For those in the know, it’s no secret that the integrated graphics of the M1 Ultra and the NVIDIA RTX 3090 don’t play in the same league. From Apple’s processor can’t stand technologies like Mesh Shadersthe Variable rate shading, Direct storage, Laser trace and many more. That’s not to say they don’t have raw computing power. Plus, we now have the proof in numbers.
Apple is a special case, as it is the only designer of ARM register set chips used today for personal computers and workstations. Being the M1 Ultra complex, consisting of two interconnected M1 Pro chips, the most powerful of all. Nor can we forget how those in Cupertino have been charging one kidney and part of the other since their origins in terms of the price of their products.
Unsurprisingly, even with the price inflated by mining, we find that with the price difference. With the one between a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra and an RTX 3090 for PC, we would have money left over to assemble the rest of the entire PC. One might therefore expect a higher price to justify better performance. Unfortunately, with the company originally founded in Steve Jobs’ parents’ garage, that’s not the case.
Here’s how the M1 Ultra’s graphics perform against an RTX 3090
As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require evidence of the same caliber. Apple’s statement was none other than to say that the M1 Ultra’s integrated GPU is much more powerful than the PC’s most powerful graphics card, which at the time of the presentation was the NVIDIA RTX 3090 and continues to be. .
While we can tell it’s referring to energy efficiency, just look at the y-axis they showed in their presentation to see what Apple was really saying. In any case, they never gave a single piece of information in the form of full graphics specs for the high-end Mac Studio. Therefore, performance tests had to be done, which The Verge did and where the reality can be seen.
For starters, this can be seen in the Geekbench 5 computer test which only measures graphics card compute capacity, where you can see how the RTX 3090 triples the M1 Ultra in raw performance. And if we go to the games we can see how in Shadow of The Tomb Raider the NVIDIA graphics manage to get up to 40 FPS more than the most powerful Apple chip. What’s more, it’s remarkable how the custom RX 6900-based Mac Pro also takes a considerable distance from Apple’s most powerful processor today.
All of this begs the question: what if graphics card prices and shortages didn’t affect the PC hardware workstation market? Objectively speaking, Apple has long lost the high-end performance race and we don’t think it will regain it for a long time.
