M2 Ultra: 15 games tested on the Mac Studio

So what would you say this GPU is close to for a windows desktop?

Would have loved to see how the M2 Studio runs World of Warcraft both Retail & Classic in Raid or Dungeons as this have been Metal optimized

When a MAC runs COD in 1440p at
200+ FPS minimum Ill ditch my gaming PC.

Can you do a video with Valorant, Overwatch 2, Fortnite, and COD?

Love that you did this video... because I am torn. But this is very insightful. Can you make more content like this?

When you put the resolution of GTA V to native, you'll be able to play it without any delay of stuttering.

I love how everyone judges the computer and not the game. The game could be unoptimized (or not even use Metal) and that is your entire problem.

Something you may not have know is the Nvidia RTX 4080 only does about 60 FPS at 4k without DLSS....

Mac and apple is garbage. Don't buy propaganda products.

Lol I could run this on 4k 120fps on my 4060 and cheaper

Mac studio ultra is $4000 before taxes

Am I crazy but who plays at 4k ever?

Wow that thing sucks. My PC plays GTA 5 in 4k at 144fps! It was probably way cheaper too lol.

now that m2 ultra runs games even better, who'll admit buying it for everyday including gaming?

Could you do a Tomb Raider benchmark? It's a game that has a fairly well known and benchmarked scene in it--it would allow for a better generalized comparison to roughly how good an M2 Ultra is vs say, AMD or Nvidia.

This is particularly useful to get an idea of just what the top end of this chip is capable of.

Hi Andrew
I know you have tested running Diablo on max using gaming port toolkit
How about controller support?
Because I play Diablo 4 using controller
And only use keyboard to reply messages

I appreciate the information here. I'm not a big gamer but if I'm spending the big bucks I really want the option. I feel like the future is bright for games porting to metal, but the frames you are getting for the ungodly amount of cores and memory you have available to you.. that's hurting.

I've been wanting to move my workstation to mac for a while for audio and video editing, but I will always want the option to hop on a game with friends.. and get great performance. And let's be real.. PC is upgradable.

I can see the potential for eSports. Can probably be nice for Tournaments who want to be able to transport and set up systems easier, instead of those massive intel systems. Can probably get 240 FPS in something like Overwatch (it were native) at 1080p on an M2 Max Studio. But, that's a niche case in the grand scheme of things and many of those orgs will not give up the Intel/Nvidia sponsorships that are predominant there (which is why almost none use AMD Ryzen/RX setups).

I can’t stand reviewers saying these games are running in 4k when they are using an upscaler! It is not running in 4k anymore if you are using metal fx or any other upscaling method!

trash

I’d say Mac in general is great for gaming with caveats.

First caveat is that you’re never going to play day in date AAA games if you want to play those you should have a ps5 or an Xbox

But if you’re okay with that games in Apple Arcade and Minecraft run really great on Apple silicon all the way back to M1

The random perf drops on the Ultra vs Max could be a similar cache coherency issue like we saw with early Ryzen architecture when they went the multi-tile CPU approach with Threadripper. Gen 1 Threadripper performed better in games when you disabled the other tiles to avoid the penalty of memory access across the fabric interconnect, but you lost access to all the other cores on the other tiles. I think it was mitigated by changing the Windows scheduling behavior to avoid moving threads across core complexes, so maybe Apple could do the same here.

Buying a 2000$ MacBook is like buying a 4000$ gaming pc minus the limitations

Serious question, why do you want to play games on Mac? I love macs but I’d just buy a gaming PC or a PS5. Just seems like flogging a dead horse. None of the peripherals are designed for gaming either. I just don’t get why you put yourself through all of this just play games you could play on an £800 gaming pc.

Do not bother with Linus.

He was always an Apple hater, so his “reviews” of whatever Apple was making were and are deeply skewed. This is why I do not watch his videos on anything: the guy just can not overcome his biases to honestly review anything, so his positions are not honestly objective, not trustable.

A 300$ Windows laptop from 2016 can play Elden Ring at 1080P 15fps. It seems like if you are a game developer, you would be better off with an 800$ Windows laptop than 4000$ Mac. It might change in a few years though, but now Mac is still mostly for video editors and music producers. Programmers should do pretty well too with recent full support in Visual Studio 2022 and Python + Java being run on anything. Full stack web developers should be doing well too. It's just game developers who still need Windows machines.

