Impressive Apple M1 Max test results - nearly on par with the GeForce RTX 3080

By: Maksim Panasovskiy | 21.10.2021, 11:25

Apple along with MacBook Pro laptops introduced 5-nanometer processors M1 Max and M1 Pro. On the World Wide Web there already appeared the results of graphics test of M1 Max chip.

The top version of the mobile processor includes 32-core graphics accelerator. The cores contain 16 executive units, each of which provides eight arithmetic and logistic devices. Multiply all that and you get 4096 stream processors.

Apple said at the presentation that the maximum theoretical GPU performance of the M1 Max reaches 10.4 TFLOPS. This corresponds to the level of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 mobile discrete graphics card. However, Apple noted that at a TGP of 60W, its new chip competes with the GeForce RTX 3080 at 160W. According to the American manufacturer, the M1 Max delivers nearly the same performance while consuming 100W less.

We had to test the mobile processor with GFXBench 5, because macOS doesn't have most graphics testing software. The test was done on a device with macOS X and low-level API Metal installed.

The integrated GPU in the Apple M1 Max turned out quite well, demonstrating performance on a par with the GeForce RTX 3080 and Radeon RX 6800M. Moreover, in some tests the integrated video chip was much more powerful than discrete graphics accelerators. For example, in Manhattan. Only in ALU 2 tests AMD and NVIDIA cards didn't give up their chances to M1 Max.

M1 chip also took part in the test. The company said that the new processor outperforms its predecessor by four times. Testing in GFXBench only confirmed this. Though the difference was not huge in all loads.