Apple Silicon brought with it a revolution to the existing Mac and iPad lineup, and in a way to the PC landscape as well. It single-handedly forced competitors such as AMD and Intel to innovate in order to keep up, and can also be credited for Microsoft’s recent push towards ARM (via the Snapdragon X series).
The generational leaps keep on piling up, and the newest M3 Ultra chip from Apple possesses a staggering amount of horsepower, being able to rival even dedicated GPUs such as the recently launched AMD RX 9070 XT and Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti.
Apple’s M3 Ultra Manages To Overpower Both AMD and Nvidia’s Finest Upper Mid-Range Offerings
The embargo for Apple’s M3 Ultra (courtesy of the maxed out 2025 Mac Studio) has finally been lifted, and reviewers have revealed all sorts of intriguing benchmark results. Among the many things tested were synthetics (such as Geekbench).
In particular, the GPU cores of the M3 Ultra were quite the pleasant surprise, managing to clock in around 374.5 frames per second in GFXBench’s 4K Aztec Ruins render test. This puts it right behind Nvidia’s RTX 5080 dedicated GPU, falling short by measly 9% margin.
Even more impressive, the GPU cores of the M3 Ultra can manage to even exceed the performance potential of the RTX 5070 Ti and AMD’s recently launched RDNA 4 based RX 9070 XT.
This can be attributed toward the M3 Ultra’s whopping 80 GPU cores, which paired with super fast 256 GB of unified memory (can be bumped up to 512 GB!) makes for a literal beast of a machine.
The SoC is capable of around 819 GB/s bandwidth, which puts it dangerously close to an RTX 4090. Even better, the M3 Ultra has a massive memory pool available, which might make it even more appealing for VRAM intensive tasks such as local AI models.
It should be noted here that this isn’t exactly an apples to apples (pun intended) comparison, and Macs most certainly do not classify as gaming machines.
While the prevalence of tools such as Crossover and Whisky have allowed for gaming on Macs to become much more mainstream, it still involves a fair bit of effort and several translation layers in order to get up and running – if at all.
Regardless, Apple’s chips are wicked fast here, and could bring in some heat toward AMD and Nvidia, at least outside of gaming scenarios.
Apple Silicon Might Not Be The Fastest, But It Still Is Quite Efficient
Make no mistake – Apple Silicon is no longer the fastest SoC on the market right now. AMD has managed to catch up and even beat Apple at their own game, delivering a staggering amount of performance in a very low profile design.
However, where Apple shines is in its efficiency, and the M3 Ultra consumes a tenth of the power of a regular gaming PC of the same caliber, delivering the same performance at around 180 watts, which is quite the absurdly low number.
This great balance between performance and power efficiency makes Macbooks so very good with their battery life, sometimes even without the need for active cooling.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
