Apple M1 Max GPU beats $6000 AMD Radeon Pro W6900X in Affinity benchmark
I know this isn't gaming hardware, but I'm simply in awe, and envious of Mac users. I'm bitter. I don't think they should have this.
They don't need it!
Given, this is just a benchmark, and one specifically optimized for the Apple GPUs, but I thought I'd keep the forum abreast of just how impressive Apple's progress has been in the GPU space. Just look at the memory bandwidth on the M1 Max:
409.6 GB/s!!! The gaming world has been swooning over the Steam Deck with its quad-channel LPDDR5 RAM which runs at a pitiful 88.0 GB/s in comparison. FYI, that M1 Max memory bandwidth is also faster than the RTX 3060 (desktop version) and the RX 6700 XT, too.
In a freaking laptop.
In an SoC.
You might be thinking it's like the i9 "-HK" processors that runs far too hot for anything but the most robustly cooled large laptops.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3
See above. It's never pulling
half the wattage from the wall as the i9-11980HK, and it's often around 1/3rd the draw. The highest the GPU itself drew at any point was 43W. The highest actual pull they could get for the SoC was 92W (the whole system was pulling 120W). For comparison, the
Ryzen 7 5700G peaked just 5W lower at 87W.
In single-threaded workloads, Apple’s showcases massive performance and power advantages against Intel’s best CPU. In CineBench, it’s one of the rare workloads where Apple’s cores lose out in performance for some reason, but this further widens the gap in terms of power usage, whereas the M1 Max only uses 8.7W, while a comparable figure on the 11980HK is 43.5W.
In other ST workloads, the M1 Max is more ahead in performance, or at least in a similar range. The performance/W difference here is around 2.5x to 3x in favour of Apple’s silicon.
Skip to the part about GPU performance in the M1 Max:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/6
You're reading that correctly.
It's coming in at 10.6 TFLOPS. That's 6.6x the GPU processing power of the Steam Deck, or perhaps more fairly, since the true peak draw of the Steam Deck's SoC is probably around 46W, it's 5.2x the processing power of the iGPU in the R7-5700G mentioned above. That's how badly it's throttling the best PC APUs.
*Edit*
Cliffs--> To put it more simply, anyone can see from the gaming benchmarks that nobody is optimizing for ARM, but in terms of raw processing power:
Apple M1 Max: Level of Performance
- CPU = R9-5950X
- GPU = RX 6600 XT*
- RAM = 3.89x the speed of DDR4-3600 in dual channel; 3.5x the speed of DDR4-4000



*This is a desktop GPU, obviously. If comparing laptop GPUs, not desktop GPUs, once again supposing that Apple were as well optimized for gaming, it would probably perform a few percent below the RTX 3070 Mobile.
This is a nearly a PS5/XSX level of graphic power in a package of these dimensions: