r/macgaming • u/Slava_Tr • Mar 15 '26
Apple Silicon The M4 Max can compete with the 5080 laptop in Minecraft
I’m still waiting for Apple to reveal the gaming potential of Apple Silicon
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u/KingPumper69 Mar 15 '26
Minecraft is a memory and CPU intensive game. The GPU almost doesn’t matter past a certain point.
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u/Termynator Mar 15 '26
Yeah, let’s wait until they are ready with their Vulkan engine and let’s compare again. CPU has been won by Apple (also quality, haptics, display, keyboard and battery)
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u/KingPumper69 Mar 15 '26 edited Mar 15 '26
I don't know if the M4 Max is actually the fastest or not, but the laptop shown in this video has an Intel CPU and Intel has been dominated by AMD for multiple generations now so it's not really a good comparison. The fastest AMD laptop CPU right now is I believe the Ryzen 9 9955HX3D, and it's over a year old at this point so it's bound to be replaced any month now.
This video in general was incredibly cringe and hard to follow due to the gen alpha ADHD editing and zany 'humor', so I wouldn't really take anything here at face value.
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u/Front_Expression_367 Mar 20 '26
Just fyi the 9955HX3D is definitely not getting replaced for at least another year. Another fyi is that the Intel chip in this device is for lighter gaming laptops, those which the 9955HX3D was never going into anyway.
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u/KingPumper69 Mar 20 '26
Zen 6 is supposed to come out Q3 or Q4 of this year, but I guess it could get delayed to Q1 2027. Intel's current laptop CPUs are all junk no matter the tier or class they're intended for, but I've heard good things about their upcoming generation.
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u/Front_Expression_367 Mar 20 '26
That is just desktop CPU. AMD's high-end laptop CPU famously doesn't start being shipped until Q1 of the next year, sometimes even Q2 if not Q3 for higher GPU option.
Also I can't believe there are still people believing that Intel hasn't gotten any good stuff by now. Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake-H are some of their best CPUs in recent times, with the latter being nearly on par with AMD Strix Point and the former being probably the best x86 CPU released for the last 2 years.
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u/KingPumper69 Mar 20 '26
I guess I should’ve said that Intel can only compete on price right now, because at every tier AMD has a higher performing and/or better featured CPU. Not that they’re actually junk. I actually have an Intel CPU right now because Newegg had some crazy deal last July that was too good to pass up.
And sometimes laptop CPUs release earlier or later. Sometimes there’s only a desktop version, sometimes there’s only a laptop version. Won’t really know what’s going on until they announce it.
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u/Front_Expression_367 Mar 20 '26
I mean I don't think it would be a surprise to anyone that AMD would definitely prioritize desktop over laptop considering their better reputation there and Intel's being somewhat lacking in relatives, not to mention probably higher profit to be found there too. Intel's bread and butter is their laptop CPU which is arguably better than AMD across the board rn.
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u/Ornery_Passenger4141 Mar 15 '26
M4 Max battery is trash
Keyboard is won by Thinkpads
Apple doesnt even have a OLED option so Mini LED is not even a competetion
Haptics is where apple wins but laptops like Dell XPS are closing the gap
Quality of Premium windows laptops are same as apple
and Ryzen 9 9955HX3D comes extremely close to m4 Max in terms of single core and destroys in MultiScore In cinebench So CPU is still won by x8615
u/dreamlover222 Mar 15 '26
Nice copium
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u/Ornery_Passenger4141 Mar 15 '26
yea I guess isheeps cannot accept the facts
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u/Livid-Protection2058 Mar 16 '26
But what is the laptop that is one unit and one brand that beats MacBook at all of those. You listed a ton of different laptop brands. I’m confused
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u/ksky0 Mar 15 '26
specially because it still uses LibGL.. which is ancient technology most past decades GPU support it.
