Apple’s new M2 chips announced this week, which “enabling console-quality gaming (opens in new tab)That’s what Apple claims, but is it true? What does it actually mean?
Unsurprisingly, given this Apple we’re talking about, no further details are provided. Apple doesn’t say what game console it might think of, let alone other factors like the game in question, resolutions, refresh rates, whatever.
But we take Apple at its word and compare the new chips with the latest consoles. In terms of pure graphics, the top of the current console stack is the Microsoft Xbox Series X (opens in new tab). The AMD RDNA 2-derived GPU is good for 12.1 single-precision FP32 TFLOPS.
Now TFLOPS is just one performance metric, that of the pixel processing shader cores. There are plenty of other important metrics, such as texture processing or memory bandwidth, that contribute to the critical end result, which is frame rate.
Likewise, comparing GPUs across software platforms and APIs is tricky. 10 TFLOPs on a console is not quite the same as 10 TFLOPs on DirectX in Windows or Metal in MacOS.
But as a rough guide to a given GPU’s gaming graphics capabilities, it provides reasonable guidance. How can those new M2 chips stack up with all that household squared?
The best M2 chip is the M2 Max, with its 38 GPU cores, versus 32 GPU cores on the old M1 Max. All told, it has a rating of 13.6 TFLOPS. Yes, that’s slightly more than the Xbox Series X. Plus, the M2 Max has the right amount of bandwidth in and out of that GPU. The shared memory architecture provides 400 GB/s of total bandwidth for the GPU and CPU.
That’s about in the same ballpark as the Xbox Series X, which peaks at 560 GB/s for 10 GB of its total memory allocation of 16 GB and 336 GB/s for the remaining 6 GB.
Of course, the fastest PC GPUs blow all this stuff out of the water. The NVIDIA RTX 4090 (opens in new tab) is good for just under 83 TFLOPS and has just over 1TB/s of memory bandwidth. The RTX 4080 (opens in new tab)? That’s 49 TFLOPS and 717 GB/s.
Perhaps the best performing PC GPU, in terms of raw TFLOPS Radeon RX 6700 XT from AMD (opens in new tab)with a clock speed of 13.2 TFOPS backed up by 384 GB/s of bandwidth.
On the other hand, those are discrete GPUs and perhaps not a fair comparison to what, with the M2 family, are GPUs integrated with CPU and other features in a full SoC. Perhaps a fairer comparison would be AMD’s latest laptop APU, codenamed Phoenix and announced at CES (opens in new tab)? That has an RDNA 3 based integrated GPU that achieves 4.3 TFLOPS.
So those new M2 chips pack some pretty impressive graphics hardware, especially for integrated GPUs, which is broadly on par with the latest consoles and some decent desktop GPU hardware too.
Apple’s chips also look pretty special when it comes to efficiency. Apple claims up to 22 hours of battery life with the M2 Max on its latest 16-inch MacBook Pro. That might be a bit optimistic, but even cut in half, that’s epic battery life for a laptop with desktop 6700 XT performance. Laptops for PC gaming don’t even come close.
You still have a pretty pathetic selection of games built to run on MacOS and Apple silicon, making any discussion of hardware capabilities pretty much moot. Buying an M2 Mac for gaming is a recipe for almost total disappointment as a result. But we’re reluctant to admit that there’s some nice graphical grunt in these new M2 chips.