Comment by zozbot234

Comment by zozbot234 a day ago

10 replies

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.

jcelerier 21 hours ago

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

  • 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.

    • 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.

      • michaelt 16 hours ago

        Certainly, nobody would buy an Apple hoping to run triple-A PC games.

        But among people running LLMs outside of the data centre, Apple's unified memory together with a good-enough GPU has attracted quite a bit of attention. If you've got the cash, you can get a Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory. So there's one workload where apple silicon gives nvidia a run for their money.

        • gehsty 10 hours ago

          Only in the size of model it can run, not speed of token generation.

      • swiftcoder 17 hours ago

        Apple's MetalFX upscaler is pretty similar to DLSS (and I think well ahead of AMD's efforts on this front).

        Ray tracing outside of Nvidia is a disaster all round, so yeah, nobody is competing on that front.

        • rxyz 10 hours ago

          Ray tracing support on the newest AMD chips is getting good enough. They are still behind Nvidia but definitely not a disaster anymore

    • jayd16 11 hours ago

      Are there real world game benchmarks for this or are these synthetic tests?

    • Rohansi 18 hours ago

      And it will consume almost as much power as the Nvidia GPU to do so.

    • 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.