Skip to main content

Apple’s M1 Ultra is faster than an RTX 3090? Don’t count on it

During the Apple Spring Event 2022, the company announced the new M1 Ultra processor. It’s a system-on-a-chip (SoC) that basically stitches together two M1 Max chips to achieve double the processing cores across the board. And Apple made some big claims about how the 64-core GPU stacks up to the competition.

Here’s the claim from Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies: “M1 Ultra delivers faster performance than the highest-end GPU available while using 200W less power.”

Relative performance the Apple M1 Ultra processor.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

As usual, Apple didn’t name names, but you can see from the relative performance chart above that it’s comparing the M1 Ultra to an RTX 3090. Apple’s claim about efficiency is probably true and then some. We’ve seen the incredible efficiency of the M1 family time and again. But more powerful? That’s unlikely.

Recommended Videos

I haven’t had the chance to test the M1 Ultra yet, but I have a good idea about how it will perform. It’s just two M1 Max chips stitched together, and assuming Apple’s interconnect is up to snuff, it should provide around twice as much performance. Even then, it’s not close to the RTX 3090.

There are some applications where you may find similar performance. I have limited data — MacBook Pro versus the RTX 3090 isn’t exactly a popular comparison — but the M1 Ultra could come close to the RTX 3090 in apps like Premiere Pro. The graphics card is far from the only component that’s relevant in Premiere Pro, but it’s still something for the M1 Ultra.

Move onto a more GPU-bound application, and the M1 Ultra gets put back in its place. The M1 Pro finished the BMW benchmark in Blender in three minutes and 26 seconds. The RTX 3090? 17 seconds. Even assuming that the M1 Ultra has four times the GPU performance as the M1 Pro — it has four times as many cores — it’s not even in the same league as the RTX 3070, let alone the RTX 3090.

And don’t even think about gaming. In Fortnite, the M1 Pro managed just shy of 60 frames per second (fps) at 1080p with the High preset. Quadruple that to be favorable to the M1 Ultra, and you have 240 fps. The RTX 3090 manages 260 fps, and that’s while being vastly CPU limited at 1080p. I’ve actually recorded higher results with the RTX 3090 at 1440p.

Logo on the RTX 3090.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

Keep in mind, too, that Apple is making this claim about an integrated GPU. I’ve absolutely seen integrated GPU performance beyond my wildest dreams with the M1 family, but still, it’s nothing that holds a candle to a full desktop GPU. Apple doesn’t have a secret sauce, and an SoC that can fit in your hand is not going to outperform a 15-inch GPU with its own cooling apparatus. And Apple needs to fit the rest of the PC on the M1 Ultra, too.

We won’t really know if the M1 Ultra can outclass the RTX 3090 until it’s here, but you shouldn’t count on it when considering a Mac Studio pre-order. I’m rooting Apple here, too — if the M1 Ultra can outclass the RTX 3090, I will eat my words with a smile until the plate is clean.

I don’t imagine I’ll have to do that, though.

Jacob Roach
Former Lead Reporter, PC Hardware
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti gets an unprecedented $1,000 price drop
Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti in a PC build.

Nvidia board partners are continuing to apply aggressive price cuts to Team Green’s flagship GPU, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti.

EVGA is offering an absolutely massive $1,000 discount in the form of a rebate for both the RTX 3090 Ti FTW3 model and the RTX 3090 Ti FTW3 Ultra version.

Read more
Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti could rival the RTX 3090 Ti — at less than half the price
An Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card seen from the side.

The rumored specifications of Nvidia's upcoming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti just leaked, and it looks like it'll be one beast of a graphics card.

If the specs turn out to be true, the RTX 4070 Ti might be powerful enough to match the current-gen flagship RTX 3090 Ti, but it's also expected to cost a lot less than the $1,999 GPU.

Read more
The M1 has a major security loophole that Apple can’t patch
Apple M1 processor on a mainboard.

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have discovered a new security vulnerability that targets Apple's popular M1 processor. The attack, dubbed PACMAN, is capable of bypassing the last line of defense against software bugs on the M1 and potentially other ARM-based processors.

PACMAN attacks pointer authentication, which is the final stop for most software vulnerabilities. Pointer authentication confirms that a program hasn't been changed in any malicious way, serving as a "safety net ... in the worst case scenario," as MIT PhD student Joseph Ravichandran put it. MIT's researchers developed PACMAN as a way to guess the pointer authentication signature, bypassing this critical security mechanism. Researchers say PACMAN exploits a hardware mechanism, so a software patch won't be able to fix it.

Read more