M1 Max With 32-Core GPU Is Slower Than 100W Laptop RTX 3080, Barely Beats Low-Wattage RTX 3060 in Gaming Benchmarks

Despite the massive leap in the compute and graphics performance Apple’s M1 Max is able to achieve, it may take some time for these custom chipsets to beat modern-day graphics processors, according to the latest benchmarks. The top-tier silicon from Apple that touts a 32-core GPU handily gets beaten by a laptop RTX 3080 with a 100W power limit.

M1 Pro With 14-Core GPU Much Slower Than 70W Laptop RTX 3060, Reveals Latest Numbers

The press and reviewers published their findings on Apple’s 2021 MacBook Pro line, and YouTuber Dave2D was keen on providing his results when it came to gaming performance. When running a Tomb Raider benchmark at 1440p, the M1 Max with a 32-core GPU attains 83FPS, while a laptop RTX 3060 with a 70W power limit achieves 79FPS, with a 100W RTX 3080 outperforming both with a 112FPS result. The M1 Pro with a 14-core GPU is the slowest out of the bunch, only managing 57FPS.

Apple’s M1 Max GPU With 32 Cores Beats a $6000 AMD Radeon Pro W6900X in the Affinity Benchmark

Also, keep in mind that these are low-powered NVIDIA RTX GPUs, and some laptop manufacturers use 115W RTX 3060 and 150W RTX 3080 units, which will undoubtedly crush the low-powered counterparts thanks to their higher power limits. Even in the Geekbench results, the M1 Max cannot even beat the 70W RTX 3060, which is plain disappointing. Fortunately, both the M1 Max and M1 Pro manage to beat NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs in GFXBench 5.0, but we believe that is because some benchmarks favor certain chips over others.

For instance, AnTuTu favors Android chipsets over Apple’s A-series ones for some reason, but when you are running a proper gaming benchmark and these results show up in front of you, you realize the performance gap of the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Then again, Apple never really intended these chips to be used for gaming, and to be honest, the energy efficiency of these chips is something that is unmatched by any notebook touting an RTX 3060 or RTX 3080.

At least the plus-side of seeing this information is that consumers will not have to spend boatloads of money to get their hands on an M1 Max MacBook Pro, assuming their sole purpose is for gaming and not for anything else. Then again, if you are spending this kind of money on gaming, you would rather get a decked-out gaming laptop than any 2021 MacBook Pro model.

While these results might disappoint some, you still have to keep in mind that the numbers you just saw were from an integrated GPU, not a dedicated one, so considering those changes, these scores did impress us. Also, seeing as how the M1 Pro and M1 Max can throw punches above their weight class, we are excited to see future gaming results, and we will update our readers accordingly, so stay tuned.

News Source: Dave2D