M2 Ultra: 15 games tested on the Mac Studio

Game Porting Toolkit on Mac Full Tutorial:

Some quick game testing on the new Mac Studio with M2 Ultra, 24 CPU cores, 64 GB RAM, 60 GPU cores. At the time of recording this is the fastest Mac you can buy, the 76 GPU core variant will be delivered to the public in July 2023. In this video I'll be testing Mac games including games running through Rosetta, native ARM, OpenGL, MoltenVK, Metal, as well as Windows games running through Game Porting Toolkit and also Nintendo Switch games running through Ryujinx.

Timestamps:
00:00 M2 Ultra is great for gaming!
00:51 No Man's Sky
01:56 Resident Evil Village
02:42 Layers of Fear (NEW RELEASE!)
03:54 Dota 2
04:42 CS:GO
05:52 Baldur's Gate 3
06:34 Diablo IV
07:49 GTA V Singleplayer
08:39 GTA Online
09:10 Hogwarts Legacy issues
09:54 Elden Ring issues
10:41 M1 & M2 Ultra chip bugs?
11:15 Cyberpunk 2077 issues
11:55 God of War
12:48 Zelda Tears of the Kingdom
13:50 4K Ryjujinx - Fire Emblem

► Links:

► Get the NEW M1 Macs here (Amazon links):

► My Recording Setup:
►► My equipment:
►► Mac:
►► General:

► Windows gaming on Mac:

[emmabentley]

Everyone always seems to miss out X Plane 12 . Something that is windows native and apple silicon compatible. Please include it next time, as a developer for the platform and a Mac Studio owner I’d love to see what the m2 is capable of

[etka]

Great video, but it would be nice to see more resolutions. Most people don’t play at 4k as indicated by the steam hardware survey. A game at 1080p 120 or 1440p 60fps is way more enjoyable than 4k 30fps

[SafetySheepRnD]

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.

[mubin-ansari]

Can you create a similar video like this but on the budget chips like M1/M2? Would be interesting to see how the performance flares there

[shakeitoff]

Andrew, as a die-hard Mac user and avid game enjoyer, I love all you do for Mac gaming. But I really think you need to make it clear what GPT is and what it isn't. 

You are highlighting Windows games here, alongside native ports, as if it it's an official way for people to run Windows games. It's not, as you are well aware. It's designed for developers to see how their game runs "as-is" and to gauge a port's viability.

People are stupid. They'll see your video, as well put together as it is, and take completely the wrong things from it.

The Mac gaming subreddit is full of people treating this toolkit like it's the defacto way of playing games that previously weren't supported. They still aren't supported, and there's no guarantee of any support. This is some weapons-grade copium, getting Elden ring running at garbage fps at 1080p and treating it as a stable release.

"When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" perfectly sums up the rabid desire to jerry-rig some games and go "THE FUTURE OF MAC GAMING IS FINALLY HERE!". If you keep perpetuating the toolkits viability, why would any developer bother to release a native port, at a time when there is already little to no incentive to do so?

[CapnSlipp]

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.

[SteelSkin]

About ray-tracing support: Metal does have ray-tracing as part of the API, but it is all done through traditional GPU compute and therefore isn't nearly performant enough for games. Apple's GPU likely do not have ray-tracing acceleration hardware blocks as implemented by other GPU vendors yet, and should you use an AMD RDNA2 GPU in a compatible Mac Pro it won't take advantage of them either. That is why game developers are holding out on implementing ray-tracing until the hardware properly supports it.

[kadirzhanl]

gta v was actually optimized almost perfectly on pc and worked ideally even on old hardware

[GuiVG]

Can you test all these games on M1 base?

Just to know what's the difference and if it's worth buying the games.

[luis_vm]

It would be nice to see a video about Whisky, an open source app that helps setting up GPTK for the non advanced users

[danielseddon]

The “crosshatching” you see in GOW is caused by shadow map bias issues.

[ozzy]

Whoa I have to chime in (thank you so much for the videos btw) because 11 years later and GTA V is still the game I use to benchmark. It is easily the best optimized game I have ever played in terms of a port. I ran it on a gtx 760, 1050ti, 1660 super, and now 3080

[tompp]

Well, you probably have not used SLI or Crossfire. There is a reason multi gpu did not catch on for gaming. As a developer, my hunch is that the two gpu chiplets of the m2 ultra either share memory, and one chip has to go to the slow path (numa), or there is a quirk on how work is submitted on M2U. Not familiar with Apple Silicon enough to have an informed opinion.

[MaschinenKopf]

I would love to see a video comparing the low end chips like m1 and m2 macbook airs.

[Hiiipowerdanni]

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

[JuanCarlosRivasPerrettaOboe]

today morning i was exactly looking for this hahaha you are the master!

[El.Duder-ino]

Thank u for making all of these tests👍 M2 Ultra confirms what we've seen on M1 Ultra that putting 2 Max chips in one isn't the same when they are made as single chip with monolithic die. Multi chip/chiplet on single package isn't the same thing as one chip designed from ground up.

[unknownpleasures_nic]

Ryujinx has a new build almost daily, and from personal experience, the more recent builds work way better than the official release, I did encounter some glitches with the Ryujinx beta like my audio suddenly stopped working, I backed up my save date and had to clean install it and it worked again. (I haven't tried Tears of the Kingdom yet though)

[elementalrabel]

Thanks to the author of this video, there is quite a bit of information on the Internet about this computer in games. This video cleared up a lot of things

[floppa]

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.