Comment by MindSpunk

Comment by MindSpunk a day ago

Taking games designed for desktop GPUs and running them on mobile GPUs with tile-based-deferred-rendering hardware will be a disaster. Mobile GPU designs will choke on modern games as they're designed around hardware features that mobile GPUs either don't have, or that run very slowly.

Peak theoretical throughput for the GPUs you find in ARM SoCs is quite good compared to the power draw, but you will not get peak throughput for workloads designed for Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

zozbot234 a day ago

Isn't the GPU on Apple Silicon machines a tile-based "mobile" GPU design? Many of the hardware features that traditional GPU's have and mobile GPU's lack can be easily "faked" with GPU-side general compute.

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jcelerier 21 hours ago

But even the most powerful apple silicon GPU is terrible compared to an average Nvidia chip

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- swiftcoder 18 hours ago
  
  While I agree with the general point, this statement is factually incorrect - apple's most powerful laptop GPU punches right about the same as the laptop SKU of the RTX 4070, and the desktop Ultra variant punches up with a 5070ti. I'd say on both fronts that is well above the average.
  
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  Rapzid 17 hours ago
  
  There is no world where Apple silicone is competing with a 5070ti on modern workloads. Not the hardware and certainly not the software where Nvidia DLSS is in it's own air with AMD just barely having gotten AI upscaling out and started approximating ray reconstruction.
  
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  jayd16 11 hours ago
  
  Are there real world game benchmarks for this or are these synthetic tests?
  
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  Rohansi 18 hours ago
  
  And it will consume almost as much power as the Nvidia GPU to do so.
  
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  throwaway314155 9 hours ago
  
  That simply isn't true. I have an RTX 4070 gaming PC and an M4 MacBook Pro w/ 36GB shared memory. When models fit in VRAM, the RTX 4070 still runs much faster. Maybe the next generation M5 chips are faster but they can't be 2-4x faster.
  
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david-gpu 14 hours ago

Snapdragon doesn't do tile based deferred rendering the way Apple does (or did). Snapdragon does (or did) a form of tile-based rendering, but it is a completely different design, with completely different performance tradeoffs.

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jayd16 11 hours ago

What about the Switch 2 (nVidia's Tegra) line? The one in the Swich 2 is using Ampere architecture.

That should be feasible, no?

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Rohansi 4 hours ago

Linux support is in a terrible state for Nvidia chips. Not going to happen.

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koolala a day ago

You don't have to use tile-based rendering on these chips anymore. They can directly draw to the entire screen.

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MindSpunk a day ago

You can, but the immediate mode path is slower and uses significantly more power. Mobile GPUs are not good at modern desktop game workflows where significant portions of the frame are compute shaders. They're generally very memory bandwidth starved, and general compute sidesteps most of the optimizations the hardware has made to work around this.

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