Two comparisons from Geekbench 5 and the game Shadow of the Tomb Raider
show that the RTX 3090 puts Apple’s SoC in its place.
When announcing the M1 Ultra, the Apple brand was a bit presumptuous: it argued that its SoC was capable of competing with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3090; more precisely to do better while consuming less. A daring assertion, when you know that the M1 Ultra consumes around 60 W and that the RTX 3090 gobbles up 350 W, in addition to being a compendium of NVIDIA’s know-how in terms of high-end GPUs. Unfortunately for her, the reality on the ground imposed itself on the M1 Ultra.
RTX 3090 and Core i9-10900 vs. M1 Ultra
A journalist from The Verge, Monica Chin, wanted to verify the statements of Apple. It compared the performance of a computer with an Intel Core i9-10900 processor, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card and 64 GB of RAM. It opposed a Mac Studio equipped with an Ultra SoC with 20 CPU cores / 64 GPU cores (there is also a more modest version of the chip with 48 GPU cores). The Mac Studio benefits from 128 GB of unified memory, the maximum configuration. In short, you will understand, the M1 Ultra had enough here to deliver its full potential.
Monica Chin first pitted the two computers, along with other machines (Mac Studio Max, 16-inch MacBook Pro Max, and the boxx apexx 4 workstation), in two arenas: a synthetic benchmark, Geekbench 5, and a Game, Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
In Geekbench 5 Compute, under OpenCL, the Windows PC armed with the RTX 3090 atomizes its rivals with 215,034 points. The Mac Studio Ultra stalls at 83,121 points, or 102,156 with the more favorable Metal API. Clearly, Apple’s chip is in any case very far from equaling the flagship from NVIDIA.
© The Verge
The situation is no more to the advantage of the M1 Ultra in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The average frame rate is 108 in Full HD, 96 in 1440p and 60 in UHD. The PC with Core and RTX delivers 142 FPS at Full HD, 114 FPS at 1440p. Again, the superiority of the RTX 3090 is not in dispute.
The apple that wanted to be as big as the chameleon…
So yes, the M1 Ultra enjoys an admirable performance / consumption ratio, partly linked to its 5 nm engraving (RTX 3000 GPUs are engraved in 8 nm).
However, to suggest that it can compete with NVIDIA’s RTX 3090 is both false and unreasonable. For boxing fans, it’s like Apple comparing Manny Pacquiao to Mike Tyson, for example; both were unquestionably exceptional boxers, simply they did not box quite in the same categories…
Sources: The Verge (1)
, The Verge (2)
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