L4sBotApple might reveal a proper gaming product at its October event
narc0tic_birdIf they want to be serious about this, they need games. Not only a handful that they proudly announce at the September event every year, but most/all major AAA titles from day one.
Then, if they want to reach as many people as possible, they need to offer an affordable product that has enough power to properly play games. Sure, it’s nice that the MacBook Air can do some light gaming and it’s quite impressive for a device without a fan. But the GPU of the base M2 doesn’t really cut it for triple A titles, and 8 GB of RAM in the base configuration won’t motivate developers to port their games over, especially as it’s both system and graphics memory. Developers already complain about the Xbox Series S, and it comes with 10 GB.
So I highly doubt we’ll see more than the usual MacBook Pros with M3 Pro/Max, that sure can do some gaming, but are also $2,000+ devices.
ThatOneDudeFromOhioTo be fair the 8GB of RAM works a lot differently compared to x86 architecture. You can squeeze a lot more out of SOC 8GB. Unless they announce something amazing tonight, I’ll be sticking with my M1 16GB Mini.
I hate this myth. If you want to put 1GB of stuff in ram, it will take up 1GB of space. I don’t understand why people keep trying to justify the 8GB as “oh but it’s somehow different” and handwaving it away.
Not only is it not different, it’s shared between the cpu and the gpu, so if anything there’s less effective total space when you’re doing graphics stuff like games as there’s no dedicated VRAM.
Yes, swap is very fast between memory and storage, and that does make it feel faster when you overflow out of the ram capacity, but that’s nothing to do with the cpu architecture. Any cpu can connect to very fast storage.
Right, but the latency of the swap is much quicker. So in essence you can squeeze more out of 8GB when optimized properly. Obviously memory is memory, but how that memory can be used is one of the keys to the M architecture.
𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠That won’t matter much though. For productivity that setup will work quite well, but for gaming where you need data from memory ASAP and consistently fast, even those SSD swaps will cause jittering, especially if it’s also shared with the GPU.