The games that run horribly on M2 Ultra but run well on M2 Max is likely running into threadlocking issues— not uncommon in render systems (especially a decade ago and longer), since there’s often a physics thread, a game logic thread, a render thread, and the thread timing coming from V-sync. It’s very likely rendering 2 or 3 frames before it frees up another thread to put those graphics on the screen, so you’re only seeing every 2nd or 3rd frame rendered. And that’s completely understandable since the games were never designed for this CPU/GPU (though less understandable on Apple’s end). Fortunately, Apple provided tools to profile these games in Xcode Instruments, so you can visually see for yourself if this is the case — if you see the game’s render thread stacking up 2 or 3 threads before the Metal thread gets a chance to do anything —as can the game dev if they care to make some modest improvements to their threading code for us Mac gamers.

The question isn’t “why would you buy a Mac for gaming?”_, the question is _“why would you buy 1 computer instead of 2?” (answer: because I’m not rich) and “why would you buy a Mac as your main computer?” (answer: because I want to day-to-day use an OS that doesn’t feel like a half-assed dogpile of early 00s UX concepts plus a ton of first-party adware (Windows), or an OS that feels like a poor competitor for a mid-90s OS’s UX with a splash of modern paint (every “modern, user-friendly” Linux distro).

Have you tried Rust?

Lol GTA V is not optimized on windows?
You trying to make jokes in between?

Came hoping for Flight Sim like DCS world. Leaving empty-handed.

Is there a comparison somewhere on how this stacks up to the NVIDIA PC world? In other words, how does each M processor with these games compare to NVIDIA? A 2070 card? A 3060 card?

Thanks.

bruh...100fps in csgo on a 5000$ pc

Can these games also play well on the Mac Studio M1 Max?

I would appreciate it if you tested especially the higher powered M2 parts at native resolutions more in addition to these settings that are, in fairness, ideal for a person trying to find a sweet spot between fps and graphics quality, instead of trying to benchmark and stress the M2 GPU as much as possible with as few CPU bottlenecks as possible (which is what the other half of your audience is trying to learn). Also, there are a lot of purists who'd rather prefer playing at a lower native res than a higher upscaled res, and I also don't agree with the tradeoff of a lower native res + high graphical settings for a higher upscaled res and lower graphical settings, which sometimes you seem to make.

Wtf, GTA 5 was in fact one of the best optimized games on Windows. I could run at it 4K high on a GTX 970 - A 300$ class GPU from 2013.

GTA V is one of the most well optimized titles for Windows ever, Could run it with a GTX 750 Ti on high settings with an average of 75 FPS. No game can do that and look as good.

I miss when games were actually optimized 😅 Elden Ring et al are a mess

For under 2000 dollars you could buy a pc with a 4070ti and play the game at 100 fps native.

NMS on even the beefiest gaming PC still stutters when leaving/entering atmospheres. There are mods available to eliminate or reduce this, but it isn't MacOS's fault.

GTA V not optimized for Windows ??? God this guy so iDi00T, even my old PC can Run GTA V properly 60fps with no problem at all 🤣🤣

A $5K computer with the gaming performance of $2K PC. Tim Apple 😂

Resident Evil logic: multiple headshots, zombie doesn't die.

1080p@60*** FSR shouldn't be called 4k benchmark IMO, at least without putting 4k(1080p native) to make it as clear as possible.

Can we please try Dota2 on max graphics and 4K resolution?

Do you know any browser to working on GPT? I need to login by discord page to game ;/

How about Fortnite and Rocket League?

Apple should develope an PS4/PS5 emulator and a Nintendo one...or relaease it's own Steamdeck Portable based on Ipad or Iphone...they're so close... of making a beter computer than any Personal Computer and Game Console by reuniting them in one only Mac Computer... just try to make a better price than overpriced and underwhelming PC hardware...they need a Foundry for its silicon or using TSMC capacity to make some experiments...it would be shocking seeing milions of PC users fed-up with years of crazy prices and little perfromance upgrades...