Apple’s M1 Max GPU With 32 Cores Beats a $6000 AMD Radeon Pro W6900X in the Affinity Benchmark

In some instances, the M1 Max with 32 GPU cores has impressed thoroughly, and in others, not so much. On this occasion, a lead developer of the image editor Affinity Photo points out that Apple’s latest silicon beats the AMD Radeon Pro W6900X, which was the fastest GPU ever tested using the application and costs a whopping $6,000.

M1 Max GPU Will Not Perform Better Than the AMD Radeon Pro W6900X in Every Task, but in the Raster (Single GPU) Test, Apple’s Custom Silicon Comes out on Top

According to Andy Somerfield, his Twitter thread highlights that Affinity Photo has been optimizing its program ever since Apple announced the M1 and he wanted to see how far the M1 Max has come in performance. Affinity Photo has developed its own benchmark suite with which it measures this performance, and it runs best when a GPU can deliver high bandwidth and compute performance.

Previously, the Radeon Pro W6900X held the crown for the fastest GPU in Affinity Photo’s leaderboards, thanks to its 32GB GDDR6 onboard memory that could deliver 512GB/s of memory bandwidth. In comparison, the M1 Max with a 32-core GPU tops out at 400GB/s of memory bandwidth. Despite this difference, Apple’s top-end custom SoC outperforms the heavily expensive AMD solution, which also consumes roughly 300W and needs a separate slot to be put into.

Coming to the numbers, the M1 Max scores 32891 in the Raster (Single GPU) test, while the AMD Radeon Pro W6900X barely trailed behind with a score of 32580. While this win goes to Apple, Somerfield points out that not every task will favor the M1 Max GPU, but these results show how the 2021 MacBook Pro models can be the go-to portable machine for editing images using Affinity Photo.

So, with the upcoming delivery of new #M1Pro and #M1Max hardware to customers next week, I thought I’d spend a couple of days talking about how @affinitybyserif Photo uses GPUs, how our benchmark works and what we should reasonably expect from this new hardware pic.twitter.com/niiTa901oe

— Andy Somerfield (@andysomerfield) October 23, 2021

Instances where the M1 Max GPU came up short, was in previous gaming benchmark results, where it barely beat a 70W laptop RTX 3060 and was thrashed by a 100W RTX 3080. It also underperformed in the 8K Adobe Premiere Pro test, where it just managed to take the lead against the Surface Laptop Studio, which does not sport powerful specifications at all. However, since Premiere Pro is not optimized for Macs, you will see such results. If you really want to take advantage of all this hardware, run Final Cut Pro and see what figures you get.

In fact, DaVinci Resolve boasts around five times faster editing with 8K videos on the 2021 MacBook Pro models, so for certain programs, the M1 Max GPU will excel beyond your wildest expectations. Do remember to check out Andy Somerfield’s Twitter thread to know more about how the benchmark tests were done, and do not forget to share your thoughts down in the comments.

The post Apple’s M1 Max GPU With 32 Cores Beats a $6000 AMD Radeon Pro W6900X in the Affinity Benchmark by Omar Sohail appeared first on Wccftech.