In a synthetic test and gameplay comparison, the Apple M1 Ultra was flattened by the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090. This M1 Ultra was the 20-core CPU/64-core GPU variant, which is as high-end as it goes. It was installed in a brand-new Apple Mac Studio. In one simulated benchmark, though, the RTX 3090 outperformed the Apple silicon by more than 158 percent. When Apple recently released an intriguing graph for its M1 Ultra that showed how it beat the Ampere rival in relative performance, there were likely lots of wry smiles, especially among GeForce RTX 3090 board owners.
M1 Ultra Did Not Perform Well Against RTX 3090
There’s no doubt that the M1 Ultra chip is a fantastic CPU that will be a major selling point for the new Mac Studio, but it’s unlikely that anybody expects the GPU to perform at RTX 3090 levels or higher. New tests from The Verge, backed up by existing Geekbench runs, reveal that Nvidia’s board is still the best in this category.
The Verge’s Mac Studio evaluation pitted a 20-core M1 Ultra with 64 GPU cores against a desktop with the RTX 3090 and an Intel Core i9-10900 processor (both systems had 64 GB RAM).
The Mac Studio with M1 Ultra falls behind in the frame-rate test, which is understandable, but the results are still impressive: In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, 60 frames per second at 4K is nothing to sneeze at. In the OpenCL synthetic benchmark, however, the Apple silicon is defeated by the GeForce RTX 3090, and there are enough test entries on Geekbench currently to prove that this is not an anomaly result.
“Performance was assessed using certain industry-standard benchmarks,” according to Apple’s marketing language for the M1 Ultra, and there’s a good case to be made that the new processor performs very well given the decreased power drain. However, in what appears to be a standard marketing tactic in the internet sector, a little more openness would go a long way.
