With the new WWDC coming out, Apple boasts about its performance using applications like video editing, encoding, etc. However, I keep hearing that despite the “power” it has, macs are not good for gaming (I know the Apple silicon processors aren’t just a CPU but my point still stands).
Why is this the case? Even with CPUs, I see that some are marketed as doing different things, like the AMD Ryzen X3D line for gaming, versus others that are better for productivity tasks. Shouldn’t a good CPU be able to do both things? What makes them different?
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Apple designs their chips for their primary markets of Mobile and Media creation. This optimizes around performance per watt (mobile/laptops) and dedicating chip space to video encoding instructions.
AMD designs their chips around desktop and server primary markets where gaming (desktop) and parallelism (server) performance are primary drivers. AMD’s X3D cache tech has performance improvements for certain gaming workloads (and some server ones, actually), and is marketed to that segment specifically.
Apple not being “good” for gaming is more about software support (Apple’s end) and developer support (Game maker’s end), not architecture.
Apple’s GPUs are extremely competitive with AMD/nVidia for the vast majority of the market (surprisingly not many gamers actually buy $500+ graphics cards), and Apple’s CPUs are just as performant as Intel/AMDs.
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