M1 Ultra graphics performance is not as good as the RTX 3090
At the “Peek Performance” spring new product launch held on March 8, Apple launched the new Mac Studio and the latest M1 series chip M1 Ultra. Through an innovative packaging architecture called UltraFusion, Apple has interconnected two M1 Max chips to create an SoC with unprecedented levels of performance and functionality, giving the Mac Studio incredible computing power.
Made up of 114 billion transistors, the M1 Ultra is the largest ever on a personal computer chip. Apple configures the M1 Ultra with up to 128GB of high bandwidth, low-latency unified memory, plus up to 20-core CPU (16 performance cores + 4 energy efficiency cores), 64-core GPU, and 32-core NPU. Like the previous M1 Max chips, each performance core has 192KB of instruction cache, 128 KB of data cache, and a total of 48MB of L2 cache, and each energy-efficient core has 128KB of instruction cache, 64KB of data cache, and a total of 8MB of L2 cache.
Apple said at the event that the M1 Ultra’s 64-core GPU could even deliver better performance than Nvidia’s current flagship, the GeForce RTX 3090 while consuming 200W less power. With Apple unblocking Mac Studio, The Verge has tested the M1 Ultra’s graphics performance, showing that there is no small gap between it and the GeForce RTX 3090 in GeekBench 5 or Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
The Mac Studio used by The Verge for testing is already the strongest version Apple offers, retailing for $6,199. Paired with the GeForce RTX 3090 is an Intel Core i9-10900 processor paired with 64GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. Such test results have also caused a lot of controversies. Some people think that the data advertised by Apple does not have a specific description, and the performance in a specific environment or task is too exaggerated, which is suspected of being misleading.
