When releasing the M1 Ultra, Apple claimed that the SoC had relatively the same performance as the RTX 3090, but with much lower power consumption. But when tested by The Verge, it turns out that its performance can’t even approach Nvidia’s flagship GPU. The test was carried out with the Geekbench 5 Compute benchmark application and also using the Shadow of the Tomb Raider game.
The test was carried out by comparing Mac Studio with M1 Ultra with an assembled PC with the specifications of an Intel Core i9-10900 CPU, 64GB RAM, and an RTX 3090 GPU. From that test, it can be seen that a PC using an RTX 3090 got an OpenCL score of 215,034. While Mac Studio with M1 Ultra scored only 83,121, while Mac Studio with M1 Max scored 64,370. Then in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the RTX 3090 got 142 fps at 1080 resolution and 114 fps at 1440p. While the M1 Ultra gets 108fps at 1080p and 96fps at 1440p.
From this test, it can be seen that the GPU in the M1 Ultra is still far behind the RTX 3090. But that doesn’t mean the M1 Ultra is a bad SoC, because such a high score is obtained with very low power consumption.
In comparison, the M1 Ultra’s overall power consumption is around 100W. Meanwhile the RTX 3090 itself has a power consumption of 320W, or even more, and this is only for the GPU. The CPU used in the test is a Core i9-12900K, which can consume more than 200W of power.
M1 Ultra is a combination of two M1 Max, which are united using an architecture called UltraFusion. UltraFusion has a data path of 2.5TB/s, which Apple says is absolutely necessary to maximize the performance of the M1 Ultra.
This architecture allows Apple to create a SoC whose specifications are twice as fast as the M1 Max. Such as a 20-core CPU, consisting of 16 fast cores and four efficient cores, a 64-core GPU, and a 32-core Neural Engine.
And Apple, as before, is certainly comparing the performance of its new chip to a monster CPU and GPU. Like the Core i9-12900K with DDR5 RAM and an RTX 3090 GPU. Unfortunately, the comparison doesn’t come with a clear comparison unit standard.
