When Apple announced its M1 Ultra processor, it made a bold claim that the discrete GPU within the processor would be just as capable, if not better, than NVIDIA’s current highest tier GPU, which is the GeForce RTX 3090. Well, that claim was recently debunked by The Verge, although it isn’t that difficult to imagine why.
Seeing how the lifestyle tech site had procured one of the Mac Studio fitted with the M1 Ultra silicon, its writers did the one thing needed to debunk the claim: test out the processor’s GPU against an RTX 3090 in a few tests. And test it, they did.
Some of you may remember the chart that Apple showed during its presentation of the M1 Ultra, and if you take it as is, one of the many messages the fruit company was trying to send out is that the new chip would have better performance-per-watt. While that isn’t technically wrong, unlike the RTX 3090 thoughy, what it doesn’t show is just how much more power the dedicated GPU from the Green Camp has.
Two benchmarks used by The Verge, one being the synthetic benchmark Geekbench 5 Compute and the other from the game Shadow of the Tomb Raider, shows the RTX 3090 with its higher 350W TDP, leaving the M1 Ultra’s GPU cores in the dust.
It is easy to both explain and understand why Apple’s M1 Ultra would find it exceedingly difficult to beat out a dedicated graphics card, and the most powerful consumer-ready one at that. Having said that, it can also be argued that the comparison between the two really is more of apples (no pun intended) to oranges comparison, especially since NVIDIA’s components is a dedicated piece of equipment, while the M1 Ultra is a capable do-all.
(Source: The Verge)
