>and I suspect it will have not-great scores until someone writes a game and optimizes it specifically for the M1. Which is most likely never.
Don't forget that these days few demanding games are "optimized for Platform XYZ", they're generally using one a small set of middleware/engine they license. So it's more a question of if Unreal Engine and Unity and so on get optimizations aimed at Apple's M-series chips. That isn't out of the question at all, given that they definitely have optimization aimed at Apple's A-series chips. Once they do, everything going forward that uses them will be better "for free". Even if they don't hit the performance of something truly hand tuned just to make max use of the arch it won't be entirely ignored either. May not even be that much work.
That's another potential non-technical performance advantage in moving the Mac from x86, they get to piggyback in some areas off the enormously higher market share iDevices. We'll see how it works out of course.
Don't forget that these days few demanding games are "optimized for Platform XYZ", they're generally using one a small set of middleware/engine they license. So it's more a question of if Unreal Engine and Unity and so on get optimizations aimed at Apple's M-series chips. That isn't out of the question at all, given that they definitely have optimization aimed at Apple's A-series chips. Once they do, everything going forward that uses them will be better "for free". Even if they don't hit the performance of something truly hand tuned just to make max use of the arch it won't be entirely ignored either. May not even be that much work.
That's another potential non-technical performance advantage in moving the Mac from x86, they get to piggyback in some areas off the enormously higher market share iDevices. We'll see how it works out of course.