50 W AMD Radeon Pro 5600M in the MacBook Pro 16 offers gaming performance equivalent to that of an 80 W RTX 2060 non-Max-Q laptop GPU

Recently, Apple offered a US$700 AMD Radeon Pro 5600M GPU option for the 16-inch MacBook Pro. While it does cost a premium, it looks like the investment may be worth it after all. Max from the YouTube channel Max Tech got to test out gaming performance on a 16-inch MacBook Pro equipped with the Radeon Pro 5600M and the results were nothing short of impressive.

Max installed Windows 10 on the MacBook Pro via Bootcamp and used the default Bootcamp drivers to see how well the Radeon Pro 5600M fares in synthetic and gaming benchmarks. The config used was a 2.8 GHz Core i9 with 32 GB RAM. We've seen earlier that the Radeon Pro 5600M offers nearly a 50% uptick in synthetic scores compared to the Radeon Pro 5500M in Geekbench 5 Metal. Now, we get to see the Radeon Pro 5600M flex its muscles in gaming as well. 

Max first fired-up Fortnite on macOS running at 3K resolution on Auto Set graphics settings. This yielded a fairly consistent 88 fps that occasionally even spiked up to 100 fps. Back on Windows 10, at native resolution Epic settings, the frames dropped down to a jittery 33 fps. Adjusting the graphics settings to High at a 3D Resolution of 100% allowed for decent framerates around the mid-50 fps mark. Further tweaking the 3D resolution to match 1080p (36%) yielded 144 fps at Epic settings. 

The Radeon Pro 5600M was also found to offer great performance in Call of Duty: Warzone. The game ran anywhere between 100 and 140 fps when the Render Resolution was set to 60% at 1,843 x 1,152 (a higher pixel count than true FHD). This is in the same region as that of an RTX 2060 non-Max-Q, which is impressive for a 50 W TDP card. Increasing the resolution to 1440p (2,427 x 1,517) with every other setting maxed out gave a neat 60 fps average framerate. Even at native resolution low settings, the Radeon Pro 5600M could deliver close to 70 fps.

These gaming performance numbers are highly impressive for a MacBook Pro. However, the Radeon Pro 5600M option can push the MacBook Pro's price above US$3,000. At this price, it would probably make more sense to go for a proper gaming laptop if gaming is the desired use case.

That being said, this could be the perfect machine for those entrenched in the Apple ecosystem and need enough horsepower for both productivity and gaming in a thin form factor without having to invest in a separate eGPU.

Check out Max Tech's complete Radeon Pro 5600M gaming review video at the link below.