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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Games tend not to be easy to parallelise so prefer a small number of very fast cores and a large cache while video editing is easy to parallelise so favours a high core count.
This is all kinda BS. Apple likes to talk shit and CPU and GPU is full of shit scam marketing for everyone all around!
The simplest matter is that the best option for both is to get the most powerful CPU possible and pair that with lots of RAM. Games actually aren’t that CPU intensive, and aren’t optimized to take advantage of all your CPU can do, the big thing for most modern complex games, usually 3D environments, is rendering graphics, which is done by the GPU, not CPU. Even many pretty old CPUs are totally fine for many modern games, but you need to pair that with RAM and a good GPU otherwise you’ll have bottlenecks at various points. Hell, the better Intel 3000 and 4000 series released in like 2011/12 still can work for many games (though not with settings pushed to the max of course). This isn’t because modern cpus are bad or anything, its that even those 10 year old ones are still really freaking powerful
Video editing is just a power hungry beast and will take every resource it can, so you give it as much as you can. The thing with videos is just more is better. More more more. More of everything. ITs always been this way. Just as much as you can jam into your system for power and resources
Anyone selling you a “gaming CPU” or “gaming motherboard” is hoping you’re stupid enough to not know this is not a thing. Their marketing has apparenttly been successful, because people think this is a thing. This is not a thing.
Whenever this is mentioned, there’s an assumption:
* Most games are optimized for only one processing thread
* Most productivity apps are optimized for as many processing threads are available
When you have an application that runs on only one thread, the highest possible processing speed will have the highest performance ceiling. 3.0 gHz will always be better than 2.5 gHz, regardless of threads because it’ll only ever use one.
When you have an application that runs on every thread, the highest total cumulative processing power will offer the highest performance ceiling. So, a 3.0 gHz Dual Core would offer (for the sake of explanation) 6 gHz of bandwidth (2×3), whereas a 2.5 gHz Quad Core would offer 10 gHz of bandwidth (4×2.5).
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However, this isn’t always the case, but is generally the case. Although, more games are being developed with multi-core processing in mind these days, although it still generally isn’t likely a big consideration unless it’s heavy on simulation/calculation, like Cities Skylines 2.
To add on to what the other comments are saying about parallel processes vs single thread, imagine it like having a bunch of lesser skilled/experienced engineers vs a single highly experienced engineer.
If you have a bunch of pretty easy tasks, the former might be able to bang them out quickly while the latter guy gets swamped because even as good as he is, he’s just one person. On the other hand, if you have a single difficult task, having a bunch of guys isn’t necessarily any faster than one and the single experienced guy will be able to complete it faster than a bunch of guys who don’t really know what they’re doing.
“Ideally” you would have a bunch of highly experienced engineers, but that would be very expensive to do and is overkill for most applications so it’s not really ideal in practice outside of like high performance applications where you might actually need that
Macs *as a whole* are not as good for gaming because fewer games are ported to run on macOS. Games are built on engines which are built on accelerated graphics APIs other than Metal.
Apple has built media accelerators that work on encoding and decoding video streams. Other systems might put those onto the GPUs.
Can I add on to this question? Can someone re-explain 32-bit versus 64-bit operating systems? I think that’s somehow involved with the max RAM usable by a single application, or number of processors? And I know applications can be designed to run on 32 or 64 bit.
It’s marketing bullshit. Compute power is compute power. It mainly comes down to software optimization with said hardware.
Games tend to run like shit on recent Appple silicon due to the lack of Apple intergration for commonly used software frameworks.
Games also tend to prefer high clock speeds on single cores/threads currently. Multi-tasking, video editing and encoding tend go use more multi core/thread processing.
If talking video editing specifically, in industry they use servers with server grade hardware mainly ran on Linux platforms.
Anything marketed as “gaming” is just marketing buzz words to catch un-informed people, and charge them more.
A M chip from Apple is just a glorified Arm cpu with a few extra extensions.
These extensions will optimize specific tasks like video editing.
Then you have x86/64 which is more of a workhorse of a cpu.
But because it is just a cpu and does not have those extra extensions that Apple created, it will be slower at those tasks when compared to a cpu with similar specs.
But if you add a GPU to your system you will get far superior capabilities to for example video editing.
But you will sacrifice for electricity usage.
A cpu with a GPU is going to consume way more power than an Arm cpu with extensions.
As for gaming, apple sucks in the way that most developers don’t want to develop games for them as they require too much control of the applications.
As well as you are required to use apple for transactions and they take a massive cut of it…
Macs aren’t good for gaming because games don’t get ported to Mac, because they use a different CPU architecture so devs would have to spend more time/money developing for them even though they have a low market share.
Also nowadays the isn’t much of a difference between a CPU good for production vs gaming, since gaming tech has evolved to make full use of CPU features like multi threading.
Think of a CPU as a freeway. You can increase throughout in two ways on a freeway, you can increase the number of lanes thus increasing the amount of cars that can pass a given point at once. And second you can increase the speed limit letting cars travel faster.
For CPUs the “lanes” in the above analogy are cores and threads. My desktop CPU has 16 cores and 32 threads, my laptop only has 8 cores and 16 threads. So my desktop cpu has 2x the “lanes” that my laptop has. The “speed limit” in this analog is the frequency at which the CPU functions. Today some of the slower CPUs run around 4ghz and can go as fast as 5.5-6ghz.
Video editing, 3D rendering, and tasks like that are very easy to split up and give different tasks to different “lanes” to speed things up. Think almost like baking cookies, one person can grab each ingredient, measure it, add or to the mix all sequentially one step after the next. Or you could have 8 people all grab an ingredient and measure their ingredient and essentially simultaneously dump all their ingredients at once which would go faster. So for video editing a computer can delegate different tasks to different “lanes” on the CPU and merge the result at the end. So for video editing programs tend to benefit from more cores on the CPU than they do from an increased speed limit on the CPU so a CPU with a reduced speed limit but increased lanes can chew through a video much quicker
Video games don’t leverage multi-threaded (multiple lanes calculating simultaneously) and historically are very single threaded applications. So you could have a CPU with dozens of cores (“lanes”) and it doesn’t benefit from that because all the work a video game does stays in one lane at a time, hence video games would benefit from an increased speed limit so that more data can get through that one lane quicker.
Back to my desktop vs my laptop. There’s software to measure precisely how fast a CPU can perform a given task. My desktop with 16 cores absolutely crushes my laptop in multi-threaded work, while my laptop has reduced core count it has a faster “speed limit” on the CPU and actually barely beats out my desktop CPU for single threaded work.
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