No it doesn’t. Apple just leverages their very fast SSDs as a substitute when RAM runs low.
Comment on Apple might reveal a proper gaming product at its October event
ThatOneDudeFromOhio@lemmy.world 11 months agoTo 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.
aluminium@lemmy.world 11 months ago
narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 11 months ago
There are some advantages to Apple’s RAM setup, but that mainly comes down to latency and bandwidth to some extent. Then they can do things on the OS level like memory compression and clever swapping, but as far as I can tell they don’t do anything super special.
8 GB is definitely fine for light multitasking with office, mail and browser apps, but big triple A titles are a different beast. There is no magic that Apple can use to make a scene require less (V)RAM. All textures, models etc. in the scene need to be in memory. A texture doesn’t magically take less memory on Apple Silicon than on a PlayStation 5.
Current games on (Windows) PCs are sometimes struggling with an 8 GB GPU, and with the 8 GB Apple Silicon Macs, these 8 GB are the whole system RAM. There is an OS with services and other apps running, so at best the game gets 7 GB of memory (probably less, even when most of the rest is swapped out) for both game logic and as video memory. Developers won’t downgrade/“optimize” their games for this target, especially since the marketshare is minuscule.
So I stand by what I said: if Apple is serious about gaming, they need to upgrade the base spec of all models from 8 to 16 GB. Right now upgrading from 8 to 16 GB costs about as much as an Xbox Series S. Imagine you want to play games on your Mac once they finally come out in somewhat relevant quantities only to realize that you got the 8 GB base model that struggles with most games, and you can’t upgrade it. They need to make every Mac as compatible as possible with these games, as their marketshare is too low as it is.
AcesFullOfKings@feddit.uk 11 months ago
ThatOneDudeFromOhio@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Nindelofocho@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You’re not getting more out of 8gb, you’re getting more out of the swap speed. its hitting the SSD at that point and you’re going to be sharing the bandwidth on those lanes with whatever else needs the SSD during that time
ThatOneDudeFromOhio@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That’s what I said lol
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 11 months ago
That 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.
insaneduck@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I see lot of discussion justifying 8gb vs higher. I think we can go round and round around this topic all day. But thing is ram is cheap just fucking put more ram in apple. Freaking base steam deck is selling for 350dollars? Has 16gb ram and apple device will cost at least 1000 dollars just put in more ram. They can always make more money by selling higher storage options.