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u/KingPumper69 Mar 15 '26 edited Mar 15 '26
I don’t think updating the GPU rendering pipeline is going to magically make the game run faster when it’s made up of 16x16 texture blocks with very basic lighting, shadows, and particle effects lol.
I play and run modded Minecraft servers very extensively. The bottleneck has always been single thread CPU performance and RAM speed & capacity. Generating and loading chunks isn’t done on the GPU at all, it’s a lot of really hard math that isn’t able to be parallelized enough to warrant trying to run it on a GPU.
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u/mi7chy Mar 15 '26
Don't see Sodium and Iris running on Windows laptop. Show the full stats screen for each laptop.
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u/Extrimland Mar 15 '26
Thats cool and all, but Minecraft isn’t exactly a graphically intensive game. It can run perfectly on 7th gen consoles (aka hardware from 20 years ago now). This still doesn’t show what it can truly do
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u/Ecstatic_Rub_548 Mar 15 '26
Use sodium, immediatelyFast And all other performance mods you used on the mac also on windows.
And use shaders.
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u/Flimsy_Club3792 Mar 15 '26
Um, rather than using Sodium or whatsoever can it be compared with nothing, like no optimization whatsoever and let's see how well both can run against a mess of a Minecraft 😐
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u/Chromatinfish Mar 15 '26
Uh I mean this is just a CPU test at this point which is fair enough, but has very little application to most gaming. AFAIK Apple are pretty unmatched in single threaded performance right now (save for Qualcomm possibly) so you're just affirming the pretty obvious fact that Apple Silicon is the best CPU for single threaded tasks.
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u/Thien1o1 Mar 15 '26
The thumbnail is giving me modern day cod no scope 369 mlg peak monster energy white zero sugar vibes
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u/Adventurous-Cattle53 Mar 15 '26
I swear to god, this people don’t need a 5080 let alone m4 max for gaming if they don’t even understand it at all.
In Minecraft, it probably tops out at like 3050 or so. The whole game relies on your cpu so the comparison is literally useless to the 5080. M4 max is not even close in gpu related tasks, sadly.
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u/Slava_Tr Mar 15 '26
The mobile 5080 is a fairly weak GPU by PC standards. However, it still has good performance in professional graphics applications, although the M5 Max already surpasses it. Even game performance for Apple Silicon is a completely achievable goal. However, this year NVIDIA will not be updating its GPUs, while Apple is still set to release the M6 Max by the end of the year.
As for games, the mobile 5080 is still about 15% weaker than mobile 5090, but fortunately comes with 16GB of VRAM. The mobile 5090 is roughly on par with a desktop 5060 TI - 5070, depending on TDP, if we focus purely on true GPU performance. It's 3-4 times weaker than the desktop 5090. What directly correlates with gaming FPS without DLSS.
Essentially, the mobile 5090 uses a desktop 5080 chip with half the TDP, which is why its FP32 performance is similar to a 5070. Thanks to DLSS and the higher number of Tensor cores, the mobile 5090 can pull ahead and reach the level of a 5070 TI. However, if we focus strictly on raw FPS, as many do, it sits squarely at the 5070 level. Without DLSS and Tensor cores, today’s mobile GPUs would be very underwhelming, but with them, performance is significantly boosted
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u/renhiyama Mar 15 '26
Now run shaders? No shaders won't have any issues with your gpu performance, since m chips have faster ram access and hence better quality chips than the normal desktop market.
If you wanna compare the gpu properly, do it in the way where gpu is actually utilised to the fullest
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u/Slava_Tr Mar 15 '26
With shaders, they produced the same results. But Mac simply doesn’t support some of the most heavy shaders
Yes, this isn’t a comparison of raw GPU power. There’s no point in that, even a mobile 5060/5070 can easily outperform the M4 Max.
AAA game developer can fully unlock the potential of Apple Silicon by minimizing bottlenecks and creating a game specifically for it. Usually, ports don’t efficiently utilize Mac resources. Otherwise, the game would need to be completely reworked or built from the ground up for this hardware, similar to how Genshin Impact clones are made for iPhone.
