(whirring noise)
What the hell, where do I plug this thing in?
Oh, this is the brand new M1 Ultra Mac Studio
with a 48 core GPU and 64 gigabytes of Ram.
And I asked my subscribers a couple of days ago
what sort of content they wanted to see?
Gaming was one of the most highly voted ones,
so guys, this one is for you.
Now, quick disclaimer as well
you should not buy this machine for gaming
in fact, you probably should not buy any kind
of Mac for gaming at all.
Even a lower end PC will destroy these machines
but it's still fun to see how far Max
and Apple Silicon have come
in relation to gaming over the last couple of years.
So with that being said
let's just get straight into the video.
Now you'll see
I have a proper gaming monitor hooked up here.
And this monitor is from BenQ it's their mobias range,
which is a 27 inch
one millisecond response time
IPS, 165Hz,
1440p panel.
It's actually a really
really good relatively budget gaming monitor.
So if you guys want to see a review on that
let me know down below.
Now, if we jump
into the display settings for this Mac Studio, you can see
that we do have the gaming monitor coming up properly here.
So there's the BenQ monitor.
For some reason, it's only saying 144Hz
even though this is 165Hz monitor.
Now, I've also got the full gaming setup here
so gaming keyboard, gaming mouse
it's all plugged directly into the back of the Mac Studio.
I have a HDMI cable
going from the studio into the monitor.
So we should have zero response time
or lag from any of these accessories.
So if there is going to be issues
it's going to be the Mac Studio itself.
So in this video, I'm going to run through a few games in MacOS
and we're also going to load up parallels and windows 11
and just see what kind of performance we can achieve.
So we're going to start off with some tomb raider.
All right.
So we're going to jump into these settings
first of all, we're going to go to display and graphics.
I'm actually going to set this
to 1080p just for this particular test.
We're going to leave the refresh rate at 144Hz.
We're also going to jump
and we're just going to put it at the highest settings.
I'll leave,
I'll turn these settings off
because I don't typically use them when I'm gaming.
So I'm going to save that.
Okay, so we are in game at the moment
now, remember guys this is at the highest settings
at 1080p and we are getting about 130 FPS
so when we're running around a moving a lot
it does dip down to 100.
We are getting a little bit
of screen tearing, nothing too crazy
if I kind of jump around.
Now tomb raider isn't 100% optimized for
Max and Apple Silicon.
Uh there was some work through metal to actually
optimize the engine a little bit more
um but it's still not 100% native and compatible
but as we can see, I mean, it's not doing badly at all.
Like this is definitely playable.
You are getting some dropped frames
and some screen tearing here and there.
It's definitely playing back at over 100 FPS.
I can feel that on the screen.
Okay, let's pause that
let's jump into options and let's bump this up to 1440p.
So now we're at 1440p um, seeing a little bit
of a drop in FPS about 85 now, but it's still not too bad.
I mean, at the end of the day,
this is a Mac $4 thousand Mac
so, you know, for that kind of money
it's not a good experience, but compared to previous Max
I think this is pretty impressive.
Now moving onto some CS:GO you guys may have seen
from my M1 pro video a couple months ago,
CS:GO could not get past about a 100 FPS.
Um, so we're going to see if throwing more CPU cores
and GPU cores and an extra 32 gigabytes
of RAM is going to have any kind of effect here.
So jumping into the video settings
I'm just going to leave everything at default
and I am going to drop it down to 1080p.
Now, typically on most windows PCs you're going to be seeing
in excess of 300 plus FPS on this particular game.
Like I said before,
it really does not seem to run well on MacOS
even on this particular M1 Ultra chip, as you can see
we are getting around 100 FPS, but there's a lot
of screen tearing and it's just not a very good
or enjoyable experience compared
to even a $100 windows gaming PC.
So, see if we can try and get a few guys over here,
definitely getting a lot of screen tearing.
It's actually quite hard to hit people.
The actual input lag doesn't seem to be too bad.
We're not, we're now sitting at around a 100 FPS.
See if I can get this last guy.
(keyboard clicking)
Okay, let's move on to parallels
now, I've been using parallels on this machine
for a couple of hours now,
and it's actually been a pretty good experience
but the gaming experience is not the greatest.
So let me explain, if we come up here
into parallel settings and I come to the control center
and I click on the little settings icon.
