Apple M5 Max with 40-core GPU makes a splash in Geekbench debut

Apple’s M5 Max made quite a splash on Geekbench by handily outperforming just about every consumer-grade x86 and Arm processor available on the market. The redesigned Super and Middle (or "Performance") cores, combined with the increased core count, propelled it past everything Intel/AMD/Qualcomm have to offer in the consumer space. As expected, its GPU prowess is just as formidable, as confirmed by its showing on Geekbench’s OpenCL and Metal benchmarks.

The M5 Max in question is a fully-specced out version with 40 GPU cores. It scores 232,718 points in the benchmark, effectively making it nearly as powerful as a full-fat M3 Ultra with twice the GPU cores. An apples-to-apples comparison with Nvidia/AMD GPUs won’t be fair because Metal workloads aren’t optimised for them.

Thankfully, an OpenCL listing gives us an idea of how the M5 Max fares against Team Green and Red. It scores 145,412 in the benchmark. Here, it performs on par with a GeForce RTX 5070 laptop variant, which, all things considered, isn’t bad, given that the latter has 36 SMs and consumes far more power. Additionally, it might take the fight to Nvidia GPUs in gaming as well, thanks to its improvements in raytracing performance.