Watch out, Nvidia – new benchmarks suggest Apple M4 Ultra could beat mighty RTX 4090
- New M4 Max benchmark suggests M4 Ultra could outperform RTX 4090
- This could strengthen Apple’s position in the gaming market
- Cyberpunk 2077 is a strong indication of the power and performance of the M4 family
Apple’s M4 series of chips is expected to significantly improve performance in all Macs, and the M4 Ultra could take the lead by a wide margin – as new rumors suggest it could even outperform the RTX 4090 GPU – the most powerful consumer graphics card in the world.
As noted by Wccftech, this comes from Yadim Yuryev (of Max Tech on YouTube), who shares his expectation for the M4 Ultra to score “330,000” on the Geekbench 6 test using the OpenCL API. This beats the RTX 4090’s current OpenCL score of 317,379, with the M4 Max sitting at 192,812.
Based on rumors that the M4 Ultra doubles the GPU cores of the M4 Max, Yuryev’s view seems plausible, at least for the Vulkan and OpenCL APIs responsible for rendering 3D graphics that allow developers to optimize games for different GPU hardware . It claims that “GPU scaling from the leaked M4 Pro score to the M4 Max is 78% higher performance,” with a safe bet of the M4 Ultra maintaining “worse scale at 70% higher performance” with an estimated score of 330,000.
This could put the M4 Ultra above Nvidia’s flagship GPU, if accurate, but it’s important to note that this wouldn’t be across the board – this is an early benchmark test, after all, and the M4 Ultra hasn’t even been announced by Apple , so this performance claim is based on extrapolating the M4 Max results, which obviously isn’t an exact science.
While Apple continues to work on expanding its Mac game library, there are still 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 position in the gaming market?
Considering the rumored specs, it’s clear that Apple is packing some serious power with the M4 chips. The predicted M4 Ultra performance in the aforementioned APIs could finally allow Macs to compete with the best gaming laptops and PCs.
Should we be surprised? I don’t think so – especially after CD Projekt Red’s announcement Cyberpunk 2077 making your way to the platform. It’s one of the most demanding games this generation in terms of system requirements, so I think that alone should act as a strong indication of how powerful the M4 chips (specifically the M4 Ultra) could be – and how sure is Apple for the gaming performance of its latest devices.
Nvidia’s RTX 4090 winning in graphics performance (even if only slightly) is a feat that shouldn’t be underestimated, and this could be the time for Apple fans to turn up the excitement levels…