If I come in here to hardware, you can see
that for some reason, parallels is not letting you allocate
more than eight CPU cores at the moment.
As you know this machine has 20 CPU cores.
If I try to change it to other
and then increase it to say 10, it just doesn't work
It gives me an error message.
So I just leave it at eight.
Memory however, you can allocate as much as you want.
I've got 32 gigabytes
which should be enough to run parallels
and also the game inside parallels,
while also leaving 32 gigabytes of RAM for MacOS.
So it seems like parallels needs to be updated to
take advantage of the extra CPU cores in here.
So hopefully in the next couple of weeks
we will see those updates take place.
So starting with Overwatch, I chose this game
because a lot of you guys play it and you enjoy the game.
And also because just like CS:GO
it's relatively easy to run.
You don't need a super beefy computer to get a decent FPS.
So jumping into the options, we'll have a look
at some of the settings we are playing with.
So you can see, I have it in full screen mode
at 1440p I don't have the FPS capped at all.
And I've also got the graphics quality set to ultra.
So basically maxed out
the highest graphic settings you can get.
Okay, so now we're in a game
and you can see we're getting around 100 FPS
it does drop down quite a bit
and sometimes it'll drop down to about 50.
We're also getting a lot of screen tearing
as you can see there.
So definitely not a super super smooth experience,
very similar to what is happening in CS:GO.
(keyboard clicking)
So as you guys have just seen, there it is.
When you get into combat with someone
when you have actual characters popping
up on the screen, the experience is not good
you get a lot of screen tearing, a lot of dropped FPS
and typically most of the time you will just die.
So it looks good on paper
you can see we're still getting around 100 FPS
but as soon as you get into any kind
of action with another player, that FPS is going to dip.
As you can see there again, it's just
it's almost complete unplayable.
Once you see another player and actually start to
really sort of get into it, moving on to GTA 5
again, we are still within parallels.
We're playing this at 1080p at medium settings.
And in terms of FPS it's, okay.
It's not the greatest we're sitting
at around 40 FPS here and still some screen tearing
and dropped frame here or there.
I will say, after playing this game
for about 45 minutes today, the screen tearing
and drop frame seems to be less
than Overwatch and CS:GO
but, when I move the mouse around there
you can see there's quite a few frames that I dropped.
So let's just quickly steal a car
We'll get in one of these bad boys and drive around
see if we can decrease that frame rate a bit.
We're just sitting at about 35 and guys
this game is almost 10 years old at this point.
Um it should be running
at a consistent 100 plus FPS at these settings.
But um,
yeah it's just,
it's not bad
like if you were just playing this
as a single player game,
just for some fun,
maybe you wanted to
maybe you wanted to emulate some old windows games.
I know Batman:Arkaham Asylum work
that's a fun game I used to play.
Those types of games will work fine and parallels, but um
but yeah, it's, it's definitely playable
but it's not something that I would recommend getting a Mac
for Of course.
So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going alt tab
out of this, and we're going to jump into activity monitor
and just have a look at how hot the system is,
how much RAM is being used, all that kind of good stuff.
So looking at the CPU, you can see the CPU really
isn't being used that much at all.
Again, parallels is limited to eight cores at the moment
in terms of memory we're using about 42 gigabytes
of RAM parallels here, windows 11
using about 33 which makes sense.
We allocated at roughly 32 gigabytes, in terms
of actual heat and noise from the Mac mini.
You guys know if you've been a fan
of this channel for a while
I typically do decibel comparisons and also thermal tests.
I literally don't need to do that here or even
when gaming natively on MacOS, cause it produces no heat,
there's no fan noise.
I do have TG Pro running
unfortunately it has not been updated yet
so I can't give you the temperatures of cores and GPU cores
um but right now I'm sitting 30 centimeters away from it.
It's not hot and it's making zero fan noise.
So as you can see, even with all of the power
of the M1 Ultra chip, it doesn't seem to
be enough to overcome all the shortcomings
with gaming on a Mac and MacOS
maybe in the future If we see games
updated to use the metal API
which is supported on Mac
or perhaps we'll get some more updates to parallels
so we can virtualize his games a little bit better.
It might be a better experience, but
for now it's really not that different
to an M1 Pro or an M1 Max MacBook.
Apart from that guys hopefully, you enjoyed this video
more content coming on the M1 Ultra Mac Studio stay tuned,
I'll catch you in the next one.