Apple M1 Max Beats GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU in GFXBench 5.0, but Doesn’t Shine in Geekbench
Jedoch, this is a median score for the GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU and many of the tests that make up GFXBench 5.0 aren’t using DirectX, which is one likely reason for Apple’s M1 Max GPU beating the Nvidia card. On the other hand, all tests seem to support Metal, which is Apple’s 3D API, whereas the Nvidia card has to fall back to using OpenGL which tends to offer lower performance than DirectX in games. In most of the tests we’re looking at an average performance advantage of less than 10 percent in favour of Apple, but it’s nonetheless impressive considering that Apple hasn’t been in the GPU business for very long.
On the other hand, in a Geekbench OpenCL test, the M1 Max is losing out against a GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU by quite some margin depending on the test. Neither is of course a real world scenario and we’re going to wait a little while longer to see how well Apple’s new SoCs really performs and more importantly, what the limitations are in terms of software compatibility.