2/15/2024 0 Comments Instal the new for mac GearCityMetro Exodus - the original non-RT version - has a decent Mac port, although again it was written for x86. The Ultra has solid performance and reasonable scaling from the Max, but isn't quite holding the line against ultra high-end GPUs. The benchmark sequence running at max settings at 4K shows the 3080M and M1 Max are neck-and-neck, while the Ultra falls squarely between the M1 Max and the 3090. This isn't a native Apple Silicon game, as the title was written for x86, so the M1 chips here have to use the Rosetta 2 translation layer to function - but it doesn't really seem like that has much of an impact on performance. For our gaming tests, we've got a 16 inch Macbook Pro with the fully-enabled M1 Max chip, our maxed-out Mac Studio, an MSI GP66 gaming laptop, with an eleventh-gen i9 and a 150W RTX 3080 mobile processor, and a high-end desktop PC with a Core i9 12900K paired with the mighty RTX 3090. But we do have a few titles here - and the results are intriguing. It's not a particularly large table because, unfortunately, there aren't many high-end Mac games that we can actually test, particularly when it comes to big-budget games. While internal benchmarks are largely accurate these days, our philosophy is that the only frames that matter are the frames that actually make it to the video output of the hardware. Is this machine truly as fast as a high end desktop PC - or possibly even faster? Let's take a look at our gaming benchmarks, calculated via video capture as is the Digital Foundry way. We're going to start off with gaming tests before closing with productivity benchmarks and synthetics. So let's move on and actually measure how fast this machine is. It uses two blower-style fans that pull air through a large copper heatsink to dissipate the roughly 200W that the system pulls at load, which is a small fraction of the energy used by a high-end desktop PC. Most interestingly, this computer has a volume of just 3.7 litres, which is truly tiny and only slightly larger than an Xbox Series S. M1 Ultra is only currently available in the Mac Studio desktop computer, which we tested in its maxed-out configuration, with 128GB of memory and an 8TB SSD. To round things out, the system packs a stunning 800GB/s of memory bandwidth to keep those GPU and CPU cores well-fed. In its highest-end spec, the 21 teraflop GPU features 64 of Apple's in-house graphics cores, with performance similar to an RTX 3090 according to Apple, though we'll touch on this later. While the clockspeeds may be lower than desktop PC CPUs, instructions-per-clock are higher on the performance cores, leading to similar overall performance-per-core. The Ultra packs a whopping 20 CPU cores, split between 16 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores in a configuration similar to modern Intel designs. To the operating system and the user it seems like one monolithic chip with 1 CPU and GPU, but in reality this is two chips linked through a first-of-its-kind interconnect with the performance to support a dual-chip GPU and CPU.ĭigital Foundry's video analysis of the M1 Ultra and M1 Max processors, stacked up against powerful PC equivalents including the Core i9 12900K and RTX 3090. It's actually two M1 Max SoCs connected over a high-bandwidth 2.5TB/s interposer. The M1 Ultra isn't really its own unique chip, however. ![]() ![]() Apple started with lower-end and lower-power form factors, but finally came around to high-end desktops with the release of the Ultra a few months ago. Since 2020, Apple has been moving its Mac desktops and notebooks away from Intel CPUs and AMD GPUs and over to its in-house SOCs, taking the same fundamental tech from iPhones and integrating it into computers. This results in tremendous control over processor design - the kind of control you would need to scale a phone processor up for high-end desktops. Apple designs its own GPUs, its own CPUs, and handles SoC design and integration. ![]() The M1 and M2 lines are the culmination of a long journey that has seen the firm transition away from SoCs based on third party design and IP, moving all chip design in-house to the furthest extent realistically possible. Packing 20 CPU cores, a 21 teraflop GPU, and 800GB/s of memory bandwidth, it certainly seems like it could be - but how does it measure up in real-world testing and how well does it game? It's the M1 Ultra that truly commands our attention though: this system-on-chip represents the highest end computer processor Apple has designed to date, with the firm claiming it should be as fast as a high-end Windows desktop. Our focus is on the monster that is the M1 Ultra, found within the latest Apple Mac Studio, but we're also going to be checking out the MacBook Pro's M1 Max. ![]() It's high time Digital Foundry took a look at Apple Silicon and today we're going to be looking at the higher-end chips in the line-up.
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