sunman42

Appleish said:

Hopefully the M1 will pay off for Warcraft. My 16-inch MBP is a good as Intel will ever be for MacOS, and my fans run like crazy even with graphics cranked way down in Warcraft. 

I'd say my i9-powered 27-inch 5K iMac with the 5700XT graphics option is as good as Intel ever got for macOS, but you're welcome to your opinion. For what it's worth, though, the fans on this machine are close to whisper-quiet.

    Here's hoping the successors to the M1 for peppier machines than the M1 models so far announced do even better at graphics-intensive tasks.

    It would be fascinating to learn from Blizzard how much dev time it took to carry out the port.

    And kudos to Blizzard, who just a year or so ago were folding their Mac dev team into the general one and raising fears of dropping all Mac support. Wouldn't it be a kick in the pants for the Windows game industry if it turned out that Macs with onboard graphics turned out to have competitive performance with custom-built x86 game systems?

DuhSesame said:

Just did some quick search on Geekbench 5:

Here's what really looks like when comparing to the 16-inch MacBook Pro (Highest vs. Highest)

7695 for the Air vs. 7346 for the 16-inch.

Here's the iMac with Core i7-9700

7695 vs. 7559.

M1 pulls slightly ahead on both, but worth noting that neither is high for an eight-core.  both 9700K/9900K pulls way ahead the competition.

So it's slightly disappointing comparing to what we used to hear, it didn't smash x86's eight-core by that much.  Then again, it's a quad-core (4x4) with 15~20W of CPU power.  Both the 9980HK & 9700 needs to pull at least ~60W to match.


Edit: It's also important to remember the 16-inch or the iMac still have to deal with thermal throttling, where the M1 could be free from that issue.  @mike_wuerthele I'd like to see a thermal test, thanks.

Well here's the cinebench loop on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/_rogame/status/1328721464040820738

This comment and the article both err in comparing the "8-core" M1 to the machines (say, the 8-core i9 in the MBPro 16). Remember that only four of those 8 (4 + 4) cores in the M1 are high performance, and the other four cores are designed to do less CPU-intensive chores at considerably lower power draw. The M1-based systems' multi-core results are particularly impressive when viewed this way.

It might also be instructive to compare the power draw on the machines over the time they're running these benchmarks.

By the way, I'm typing this in front of a 10-core Intel iMac, and it's yet to hit any thermal throttling. The again, I've yet to do any 8K video editing on it.

Mike Wuerthele said:

22july2013 said:

Apple's exact words were "Addresses a graphic issue that may occur on iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020) with Radeon Pro 5700 XT". It sounds like they are claiming this is a 100% reliable fix.

I'm sure the fix is reliable. The problem itself wasn't universal, which is wacky.

Or maybe not so wacky? The 2011 iMac graphics issue only applied to 27-inch models with serial numbers within certain ranges, which to me suggests bad lot(s) of chips or other components.

It'll be interesting to see if the "graphic issue" (singular) applies to the horizontal lines, faint, square corners on windows, and streaking character descenders, or a subset of those.

cdoubleu said:

I have experienced graphical glitches consisting of triangles and lines on my 2020 iMac w. 5700XT. It requires a reboot to resolve them. I am also experiencing crashes where the whole system becomes unresponsive also requiring a (hard) reboot. I can replicate this consistently by playing Civ 6 - it typically freezes 20 minutes into a session.

Would you be willing to tell us how much graphics memory you got with the 5700XT (8 or 16 GByte)? Thanks

dysamoria said:

cdoubleu said:

I have experienced graphical glitches consisting of triangles and lines on my 2020 iMac w. 5700XT. It requires a reboot to resolve them. I am also experiencing crashes where the whole system becomes unresponsive also requiring a (hard) reboot. I can replicate this consistently by playing Civ 6 - it typically freezes 20 minutes into a session.

Yet another GPU thermals issue?

Would you be willing to tell us how much graphics memory you got with the 5700XT (8 or 16 GByte)? Thanks.