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?
In: 100
Some work can be done at the same time as other work.
Other work has to be done in order.
Games require humans to input new choices whereas videos being edited can be chopped into pieces and done in small chunks that can be spliced back together into your final video.
It’s saving you the step of breaking apart the work into packages, finding friends who have computers, transferring pieces of video to process, gluing them back together. It all happens on the CPU at light speed now.
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.
For a 5 year old –
The CPU is like machine doing a job, and different machines do their jobs differently. IN this case (more than serial vs parallel) – the actual CPUs ( machine ) are made different.
In gaming – we are working with creating a 3 dimensional model – like a sculpture, that you, playing the game can see. So the tools (registers and vector specific processors) it has are for creating the sculpture.
In video editing – we are typically looking at a series of photographs, a flat image – broken into pixels or made into a digital image, and need to work on all of those pixels very quickly because there are so many of them. So the CPU is built and has tools to read the image – do something to its data, and save it – to many pixels in a very consistent and organized way.
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