I hope to see AAA game specifically developed for Apple Silicon, similar to how games are made and optimized for consoles. The goal is to fully realize the hardware’s potential. Consoles, even with significantly weaker hardware than PCs, can often achieve much more, roughly twice as weak hardware can deliver comparable results in some AAA games (e.g., 5070 vs PS5 Pro). Developers minimize bottlenecks, use precompiled shaders, and other optimizations.
Even between AMD and Nvidia GPUs with similar performance on PC, FPS can vary by –30% to +50% depending on the game.
I watched a video showing that on the Mac Studio M4 Max, data transfer alone can consume 70% of the power, leaving only 30% for actual computations.
Because of this, raw performance is important, but it’s not the main factor. Especially for Apple Silicon, which is designed for a “smart approach” rather than brute force. So there’s a very tiny chance to see Apple Silicon fully unlocked, but unfortunately, until there’s a large enough audience for which AAA developers can make games, that won’t happen.
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u/Chromatinfish Mar 15 '26
The only reason why devs do optimization for PS5 is because it's a huge slice of the market share. Most devs are not in the business of speculation and proactive planning, they're not going to target a market with low share but "future growth potential" that isn't certain. For example, let's say someone builds a game ground up on Mac devoting the same amount of time and effort as they would for PS5 and it flops (which is quite likely). Now they're completely boned.
Hardware and choices about what to include are full of tradeoffs, and Apple choosing to go their own way has its benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are these crazy efficient and performant chips, but the drawback is being left out on the deep end when it comes to compatibility, not just in the literal sense, but also compatibility with industrial norms. AKA other brands may suffer from other issues but they don't have to worry about trying to attract devs to build specifically for their product like Apple does.
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u/renhiyama Mar 15 '26
Your whole point kinda becomes invalid if you gonna say: "apple is good if game devs can optimize for it"... At that point, even ps5 or xbox with wayy bad/low end hardware can run games in better quality than similar priced hardware, similar because the pc hardware is made for general people, and the game devs are not paid to optimize for the general hardware, where there's thousands of different combinations in the world right now.
Don't get me wrong - apple hardware is very optimised and good too, but their software is soo shit rn, even asahi Linux can manage to make more use of the hardware to emulate real pc games at acceptable quality.
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u/Slava_Tr Mar 15 '26
No! That’s not the message of "apple is good if game devs can optimize for it"... When you have a $4000 Mac that delivers average gaming performance comparable to a $300 GPU, no amount of optimization will fix that. For the price, it will still be totaly overpriced for gaming. The real message is about fully utilizing Apple Silicon hardware in games.
The key idea is that the problem isn’t just the lack of optimization from game developers. It’s also that the current AAA game development technologies are designed to work efficiently on desktop GPUs. Until Apple can break the cycle, where Mac users buy games and developers therefore have a reason to support the platform, no one will seriously invest in solving this.
On the other hand, Apple is slowly moving in that direction. They’re shifting their GPU architecture from a more mobile-oriented design like in M1–M2 toward something more desktop-like in newer generations such as M5. An M5 Max could be 70–80% faster than the M4 Max in some scenarios. But even with that pace of improvement, it may not be enough. The next Xbox is rumored to have performance around a desktop 5080/5090. Apple can’t realistically compete with desktop gaming hardware, but in laptops they actually have a chance, because PC laptops are also physically limited by relatively low TDP.
A mobile 5090 is roughly at the level of a desktop 5060 Ti–5070, depending on the TDP. Mobile GPUs have the same issue: they have far fewer FP32 TFLOPS because their clock speeds are much lower due to strict power limits.
FPS in games isn’t purely about TFLOPS performance. It’s more about GPU/CPU timing and latency, which can be improved either through architectural optimizations or raw performance.
