Apple announced the M1 Ultra SOC a few days ago, claiming that its 64-core GPU outperformed NVIDIA’s top GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card. Now that the first evaluations have been released, it appears that this claim has been refuted, as NVIDIA’s offering just crushes the M1 Ultra’s GPU in both gaming and computational benchmarks.
The Apple M1 Ultra GPU has a 64-core unit with 8192 execution units for up to 21 TFLOPs of single-precision horsepower, 660 GTexels/s, and 330 GPixels/s, according to Apple. The Apple M1 Ultra’s media engine includes the newest Hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes & ProRes with two video decode engines, four videos encode engines, and four ProRes encode and decode engines. A total of 128 GB of unified memory is available to the GPU.
According to Apple’s benchmark slides, the M1 Ultra GPU will deliver performance comparable to NVIDIA’s top GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card while using 200W less power. However, true benchmarks published by The Verge in their Mac Studio (Ultra) review reveal a completely different scenario.
In terms of gaming, the 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p resolutions of Shadow of the Tomb Raider were utilized for comparison. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is the best at 4K resolution, with a performance boost of up to 32%. Furthermore, the reviewer detected substantial micro stutter at all three resolutions, implying that NVIDIA and AMD’s GeForce and Radeon GPUs will continue to be the top choices for gaming.
Because the Mac Studio is aimed at content creators and workstation users, the Apple M1 Ultra GPU should perform admirably in those tests. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 achieves 215,034 points in the Geekbench 5 OpenCL benchmark, whereas the Apple M1 Ultra SOC only manages 83,121 points. That’s a 2.6x boost for the desktop PC’s GeForce graphics card. Even using an Apple-optimized API like Metal, the RTX 3090 is still 2.1x quicker.
Another interesting point to note is that, even though M1 Ultra has nearly double the configuration of M1 Max, performance does not scale well across the computational and gaming benchmarks in the testing. The M1 Ultra outperforms the Max chip by about 25% to 30%.
This should indicate how much faith you should place on Apple’s SOC numbers. Official benchmarks appear to have been run with specific workloads that favor the M1 Ultra GPU rather than real-world apps. To give you a price/performance comparison, the GeForce RTX 3090 presently costs roughly $2000 US, while the Mac Studio with the full 64-core configuration and 128 GB memory costs $5800 US.
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