M1 Ultra GPU Faster Than a GeForce RTX 3090? Apple thinks so, the tests say no

One of the most important news of the last conference of Apple it is definitely the Soc M1 Ultra aboard the Mac Studio, the mini PC intended for content creators. Fruit of the merger of two M1 Max using UltraFusion packaging technology, M1 Ultra was accompanied by bombastic statements.

114 billion transistors, CPU with 20 cores (16 Performance + 4 Efficient), GPU with 64 cores, 32 Neural Engine and maximum support for 128 GB of unified memory. Features that, according to Apple, I allow the CPU to offer up to 90% more multithreaded performance than Intel’s Core i9-12900Kor the same performance but consuming 100 watts less.

The part too GPU it looks absolutely prominent, in some ways astounding, because Apple has promised performance superior to the GeForce RTX 3090 with a consumption of 200 watts less. Well, it seems that this last statement is a bit exaggerated, at least based on early overseas reviews like The Verge’s. The Cupertino company says it detected its data using an unspecified “industry standard benchmark series”, so reviewers ran a variety of tests, from synthetics to gaming, to actually understand the level of the M1’s GPU. Ultra.

The Verge competed a $ 6,199 Mac Studio with a system equipped with a Core i9-10900 CPU, 64GB of RAM, and a GeForce RTX 3090, recording in Geekbench 5 results clearly in favor of NVIDIA’s solution. The same can also be seen in gaming, with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, where the RTX 3090 hit 142 fps in 1080p and 114 in 1440p, compared to 108/96 of the M1 Ultra.

Sure, the M1 Ultra isn’t meant for traditional gaming, and the results are however remarkable if we also think that the system requires an overall maximum power of 370W according to Apple, while the RTX 3090 has a TGP of 350W, but the point is that perhaps the marketing of Apple would do well to clarify, with more specific examples, from where he obtained the values ​​given in print and possible customers. Are we talking about content creation or something else?

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Said this, M1 Ultra remains an SoC that AMD, Intel and NVIDIA should carefully analyze to understand its potential and steal some secrets where possible, especially in terms of performance per watt. In all these years, Apple has proven that it can create absolutely competitive SoCs. So far in the PC world there is no ARM SoC like Apple’s, but Qualcomm aims high (with a horizon of 2023) and this could give several partners of those three companies an option to disengage, at least in part, from current x86 ecosystem.