EPTFPS testing on Apple Silicon M1 Mac Mini - Page 2
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renaissanceMAN
United States1840 Posts
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Ben...
Canada3485 Posts
On January 24 2021 11:21 renaissanceMAN wrote: Got my M1 MBP a few days ago and booted up SC2; ~90 FPS at 1920 x 1080. I was impressed, but has the game been recompiled? It hasn't yet, at least from I could find. It does appear that support is at least paying attention to M1 Macs because they have a note posted regarding vsync causing hangs on M1 Macs. The pinned note mentions the issue is being worked on but that doesn't tell us anything. There haven't been any official announcements at all. | ||
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renaissanceMAN
United States1840 Posts
On January 24 2021 13:57 Ben... wrote: It hasn't yet, at least from I could find. It does appear that support is at least paying attention to M1 Macs because they have a note posted regarding vsync causing hangs on M1 Macs. The pinned note mentions the issue is being worked on but that doesn't tell us anything. There haven't been any official announcements at all. Gaming aside this thing is a absolute monster and the battery life is unbelivable. | ||
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KNUCKLEHEAD
United States18 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26221 Posts
On December 28 2020 08:07 heqat wrote: Sorry did not have the time to watch the video yet. But it makes sens that it is GPU bound. In this case, I don't think we'll get that much from an ARM version unfortunately. If you check these benchmarks: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3 The BaseMark ones near the end, you can see the difference between the Rosetta (emulated x86 like SC2 is now) and native version. You get a bit, but not that much. Aside from the ARM thing and the whole pooling of CPU/GPU and RAM, which I’m not as sure about as some of you tech wizards I was always under the impression SC2 was both CPU bound and not optimised for multicore processors, not GPU bound. My 2008 iMac and old i5 Windows machine were able to run it pretty well, well primarily the latter. This despite the latter’s relative lack of GPU grunt bottlenecking me out of many a game in the proceeding 9 years until I upgraded. From what I remember in the early days, and that’s a long time ago now, folks with higher clock speeds on single cores with generally slower/fewer core processors were getting better performance than those with less, even if they had more advanced processors on occasion. Can someone let me know if I’m going crazy/senile? I’d always assumed this was the case. If I’m wrong about this what else do I believe that’s fallacious!? Even my laptop college gave me can run it alright and it’s got a pretty ropey integrated GPU. Is running SC2 via Rosetta pushing a lot of the workload to GPUs on a game that’s generally CPU bound and causing performance issues, or does the M1 chip generally do this or something? From a Logic (Apple native Digital Audio Workstation software) group I’m in the M1 machines absolutely smoke it when recording and mixing audio, which can be very resource intensive. Hope to pick up one at some point, heard good things/seen benchmarks for other intensive creative applications like rendering etc too. I wouldn’t expect it to be a gaming monster at all, but it does surprise me that it can’t push SC2, even if it is via the emulation layer. | ||
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SC-Shield
Bulgaria832 Posts
On January 03 2022 21:08 WombaT wrote: Aside from the ARM thing and the whole pooling of CPU/GPU and RAM, which I’m not as sure about as some of you tech wizards I was always under the impression SC2 was both CPU bound and not optimised for multicore processors, not GPU bound. My 2008 iMac and old i5 Windows machine were able to run it pretty well, well primarily the latter. This despite the latter’s relative lack of GPU grunt bottlenecking me out of many a game in the proceeding 9 years until I upgraded. From what I remember in the early days, and that’s a long time ago now, folks with higher clock speeds on single cores with generally slower/fewer core processors were getting better performance than those with less, even if they had more advanced processors on occasion. Can someone let me know if I’m going crazy/senile? I’d always assumed this was the case. If I’m wrong about this what else do I believe that’s fallacious!? Even my laptop college gave me can run it alright and it’s got a pretty ropey integrated GPU. Is running SC2 via Rosetta pushing a lot of the workload to GPUs on a game that’s generally CPU bound and causing performance issues, or does the M1 chip generally do this or something? From a Logic (Apple native Digital Audio Workstation software) group I’m in the M1 machines absolutely smoke it when recording and mixing audio, which can be very resource intensive. Hope to pick up one at some point, heard good things/seen benchmarks for other intensive creative applications like rendering etc too. I wouldn’t expect it