League of Legends is not a demanding game. It will run at 120fps on a GTX 960 on max settings 1080p. (The 960 is about 1/4 as powerful as the current flagships according to passmark.)
My point is that a very old discrete GPU is capable of running League at very high settings, and therefore that the new M1 chip's capability to run League well doesn't prove much.
In a more relevant benchmark, it looks like the M1 is about 30% better than the GTX 1050 Ti, which was released in Oct 2016. So it's maybe two to three years behind the state of the art in low-power discrete GPUs? I wouldn't be worried about my discrete GPU business if I were AMD or Nvidia, at least not yet.
But the M1 chip isn't competing with discrete graphics, at least yet. The M1 is replacing integrated graphics in these machines. Integrated graphics also trail discrete graphics by years so it isn't really a knock on the M1 that it does too.
That leaves two primary questions. Does the integrated graphics of the M1 beat integrated graphics of Intel and AMD? What does Apple plan to do to compete with discrete graphics in their higher end hardware and will that be a more powerful SOC, discrete graphics hardware from Apple, or something more traditional from AMD?
> But the M1 chip isn't competing with discrete graphics, at least yet.
I understand that. I was responding to a comment that referenced a near future in which the Apple chips would compete with discrete graphics. Observing the distance they have to go is relevant to that speculation.
I'm just not sure the distance between integrated and discrete graphics performance is a better indicator of Apple's hardware capabilities than the differences between Apple, Intel, and AMD integrated graphics. It is a safe assumption that Apple isn't going to release an identical M1 as a competitor for discrete graphics. So why compare this to something in a different product class rather than judge it on how well it achieves the purpose it is designed to achieve?
> I'm just not sure the distance between integrated and discrete graphics performance is a better indicator of Apple's hardware capabilities
It's not a better indicator in any way, except in terms of being more relevant to the comment I was responding to at the top of the thread, which contemplated the possibility that Apple's chips would become competitive with discrete graphics cards in the foreseeable future.
