Overall, with M1 being A14-but-bigger, Apple has scaled up their 4 core GPU design from that SoC to 8 cores for the M1. various GPU texture and surface formats), but by and large the difference is abstracted away at the API level. Apple will have needed to tweak their design a bit to account for Mac sensibilities (e.g. To be sure, native CPU code is still going to produce better results since a workload that’s purely GPU-limited is almost unheard of, but the fact that existing Metal (and even OpenGL) code can be run on top of Apple’s GPU today means that it immediately benefits all games and other GPU-bound workloads.Īs for the M1 SoC’s GPU, unsurprisingly it looks a lot like the GPU from the A14. Meanwhile, unlike the CPU side of this transition to Apple Silicon, the higher-level nature of graphics programming means that Apple isn’t nearly as reliant on devs to immediately prepare universal applications to take advantage of Apple’s GPU. By switching to their own silicon, Apple finally gets to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak, by building a laptop SoC with all the GPU performance they’ve ever wanted. So it’s been clear for some time now that Apple has long-wanted better GPU performance than what Intel offers by default. And when they couldn’t fit a dGPU in the 13-inch model, they instead used Intel’s premium Iris GPU configurations with larger GPUs and an on-chip eDRAM cache, becoming one of the only regular customers for those more powerful chips. Whereas many of Intel’s partners were happy to ship systems with Intel UHD graphics and other baseline solutions even in some of their 15-inch laptops, Apple opted to ship a discrete GPU in their 15-inch MacBook Pro. And from a performance standpoint, it’s arguably an even bigger deal than Apple’s CPU.Īpple, of course, has long held a reputation for demanding better GPU performance than the average PC OEM. Like their CPU cores, Apple has been developing their own GPU technology for a number of years now, and with the shift to Apple Silicon, those GPU designs are coming to the Mac for the very first time. While the bulk of the focus from the switch to Apple’s chips is on the CPU cores, and for good reason – changing the underlying CPU architecture if your computers is no trivial matter – the GPU aspects of the M1 are not to be ignored.

Section by Ryan Smith M1 GPU Performance: Integrated King, Discrete Rival

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