Watch out, Nvidia: New benchmarks suggest Apple M4 Ultra could beat the mighty RTX 4090
- A new benchmark for the M4 Max suggests the M4 Ultra could outperform the RTX 4090
- This could strengthen Apple’s position within the gaming market
- Cyberpunk 2077 is a strong indication of the power and performance of the M4 family
Apple’s line of M4 chips are expected to significantly boost performance on all Macs, and the M4 Ultra could take the lead by a landslide – as new rumors suggest it could even outperform the RTX 4090 GPU – the most powerful consumer graphics card in the world.
If noted by Wccftechthis comes from Yadim Yuryev (from Max Tech on YouTube), who shares his expectation that the M4 Ultra will score ‘330,000’ on the Geekbench 6 test using the OpenCL API. This beats the RTX 4090’s current OpenCL score of 317,379, while the M4 Max sits at 192,812.
Based on rumors that the M4 Ultra will double the GPU cores of the M4 MaxYuryev’s projection seems plausible, at least for both Vulkan and OpenCL APIs responsible for rendering 3D graphics, allowing developers to optimize games for different GPU hardware. He claims that ‘the GPU scaling from the leaked M4 Pro score to M4 Max delivers 78% higher performance’, with the safe bet being that the M4 Ultra maintains ‘worse scaling at 70% higher performance’ with the estimated score of 330,000 .
If accurate, this could put the M4 Ultra above Nvidia’s flagship GPU, but it’s important to note that this wouldn’t hold true across the board – after all, this is an early benchmark test and the M4 Ultra hasn’t yet once announced by Apple, so this performance claim is based on extrapolating M4 Max results, which is obviously not an exact science.
While Apple continues to work on expanding the Mac gaming library, there are still far too many popular games that aren’t available on the platform, but this is a step in the right direction for the Cupertino company.
What could this mean for Apple’s place in the gaming market?
Given the rumored specs, it’s clear that Apple is packing some serious power with the M4 chips. The expected M4 Ultra performance in the aforementioned APIs could finally allow Macs to compete with the best gaming laptops and gaming PCs.
Should we be surprised? I don’t think so, especially after CD Projekt Red’s announcement Cyberpunk 2077 on the way to the platform. It’s one of the most demanding games of this generation in terms of system requirements, so I think this alone should be a strong indication of how powerful the M4 chips could be (particularly the M4 Ultra) – and how confident Apple is about the gaming performance of the latest devices.
Beating Nvidia’s RTX 4090 in graphics performance (even just by a little) is an achievement that shouldn’t be underestimated, and now could be the time for Apple fans to ramp up the excitement level…