Apple M4 Max Trails RTX 4090 by 30%, Beats RTX 4070 & 3080 Ti

The first Geekbench 6 benchmark scores for Apple’s just-announced M4 Macs are out, with significant gains over last year’s M3 chips in both single- and multi-core performance.

The chips come in a variety from the base model to the M4 Max and offer improvements in computation and graphics, paving the way for the long-awaited M4 Ultra chips next year. Impressive competitiveness against NVIDIA’s RTX 4070 and RTX 3070 Ti is also coming to light in new GPU benchmarks for the M4 Max chip.

Apple’s M4 Max Chip Lags RTX 4090 by 30%, Outpaces RTX 4070 & 3080 Ti in Blender Benchmarks

For its place in the Apple Silicon hierarchy, the M4 Max GPU is flying high, and even when matched against competitors, it should be extremely strong once more, with only the 80-core GPU-enabled M4 Ultra sure to smash rivals. For Blender benchmarks, which measure CPU and GPU performance in combination, it scored a total of 5,208 across 28 tests on the M4 Max. It achieved this score and is ranked just behind the RTX 4080, with the RTX 3080 Ti and the RTX 4070 being slower.

Given that the M4 Max is a laptop chip, and the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 4070 are desktop components, these results also showcase just how much the M4 version is able to do. However, it’s important to consider the form factor: the M4 Max has a built-in GPU, while the RTX 4070 and 3080 Ti are much larger, desktop-based units. Even the M4 Max is not able to compete with the RTX 4090 laptop, which averaged 6,863 points in Blender. This puts the M4 Max about 30% slower than the RTX 4090 in gaming performance

The M4 Max is also more energy-efficient, using far less juice than the NVIDIA GPUs. The M4 Max may not be the fastest chip around but the power efficiency and performance-per-watt balances out make it competitive. Cinebench sees the top-end desktop RTX 4090 take the win with a score of 10,880, though things could be different when Apple launches its M4 Ultra.

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