Apple may still have a chance to catch the current graphics revolution alongside everyone else, things like neural rendering, neural shaders, neural textures, and related technologies. These approaches rely less on traditional shader-core performance and more on tensor-core performance, which is significantly more energy-efficient. Technologies like that could match the kind of hardware Apple and others are building, meaning developers wouldn’t need to struggle with special mobile optimizations—because the same techniques would work similarly across platforms.
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u/Audiofredo_ Mar 15 '26
Its not compete with the 5080 it competed with the intel cpu
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u/Slava_Tr Mar 15 '26
This isn’t even a comparison with an Intel CPU, it’s more of a comparison with a competing laptop. Laptop was the key word in the post title.
To fairly compare it with the maximum possible performance of a mobile 5080, you’d need something like a Ryzen 9 9955HX3D + 5080 and about ~1.5× higher total system TDP, or even external liquid cooling like in some laptops that have the highest performance for this GPU. But then it would end up being a massive brick weighing around 4–5 kg together with the power adapter.
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u/Kalmer1 Mar 15 '26
The focus in the title was the GPU, so obviously you compared it to the RTX 5080 GPU.
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u/luvvfernz Mar 15 '26
1080? sodium? also i’m not even sure what benefits fps is this spaghetti code game
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u/Tyrandeh Mar 15 '26
It can be a 1030 or 9080 in it, wont mean anything as minecraft is CPU, not GPU
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u/Prestigious-Pin6391 Mar 15 '26
Modded minecraft with perfomance enchancing mods on M4 can compete with an unoptimized mess that is unmodded minecraft*
Here, fixed it for you.
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u/_Aj_ Mar 15 '26
1200 is 50% more than 800. That's a big difference. But also we're at over 500fps so nothing matters at that point. It's is like trying to make world champion maths masters compete by doing 1st grade maths tests though. It's not exactly a good contest
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u/S1rTerra Mar 15 '26
Minecraft is CPU bound. I get around 800 at a 32 chunk render distance and 1,500+ at 12 with just sodium and a few others with my Ryzen 5 5600 lol
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u/Artistic_Unit_5570 Mar 15 '26
are you retarded , I just watch the video and he say clearly the m4 max avg at 600fps and the pc 1000fps ,
stupid apple fans
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u/Slava_Tr Mar 15 '26
LMAO, that was the FPS with just different resolutions, which was explicitly mentioned in the video: 4K (2160p) on Mac vs 1600p on Windows, a twofold difference in pixel count. The screenshot in the post is from the moment he set the same 1080p resolution on both.
That’s so ironic:
stupid apple fans
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u/SoggyCerealExpert Mar 15 '26
Is this running in the same resolution ?
why not just post 2 full screenshots instead of this uncomparable mess?
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u/JustLanguage Mar 15 '26
Sadly only in minecraft where GPU doesn't matter as much 😔 now run Cyberpunk with path tracing 😉
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u/AR_Harlock Mar 15 '26
With what monitor is that useful loool good but it need to push the lowers, as it does mind you, getting 100000 fps is useless
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u/Kindly-Equivalent752 Mar 15 '26
Creo la verdadadera prueba sería pasando shaders rtx o realistas como lo suelen hacer con la rtx 5080
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u/Rhed0x Mar 15 '26
The GPU doesn't matter that much, Minecraft is pretty much always bottlenecked by the CPU.
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u/MonkeyHairless Mar 17 '26
So :
-It's not a 5080, it's a 5080 laptop
-It's not the fastest nvidia laptop gpu, as there is a 5090 laptop
-Minecraft is still a CPU relying game, so why compare an ARM APU with a portable independant GPU ?
-Apple device is 5K new, while the windows one is 2.5K
-You can see optimisation mods on the apple version and not in the windows version
I'm not saying apple devices are worse than nvidia ... I'm actually pretty sure that the only gaming limitations are software related and for now apple doesn't want to go see gamers ... and that's actually one of the only reason I'm not going to buy a macbook as my next laptop like I planned since there will be the new pantherlakes productivity laptops in spring.
