Right now, at this point in time, for applications like local AI and certain types of gaming, I would argue for most people having more VRAM is more useful than having faster VRAM.
I personally now do more AI stuff and gaming on my M5 mac with its 24 GB shared (300 GB/s) RAM pool than my 12 GB 5070 Ti (900 GB/s).
replyApple still lives in its walled garden and defends it vociferously, but I would argue they have made the correct design tradeoffs for their business.
> Right now, at this point in time, for applications like local AI and certain types of gaming, I would argue for most people having more VRAM is more useful than having faster VRAM. I personally now do more AI stuff and gaming on my M5 mac with its 24 GB shared (300 GB/s) RAM pool than my 12 GB 5070 Ti (900 GB/s).
replyThe issue is that this in no way requires soldered memory. CAMM2 supports speeds up to 9600 MT/s. You can get over 300 GB/s from two CAMM2 sockets.
For applications like local AI and the majority of PC video games, you are not expected to have DDR5-level GPU bandwidth. It is a constraint, there is no "good enough" when you're selling a desktop-grade M5 Max that is bandwidth-constrained in practice. Modern gaming at native resolution is pretty much impossible on most Macbook Pros.
replyIt's an acceptable approach for iPad-level stuff, but for professional workstations and desktops it's not competitive.