Apple Silicon chips are proving to be extremely powerful, as a new benchmark test run with Affinity Photo’s tool shows that the M1 Max’s GPU beats the $6,000 AMD Radeon Pro W6900X GPU for some tasks.
The tests were conducted by Andy Somerfield, lead developer of the popular image editor Affinity Photo. In a Twitter thread, Somerfield details how the Affinity team has been optimizing its software for Apple Silicon chips since the first version of Affinity Photo for iPad, and how far the performance of these chips has come with the latest MacBook Pro…
The developer explains that Affinity Photo runs best with a GPU that has high compute performance, fast on-chip bandwidth, and fast transfer on and off the GPU. The fastest GPU that the Affinity team had ever tested in their benchmark tool was the expensive AMD Radeon Pro W6900X, which Apple sells for $6,000 as an MPX module for the Mac Pro.
The Radeon Pro W6900X has 32GB of GDDR6 memory that delivers up to 512GB/s of memory bandwidth. Even so, it was outperformed by Apple’s M1 Max GPU with 32 cores and 400GB/s of unified bandwidth memory.
The #M1Max is the fastest GPU we have ever measured in the @affinitybyserif Photo benchmark. It outperforms the W6900X – a $6000, 300W desktop part – because it has immense compute performance, immense on-chip bandwidth and immediate transfer of data on and off the GPU (UMA). pic.twitter.com/iPg3L56y2u
— Andy Somerfield (@andysomerfield) October 25, 2021
MacDailyNews Take: A $6,000, 300W desktop GPU. Bested by Apple’s M1 Max in a MacBook Pro that’s 0.61 inch (1.55 cm) thin.
And there you have it: Intel, and, for that matter, AMD make slow, hot, inefficient junk for low-end boat anchor PCs stuck running inferior OSes.
Anyone who wastes their money an a Windows PC today is even more of an idiot than they were a week ago – tough to believe that’s possible, given the abject idiocy required to buy a Windows PC at any time over at least the last decade-plus, but, oh, so true.
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