The GPU in the Xbox One S was far from top of the line, it's pretty mediocre. A middle of the road GPU from that time frame was easily 200% faster than it.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?architecture=GCN+1.0&...

That being said, frankly I'm amazed at what most modern mobile GPUs are capable of and for most people who are casual gamers, that level of performance will be more than enough. What Apple will bring to the table will certainly be better than that, it's already better than Intel GPUs and they can still support 3rd party GPUs if necessary.

The demo they showed of Shadow of the Tomb Raider running at 1080p looked great for a game, AND it also looked awful if you compared it to the PC version on Ultra settings.

Apple kept mentioning pro apps like maya where you need highend GPUs. Gaming isn’t a big use case on a Mac. Our video production team uses highend macs with discreet gpus. If they don’t plan to offer comparable solutions to current line of desktop machines, we’ll be forced to switch platforms. I don’t see how an integrated gpu can compete with a discreet GPU with specialized dedicated ram and a memory bus that’s 10x of a CPU using ddr4x.

I suspect they aren't going to rule out external GPUs, they were just demonstrating the platform capability without them.

The whole presentation struck me as a big middle finger to Intel and just Intel.

I mean, it looked awful compared to what I run on my PC, but considering as well that it was running using Rosetta I thought it was genuinely quite impressive.

Yeah, but that demo was running under emulation through rosetta 2...

The game natively supports Metal, I suspect that's why they chose it.

I agree the game definitely did not look like it was intended to and from that perspective it looked bad.

Looking at it without context however, it demonstrated the capability of the platform to run a AAA game without developer optimization/consideration.

And it demonstrates someone could make a stylized game similar to Fortnite.

Yeah, I would agree with that. It definitely demonstrated that gaming is possible even under Rosetta, which is an accomplishment. Watching some other stuff from them this morning, it seems like they're passing the metal calls directly through to the GPU (which makes sense), even while translating CPU calls from x86 to ARM.

An A12x has 10 billion transistors, and being a SoC the CPU, Neural Engine, ISC and GPU are all integrated.

And that was released in 2018. By the time Apple put out desktop class silcon in end of 2020, surely it will be significantly scaled up?