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