Why the Apple Silicon M4 is a big deal for gaming

On Tuesday morning, Apple announced that it was taking some major steps towards courting gamers all over the world. The company officially unveiled the brand-new iPad Pro at its 40-minute Let Loose Event, and the device has a little something for everyone. Including the powerful M4 chip, and how it is going to — pardon the pun — change the game regarding how titles like Diablo Immortal and Resident Evil 4 look and play on the tablet.

The first thing to note is that the iPad Pro 11-inch and 12.9-inch versions are leaping ahead a couple of generations, from the M2 to the groundbreaking M4. This is a whole generation ahead of even the newest Macbook Pros with the M3 Pro. The M4 chip’s speed and power, with a 10-core GPU and a neural engine Apple says is capable of 38 trillion operations per second, surpasses any AI PC currently on the market.

While the CPU being able to think and move 1.5 times faster than the current iPad Pro is likely geared more towards people who are using the device in their work life, people who are using it for entertainment purposes will get massive benefits as well.

Those features, along with the new OLED screen, would already boost what the new iPad Pro had to offer gamers, even if those were the only tweaks and improvements Apple made. Fortunately, those are just some of the boosts that could make this new tablet one of the best mobile gaming devices out there.

Mesh shaders and ray tracing offer a massive jump in gaming performance for the new iPad Pro

Gamers know just how big a deal those features are

For gaming enthusiasts, the two most exciting announcements also happened to be bits of info that weren’t leaking out much ahead of the Apple Event. The more powerful GPU built into the iPad Pro’s M4 chipset means that the tablet will support both ray tracing and mesh shading. Both features are brand new to these tablets and are also features that some gaming PCs aren’t always able to offer.

Ray tracing allows graphics to be far more realistic. Most gamers tend to notice the effect more when it comes to shadows or reflections, though there’s a deeper level of immersion overall when using the technology. At the absolute very least, this kind of tech is going to bring a level of realism that will allow the iPad Pro to compete with something like the OLED Steamdeck in the way a game appears, even if it can’t come close to competing with the volume of games available (yet).

Mesh shading is the other half of the one-two punch for gamers who have heard Apple claim it wanted to offer more for the community for quite a while now. The ability to handle mesh shading, paired with the M4 chip, means this device should offer greater capability to offer more in-depth scenes and graphics. And once again, those graphics capabilities are not only going to challenge some gaming PCs but will actually leave at least a few of the older models still out there in the dust.

Related

How to buy Apple’s new iPads and accessories

Apple unveiled new versions of its iPad Air and iPad Pro, along with a new Pencil Pro and Magic Keyboard. Here’s how you can grab the latest devices.

One case in point came last October when Alan Wake 2 hit store shelves and digital libraries. The game featured a fantastic look and feel, as long as PC gamers had a graphics card that could actually support mesh shaders. That meant that computers with MD RX 5000-series or Nvidia GTX 10-series cards, still fairly popular cards in the PC gaming world, were out of luck. While Alan Wake 2 would technically run on PCs with those cards, the performance was so bad that many users didn’t see the point until Remedy released an update to improve performance on older GPUs.

The TL;DR version of why mesh shaders are so important is that 3D games like Alan Wake 2 or Assassin’s Creed Mirage are built from the ground up using thousands, millions and possibly eventually billions of little triangles. The first steps in game and graphics development involve moving those triangles around. Some of the older graphics cards and chips use what’s called vertex shading, and mesh shaders are essentially the next generation. The M4 chip offering mesh shading capabilities means that it will be better in the geometry processing required for top of the line graphics.

Related

The Delta emulator is on its way to iPad very soon

Everyone’s new favorite iOS emulator is coming to iPad, with developer Riley Testut teasing its upcoming release.

Apple

M4 bodes well for more PC games coming to the iPad

Apple Arcade set to explode?

Some gamers’ initial reactions to this news will almost certainly be, “OK, yeah, but does the iPad have anything I’d want to play on it?”

For now, the answer is slim pickings. However, the fact that gaming was front and center at the Apple Event on May 7th, could be a sign that Tim Cook and his company are going to be leaning in on video games more than ever. Over the last few years, more console and PC games have started arriving, though most of them have been from the last generation or even older. The reason for that was that the M2 chip simply could not do justice to games like Alan Wake 2. On May 15, that will no longer be the case.

Related

What is Apple Arcade? Price, devices, games list and more explained

Apple Arcade is a paid subscription service for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV. Here’s how much it costs and what you get for your money.

When the iPad Pro officially releases with the M4 chip, it will be a piece of hardware equipped with software that offers developers a chance at what is largely an untapped market. Consider the number of Steam games out there running on Macbooks and their older M2 or suddenly out-of-date M3 chips.

As video games continue going more mainstream and get played on more devices and especially go more mobile, Apple is making some big moves that could pay off for everyone.

Related

How to watch Apple’s ‘Let Loose’ iPad event on May 7

It should be short, but take iPads in a brand new direction.