[ggreg84]

> Isn't there a single GPU benchmark that actually does the same work so that comparisons can actually be made?

Apple does not support OpenGL or Vulkan, only Metal, and most app devs have better things to do than rewriting code for the Mac.

The recommended way of gaming on a mac is to use emulation by emulating whatever the game is used with a metal wrapper.

IMO the claim that these benchmarks aren't fair is naive. I don't care about how good the hardware is, but about what performance I get. If I get poor performance because the software, drivers, etc. are poor, I want to know that.

[tpush]

> I don't care about how good the hardware is, but about what performance I get.

Of course, I'm not at all saying that you're wrong to want that, or that these benchmarks don't show what you're interested in.

However this and many other articles are using these benchmarks to derive comparative hardware performance, which is simply wrong to do. That's what I'm criticizing.

[ggreg84]

Since you can't really buy apple cpus or gpus and put them in a PC, for benchmarking... today at least one can't compare apple's hardware against intel hardware.

What one can compare, is the performance of the "Apple platform" and the "PC platform" at similar price points, power budgets, features. This is more meaningful for most people, which mostly care about how fast can the computer do X (whether it uses the CPU, GPU, or some other chip, most people don't care).

[isaiahg]

Is this a serious comment? Alwrapper doesn't use emulation. An API wrapper simply translates calls to the appropriate API. But more to the point, If the benchmark isn't properly ported to the platform it's testing then the benchmark is BROKEN. It isn't naive to expect them to do their job right.

[ggreg84]

> Is this a serious comment? Alwrapper doesn't use emulation. An API wrapper simply translates calls to the appropriate API. B

QEMU simply translates calls from one hardware API to another hardware API, so it isn't an emulator either right?

[KolenCh]

It depends on your perspective, yours is a subjective perspective that you care your experience only, which makes sense for a consumer to know what to buy. (But then everyone’s subjective bias has different weights so to speak.)

But from a technological perspective, the logical way to test is to eliminate as much variable as possible and really compare the hardware compatibility. Using software that’s not optimized for the hardware is not an objective test of the hardware.

There are many ways to try to conduct as objective a test as possible. In that criteria, I found that only those review from Anandtech is up to standard. Article like this is more like click bait.

Now I’m not an expert, but if I were to compare the performance somewhat objectively, I might start with TensorFlow where Apple has releases a metal backend for it to run. Then may be write some naive kernel in Julia using CUDA and the pre release metal library (It might not be fair, but that’s where I would start given what I know.)

[weberer]

Can't you just install Linux on both machines?

[tzekid]

Linux for Macs with M1 architecture is still in development. There's a team that's currently reverse engineering the M1 GPU to create linux drivers for it ... but until that's finished, unfortunately no, you can't just install Linux on both systems :/

[Macha]

Using the in-progress Asahi Linux to benchmark the hardware could be justified as hampering the hardware even more than MacOS's limited support for mainstream graphics APIs.

[philistine]

The GPU is not supported yet in Asahi Linux.