to be a gaming monster at all, but it does surprise me that it can’t push SC2, even if it is via the emulation layer. I can't comment on macOS, but you're correct regarding high CPU frequency on 1-2 cores. That's what counts in sc2. So you can get away with an i5 Alder Lake CPU like i5-12600K(F) if your goal is just gaming. Before Alder Lake, Ryzen 5000 series was the hot deal. To give you perspective, any recent CPU in the last 1-2 years with 3+ GHz should do well enough in sc2. Even my i7-5820k (years old now) was doing fine in sc2. Only improvements you see with recent CPUs is handling late games a little easier (less lag), most noticeable in 3vs3 and 4vs4. Other than that, you may use any old graphics card (e.g. even 5 years old graphics card) and still be fine because sc2 doesn't rely on that much. Edit: Also, 3 GHz CPU just released vs 3 GHZ CPU from 2 years ago aren't the same. Neither in sc2 nor elsewhere even if cores are somehow the same number. IPC (instructions per cycle) gets improved after each CPU generation, which is why we all see more and more fps in sc2 with newer CPUs even if Blizzard doesn't do optimisations anymore. Imagine IPC as a bag when you go to grocery store. 5 years ago you could carry 5 items in it, 4 years ago you could carry 6 items in it before returning home for a new round of "shopping", etc. Hopefully this example would do to explain fps gain without support from game developer.  | ||
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renaissanceMAN
United States1840 Posts
On January 03 2022 11:05 KNUCKLEHEAD wrote: what is the ladder experience on the m1 mac mini? I would just put everything on the lowest settings and try to get the best gameplay I play on a 27" Cinema Display with a moderate resolution (definitely not 4k) and I still average ~90 FPS in almost all situations, ladder experience has been great, I'm diamond 2. FYI: still on the same MBP, not a mini, but they're comparable. I'd be really interested to see what SC2 is like on the new M1 Pro or M1 Max. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20322 Posts
------- I was always under the impression SC2 was both CPU bound and not optimised for multicore processors, not GPU bound. My 2008 iMac and old i5 Windows machine were able to run it pretty well, well primarily the latter. This despite the latter’s relative lack of GPU grunt bottlenecking me out of many a game in the proceeding 9 years until I upgraded. From what I remember in the early days, and that’s a long time ago now, folks with higher clock speeds on single cores with generally slower/fewer core processors were getting better performance than those with less, even if they had more advanced processors on occasion. Can someone let me know if I’m going crazy/senile? I’d always assumed this was the case. If I’m wrong about this what else do I believe that’s fallacious!? Even my laptop college gave me can run it alright and it’s got a pretty ropey integrated GPU. SC2 uses very little graphics, but the regular M1 graphics are slow and they struggle to run actual games. It's more there for desktop use while the M1 max does a better job as a mobile gaming system. You need 1 core to run the simulation and 1 other core to do everything else without interrupting the important stuff. The most important limiting factor has been feeding that core with data from cache and memory - SC2 scaled massively from DDR3 to DDR4 to DDR5, as well as from L3 cache improvements - but the core performance and clock is also very important. | ||
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renaissanceMAN
United States1840 Posts
On January 05 2022 03:56 Cyro wrote: I have a standardised CPU benchmark with data from Vermeer, Cometlake and Alderlake if anyone wants to run it on something else. PM me your discord name ------- SC2 uses very little graphics, but the regular M1 graphics are slow and they struggle to run actual games. It's more there for desktop use while the M1 max does a better job as a mobile gaming system. You need 1 core to run the simulation and 1 other core to do everything else without interrupting the important stuff. The most important limiting factor has been feeding that core with data from cache and memory - SC2 scaled massively from DDR3 to DDR4 to DDR5, as well as from L3 cache improvements - but the core performance and clock is also very important. Do you have an M1 Max? | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20322 Posts
No, just talked to a bunch of people running M1 / M1 Max on OSRS community. The M1 is struggling bigtime on the GPU side there. | ||
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alpenrahm
Germany629 Posts
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renaissanceMAN
United States1840 Posts
On July 13 2022 20:02 alpenrahm wrote: Any updates here with regards to m2 ? AFAIK M2 is a step above the M1, but still lesser than M1 Pro in general: https://www.theverge.com/23177674/apple-macbook-pro-m2-2022-review-price-specs-features | ||
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MhaxIA
7 Posts
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