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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>>Anyone selling you a “gaming CPU”
The exception being the X3D processors from AMD, which add a bunch of L3 cache, whose primary benefit are games. They’ll tend to be the same or slower in synthetic benchmarks than their comparable non-X3D processors, but anywhere from 0-20% faster in games, depending on the game.
As always, lots of experts in the comments completly missing the actual reason. The actual reason is that some cpus has dedicated parts for doing certain things. Imagine a cpu as a group of friends who solves math problems. Some of them are good at additions while some of them are good at multiplications. If you get into a competition and questions are mostly multiplications, you want more people who are good at multiplication.
This is the gist of the idea. CPU’s who are good at certain tasks usually good at it because they have special parts dedicated to solving math that will be used for those tasks and they have more of them.
Clock speeds and single/multi thread performance is important obviously but those are areas that don’t see much change or innovation for the last decade. We basically hit a wall. So those are not the reason for performance improvements. Modern improvements are usually about cache size and speed and dedicated cores for solving some problems.
It’s not really about the CPU power. While Apple CPUs are probably marginally better for productivity since they’ve probably been specially optimized for it, if you somehow transplanted an Apple chip into a Windows PC it would probably game fine.
Macs aren’t good for gaming because they don’t come with good GPUs (a special kind of CPU for graphics only), and game developers don’t usually bother releasing for Mac, or optimizing for Mac even if they do.
This isn’t because the CPU is bad, but because Apple and developers have no incentive to make gaming good on Mac, because no one (to a rounding error) games on Mac. And why don’t people game on Mac? Because Macs aren’t good for gaming. It’s a chicken and egg problem.
It’s nothing to do with the CPU though.
This doesn’t really have much to do with single vs multi core performance and more about how Apple has designed their chip and what they’ve included on it. Apple includes encoders on their chip specifically meant for processing of video. Someone used the separate engineers analogy and it was pretty good. Imagine an entire department of engineers and all they did was get a part in and draw a blueprint of it. Then it was sent to either the large amount of lower skilled engineers or the one highly skilled engineer. That company would be very fast at looking at a part and getting it to production because they have a specific department that specializes in that task (these are the encoders). Apple includes large amounts of these highly specialized pieces in their chips because then they can wipe the floor with other chips that don’t have that specialization, but these only work when used in video production and they also take up valuable space inside the computer. Apple is not considered a good gaming platform not because they’re processors can’t perform well, but because PC gaming has evolved on Windows machines. Most games are only built to run on Windows systems and for Apple to run them they must be “translated” and that takes time (imagine Apple and Windows speak different languages).
Workstations, and the professional software that they use, can use as much “power” as you put into them. So, if you put in a CPU with 32 cores, they all run at lower speeds, but it has more cores in total available for rendering video than a consumer/gaming CPU.
Video rendering also works with GPUs (Graphics Cards) nowadays. Because GPUs follow the principle of quantity. GPUs have 1000s of smaller “shader cores”.
Games on the other hand dont profit as much from this CPU architecture. They can only use 1 to 8 cores at best most times. This is a restriction due to how games work currently.
So ELI5, a game runs better on HIGH frequency cores, like the 5800X. Less cores, more hertz. Thats gaming CPUs. The more powerful a single core on the CPU is, the better it is for gaming.
Video editing uses most of the hardware you put into it. Like 24-48 cores, 2 GPUs, 128-256 GB of RAM (“slow” ram, high capacity) ecetera.
edit: this approach btw makes sense, because these professional CPUs produce alot of heat and sip immense amounts of power. Useless for casual consumers.
The biggest problem with gaming on Macs has nothing to do with processors at all; it’s that there are few games that support MacOS.
There are two main reasons for this. Reason number one is a chicken-and-egg classic: Most people who play games have Windows PCs or consoles or both for that. It’s a small market, and it’s not worth the effort to port to a whole new OS for the small overlap of Mac owners who want to play games, but don’t already have a PC or conosle.
Reason number two is that effort: MacOS does not directly support the graphics APIs — the software toolkit — used by game developers, Microsoft’s **DirectX** and the open-source **Vulkan**. Apple has it’s own API, *Metal*, which is incompatible and only runs on iPhones and Macs.
(You can, sort of, use an adaptor API called “MoltenVK” to translate between Vulkan and Metal, but performance takes a small hit, and some features are missing.)
(Apple has also very very recently announced a porting kit to make it easier for DirectX programmers to convert their games, but this is brand new and so far has not yielded any concrete results.)
Honestly, it has little to do with processors at all — Apple’s SoCs are, well, *fine*, very efficient, don’t throttle under load, and the better ones, like the M2 Max and Ultra are probably faster overall than what most gamers have in their dedicated gaming rigs.
Apple’s GPUs, on the other hand, are fair to middling. They could do more here, and perhaps they will, someday.
But it doesn’t really matter without any games to run on ’em.
To add to what others have already said, more specifically about gaming, the reason you don’t often see games for Mac (or any Linux) is because they do not possess the same libraries (specifically the gaming libraries) as Windows. It is a massive obstacle in the way of developing games to be cross-platform. One such graphics library is DirectX, which was developed by Microsoft for their original Xbox and has evolved greatly since then. A vast majority of games use DirectX, and the powerful game engines (most notably Unreal) only really support DirectX. (Unreal does support opengl but it’s complicated, too outside of scope for this thread).
As you may have noticed, however, there are still games that can run on Mac. That is likely because they use Opengl, which is the other “big” graphics library that is cross platform. I won’t go into the reasons why people prefer DirectX over Opengl because that would take too long, but it’s an interesting history.
This all ties into CPUs (and GPUs) because companies like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia know where the market share is. They are reasonably incentivised to work with these libraries to increase gaming performance, among a miriad of other reasons. Apple, on the other hand, has a proprietary processor that they choose to modify to fit their niche. They could make gaming more accessible and incredibly fast on a Mac, but they are just not interested. It also doesn’t help that they are anti-developer, but that’s another topic for another thread.
Gaming: rendering of a partial scene of a big 3d model, to be refreshed as fast as possible. “Just don’t slow down!”
Work: refresh less often, 25fps is ok, even freeze for a split second is ok, as long as it can handle a vastly more complex, unoptimized, detail heavy 3d. “Just don’t crash please!”
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned this, but software is also very important to this question, in particular the games themself. The game developer writes source code that gets translated to cpu instructions by a so called compiler (another software). The problem is, that you need to do this for every processor with different instruction sets if you want to support that processor, and you need to optimize differently and so on. AMD and Intel use the same instruction set called x86_64, the steam deck also uses that btw, that’s why it works so well. Apple cpus use a different instruction set, and game devs don’t develop for Apple cpus.
A weight lifter has a different capability to that of a rock climber. Both can do each others discipline but when then are in their own domain they excel.
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