Apple Silicon M1 Ultra Is Nowhere Near As Powerful As NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU

| Updated: Friday, March 18, 2022, 15:13 [IST]

During the Mac Studio launch, Apple claimed that the 64-core GPU on the Apple Silicon M1 Ultra is as powerful as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 and even showcased a graph claiming the same. As the early reviews of the Mac Studio have gone live, it is now confirmed that the RTX 3090 is still the most powerful consumer-grade graphics card.

M1 Ultra's GPU Is Nowhere Near As Powerful As NVIDIA RTX 3090

Apple claims that the 64-core GPU on the M1 Ultra can offer up to 21 TFLOPs peak performance, and it comes with 128GB of unified memory. According to a report from The Verge, When it comes to gaming, the integrated GPU on the Apple Silicon M1 Ultra is nowhere as powerful as the RTX 3090.

According to the numbers quoted on the report, the RTX 3090 can offer an average FPS of 114 at native 1440p resolution on Shadow of the Tomb Raider, while the M1 Ultra with 64 core GPU offers an average FPS of 96. Similarly, at 1080p resolution, the M1 Ultra offers an average FPS of 142 while the M1 Ultra's 64-core GPU only manages to offer 108fps.

Even on the Geekbench 5 compute benchmark, the RTX 3090 scored 215,034 points, while the M1 Ultra only manages to score 83,121 on Geekbench 5 compute OpenCL test. These numbers almost confirm the fact that the M1 Ultra's 64-core GPU is definitely not as powerful as the RTX 3090, especially when it comes to gaming.

Gaming has never been the strong suit for Apple in the PC and the laptop segment, and even with the launch of their most powerful silicon, the company still lags behind when it comes to gaming performance. These numbers also indicate that the Mac Studio is not meant for gamers.

Advantages Of M1 Ultra

Apple's M1 Ultra seems to deliver better performance for professionals, who might use the device for editing and rendering videos. As of now, it is unclear how much faster the 20 core CPU on the M1 Ultra is when compared to the latest 12th Gen Intel Core processors. Although the M1 Ultra might be the most power-efficient processor, it is definitely not as powerful as something like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090.