this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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There are some advantages to Apple's RAM setup, but that mainly comes down to latency and bandwidth to some extent. Then they can do things on the OS level like memory compression and clever swapping, but as far as I can tell they don't do anything super special.
8 GB is definitely fine for light multitasking with office, mail and browser apps, but big triple A titles are a different beast. There is no magic that Apple can use to make a scene require less (V)RAM. All textures, models etc. in the scene need to be in memory. A texture doesn't magically take less memory on Apple Silicon than on a PlayStation 5.
Current games on (Windows) PCs are sometimes struggling with an 8 GB GPU, and with the 8 GB Apple Silicon Macs, these 8 GB are the whole system RAM. There is an OS with services and other apps running, so at best the game gets 7 GB of memory (probably less, even when most of the rest is swapped out) for both game logic and as video memory. Developers won't downgrade/"optimize" their games for this target, especially since the marketshare is minuscule.
So I stand by what I said: if Apple is serious about gaming, they need to upgrade the base spec of all models from 8 to 16 GB. Right now upgrading from 8 to 16 GB costs about as much as an Xbox Series S. Imagine you want to play games on your Mac once they finally come out in somewhat relevant quantities only to realize that you got the 8 GB base model that struggles with most games, and you can't upgrade it. They need to make every Mac as compatible as possible with these games, as their marketshare is too low as it is.