March 18 news, according to foreign media The Verge reported that they have obtained the first batch of Apple Mac Studio, and tested the M1 Ultra chip equipped with it. The test results show that the M1 Ultra's nuclear display performance is indeed powerful, but it does not surpass the NVIDIA RTX3090 as Apple advertises.
It is understood that Apple released a picture when introducing the performance of the M1 Ultra, indicating that its performance is better than the most high-end independent GPUs in terms of "relative performance", that is, it is stronger than the RTX3090 or AMD 6900XT. However, Apple did not directly indicate which graphics card it was, nor did it say what tests were carried out. The media suspected that Apple only showed the M1 Ultra's data that could beat the RTX3090 in specific power or specific scenarios, and did not make a complete performance comparison.
In the Geekbench 5 graphics test, the M1 Ultra scored 83121 points in the OpenCL project, while the desktop version of the RTX3090 achieved 215034 points, nearly 1.5 times ahead. In the game frame rate performance at different image quality, the RTX3090 is also significantly ahead of the M1 Ultra, and the 4K image quality is about double the lead. It can be seen that even if the M1 Ultra runs at full power, the performance is equivalent to about half of the RTX3090, and the gap is still very large.
However, such results are enough to be surprised, to know that the M1 Ultra still uses a nuclear display, and the power consumption is much lower than that of the RTX3090, and the current performance has been very good. Of course, the current performance of the M1 Ultra is also significantly ahead of the 16-core M1 Max, which is definitely apple's most powerful chip at present.
Although the M1 Ultra is not as good as the RTX3090 in terms of running score performance, it may not be too different in terms of actual experience. Everyone knows that Apple MacOS is not suitable for playing games, more for office, design, software development, video creation and so on. Apple's self-developed chip, paired with a specially adapted MacOS, can better play the chip's ability in terms of productivity. In these areas, the more powerful RTX3090 may not necessarily have an advantage.
Running score has always been only one aspect of measuring product performance, and we still need to combine the actual use needs for comprehensive analysis. If you focus on gaming abilities, the Natural RTX3090 is even better. If what you need is productivity performance, the M1 Ultra might be a better fit.