Early benchmarks suggest Apple M2 Ultra could be slower than Core i9-13900KS, RTX 4080

[hwertz]

Let's be honest:

A) office and multimedia edit: private users or small companies have enough power on M powered laptops (simple or pro versions of the chip)

B) games and 3D and demanding works: people (at least outside the US and UK) won't mind too much about power consumption, it's all about "how- much- job- will- be- done" / price. On this matter Apple is very unlikely to win costumers:

- the hardware is great BUT Apple is very expensive and zero upgradable.

- MacOS is pretty cute but very incompatible, most AA/AAA games and professional 3D/CAD/ physics or engineering apps don't work.

"Oh you can virtualize Windows 11 ARM or use Crossover or ..." .... why bother?! I can directly buy an upgradable PC with Linux or windows or both, with a good CPU and gpu and even change as I go and DIRECTLY run all apps and games. Why spend a ton of money on a Mac and win a non upgradable system with a "I don't care about your needs just your money" philosophy?

Agreed 100%! I like the ARM chips, but find the Apple products overpriced (and these pro-style workstations are VERY expensive, with poor expandability.) I'll have to wait it out to see if anyone comes out with an ARM system with a nice GPU (I do want to be able to play some games on it potentially -- Linux has x86/x86-64 emulation running already at good enough speed for this, just limited by the tablet-style GPUs that usually these days have Vulkan drivers but with many missing features, roughly DX10-equivalent). I'm kind of hoping Microsoft flubs Windows on ARM enough so I can pick up something used at a good price.

I liked the solution one ARM vendor had for their ARM workstation they've started selling (pricey but it's a 128-core ARM).... "Oh, what are you going to do for a GPU? ARM chips tend to have weak GPUs." (And indeed, the one they were looking at had some tablet-grade GPU built into the ARM chip, which the vendor was not using because....): "Well, it's a desktop, it has PCIe slots, Nvidia has had Linux ARM drivers for many years. We put a 4090 in it."

I also have to agree, it seems like a big mistake to insist vendors for Mac must use Metal instead of having Vulkan available. To make things worse, the Wine/dxvk/vkd3d developers are using a Vulkan-to-Metal translation layer, only to find Metal is NOT feature-complete -- I mean, you can write a game FOR Metal and it's fine, but it's missing some memory-mapping features and such that are REQUIRED to provide DX12 compatibility, and a few others that make DX11->Vulkan translation MUCH faster. Will they add new Metal functionality at the request of Crossover? I mean maybe, but given Apple's dislike of ports that rely on compatibility layers in general, I kind of doubt it.