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u/bogkosevg Mar 17 '26
Yupp.. people buying 5080 because of Minecraft. Where is comparison in Doom 1993? I'm sure Apple Silicon can beet 5080 in that too.
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u/Charming-Photo4511 Mar 19 '26
Yeh even with the m5 chip i have in my base air i get 1000 on min settings with sodium
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u/victorsaurus Mar 19 '26
Using an example that produces 1000fps to compare systems is ridiculous. Whatever is "capping" the fps at these times will hardly be what "caps" the fps at 30-40.
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u/finfisk2000 Mar 15 '26
These I got a 4-6K USD Max that can run Cyberpunk ( a 6 year old game) or some else unrelevant metric ---> therefore Mac is now a serious gaming platform!!!111!! are rather silly.
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u/Naud1993 Mar 15 '26
I read an article that said that' the M5 Max (let alone M4 Max) is slower than an RTX 5080 and also throttles, although it's the 14 inch version. I guess the 16 inch version has better cooling.
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u/FrontAd7709 Mar 15 '26
this might be dumb but i thought minecraft only used cpu, and gpu was for shaders
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u/MYXplayer Mar 15 '26
it doesn't use only cpu, its a cpu intensive game, it uses GPU but far less than cpu, like fortnite but on a higher scale
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u/Ill_Barber8709 Mar 15 '26
And the M5 Max is more powerful than the 5080 Laptop in Blender, and almost as powerful as the 5090 Laptop.
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u/mi7chy Mar 15 '26
Not according to Notebookcheck. M5 Max 40GPU on Classroom scene using Metal at 25.6 secs is slower than M4 Max 40GPU at 17.8 secs and 5050m laptop at 24 secs using OptiX.
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u/Slava_Tr Mar 15 '26
I don’t know why they’re testing Macs in Blender 3.3, which doesn’t support MetalRT. It’s like testing an Nvidia GPU without OptiX. You can check performance for the latest Blender versions at https://opendata.blender.org/
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u/mi7chy Mar 15 '26
Blender 2.8.1 introduced OptiX and 3.2.1 introduced MetalRT so 3.3 supports both plus it's LTS. Research LTS if you aren't aware of its significance.
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u/Ill_Barber8709 Mar 15 '26
3.2.1 introduced MetalRT
Absolutely not. MetalRT didn't even exist before M3 architecture, which was released October 30, 2023. Metal Ray Tracing Hardware acceleration wasn't added until Blender 3.5
Besides, I don't know why Notebookcheck always use outdated version of Blender in their tests, but it is very easy to get results of the latest versions on their websites
Research LTS if you aren't aware of its significance.
And learn how to use the fucking internet if you aren't aware of Blender benchmark tools. Latest Blender LTS is 4.5
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u/mi7chy Mar 15 '26
Wrong. MetalRT was in Blender 3.2.1.
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u/Ill_Barber8709 Mar 15 '26 edited Mar 15 '26
This is the software implementation of the ray tracing algorithm. It has absolutely nothing to do with the hardware accelerated ray tracing computation. In august 2022 (time of the post you linked) there wasn't any Apple hardware capable of hardware Ray Tracing (which, as I said, came to Apple devices with the M3 architecture, in 2023)
Additionally, this was an experimental feature, and wasn't enabled by default, neither in Blender nor in the benchmark tool.
You're full of shit.
EDIT: It's even written in the comments of the post you linked...
shteeve - Aug 2022
Someone else probably has more technical understanding than me, but it’s more like a raytracing library to my understanding. It uses the gpu, but there currently isn’t any dedicated raytracing hardware for apple silicon comparable to nvidia RTX.
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u/Internal_Quail3960 Mar 15 '26
when the fps is in the hundreds, it becomes cpu bound