128 Gb/s, which is far above TB4's 40 Gb/s (ignoring overhead in both cases). Is that a legitimate distinguishing use case for the Mac Pro?

I‘m sure there are some use cases. I’m sure some subset of those has people willing to pay an extra $3000. But, overall, seeing this thing gives me a case of Fremdschämen for Apple, which is a great German word we should all be using.

In any event, stay tuned for M3 Extreme, which is where this box will make a lot more sense.