Apple M3 Max lags behind Nvidia's 4080 Laptop GPU by 7%, outpaces M2 Max by 18% in GFXBench's Aztec Ruins test

Apple's recently unveiled M3 Max, the flagship offering within the M3 lineup, has performed impressively well in Geekbench 6's CPU tests, getting surprisingly close to the Mac Pro. The M3 Max has now ventured into GFXbench's GPU benchmark, and the results do not disappoint.

With a top-end configuration of up to 40 cores, Apple's cutting-edge M3 Max's GPU improves upon its predecessor, the M2 Max, with an additional 2 cores and introduces support for advanced features such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing, mesh shading, and dynamic caching. During its official 'Scary Fast' event, Apple claimed that the M3 Max boasts a 20% performance boost over the M2 Max, and the GFXBench results more or less validate Apple's claims.

Scoring a respectable 443 FPS in GFXbench's Aztec Ruins benchmark, the M3 Max outperforms the M2 Max's score of 374 FPS by an 18% margin. While this falls slightly short of Apple's claimed 20%, it's important to note that this is an early test, and more comprehensive benchmarks will be available when the M3 Max undergoes real-world evaluation by reviewers.

However, when compared to the RTX 4080 Laptop GPU's score of 479 FPS in the same test, the M3 Max lags behind by approximately 7.5%. Nevertheless, this performance is still commendable, especially when considering that the 4080 Laptop GPU alone can consume up to 150W, while the previous M2 Max's entire SoC only consumed approximately 80W at peak load. 

The M3 Max-powered 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at US$3,699 while the larger 16-inch version with the same chip starts at US$3,999, both of which are expected to start reaching customers by late November.

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