The Apple M1 Ultra is no more powerful than the Nvidia RTX 3090

When presenting its Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra, Apple offered graphics including a comparison between its chip and Nvidia’s RTX 3090 graphics card, ensuring that its model was more efficient. But this is not the case in practice.

The RTX 3090 is still better than the M1 Ultra

In its graph, Apple suggests that the M1 Ultra chip manages to be a bit more powerful than Nvidia’s RTX 3090, while consuming 200W less. But the problem is that the methodology used is not communicated. The Verge therefore conducted its own tests with Geekbench and the Nvidia graphics card does much better.

The score obtained with the RTX 3090 in the benchmark is 215,034, compared to 83,121 (with OpenCL) / 102,156 (with Metal) for the Mac Studio equipped with the M1 Ultra. So it’s twice less. That’s not to say Apple’s chip is bad, not at all. It’s just that Nvidia’s graphics card performs much better.

It is true that Apple’s announcement during the keynote was a bit surprising. The fact that a chip manages to do better than a dedicated graphics card would be more than surprising, at least in 2022. Here is what The Verge notes:

It looks like Apple just isn’t showing off the full performance of the competitor it’s chasing here.

It’s a bit like saying that because your electric car uses a lot less fuel at 130 km/h than a Lamborghini, it has a better engine – not to mention the fact that a Lamborghini can still go twice faster.

As a reminder, the M1 Ultra is more or less the equivalent of two M1 Max chips that are grouped together. Tests show that performance has actually doubled (or almost) with the very high-end chip found in the Mac Studio. This model is available for purchase since today.