JUNE 2019 MACWORLD 47launches its Apple Arcade (go.macworld.
com/arca) service with premium, top-tier
games. We can look at two aspects of
graphics performance—the
ability to render traditional
3D scenes like games, and
the ability to use the GPU
for complex non-graphics
compute (like image
processing).
Traditional graphics
performance has been
increasing at a steady rate
over the last few
generations of A-series
processors. It is often limited
by memory bandwidth,
which doesn’t often make a
big leap from one year to
the next. If we think the trend will continue,
we can expect a 3DMark Sling Shot
Extreme Unlimited score of around 4,500.
It’s a significant improvement
for Apple, but not as fast as the
very latest Qualcomm chips.
Apple seems to be leaning
more in the direction of making
its chips faster when using its
own Metal API, both for
graphics and compute. I think
that trend will continue, and
while the GPU probably won’t
see the big Metal performance
leap it did from the A11 to the
A12, we’re probably still going
to get a Geekbench 4 Compute
score of well over 25,000.Graphics performance is starting to plateau, and without a
big boost in memory bandwidth, that probably won’t change.
Graphics compute performance, however, has plenty of
room to grow. It’s more useful to Apple’s software than
ever, so expect significant gains.