Is Apple’s M1 Ultra more powerful than NVIDIA RTX 3090?

Apple’s M1 Ultra that was announced with the Mac Studio may not be as powerful as strongly claimed by Apple, tech blog Ubergizmo reported on Friday.

Apple made bold claims when they disclosed a new version of the M1 chipset called M1 Ultra. 

M1 Ultra is a combination of two M1 Max chipsets. Apple called this the 'UltraFusion' technology.

They claimed during the presentation that the graphic performance of the new chipset will be far more efficient than the “the highest-end discrete GPU”. Currently, NVIDIA’s RTX 3090 holds that title. 

The reviews and tests that were done by The Verge, however, show different results.

Tests using different benchmarks and apps show that the M1 Ultra graphics are not as great as claimed especially compared to RTX 3090. 

One example would be the scores achieved after using the Geekbench 5 Compute. While M1 Ultra managed to score 83,121, RTX 3090 topped the former with a stark difference of 215,034.

Tests on games showed that the RTX 3090 could get 142 fps at 1080p resolution whereas M1 Ultra could not go above 108 fps.

While M1 Ultra still remains a good performer, these tests and their results should be considered while investing in the new Mac Studio.