CNET recently benchmarked the 2021 Apple MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chip against a 2019 MacBook Pro with a Core i9 in Adobe Lightroom. The results were nothing short of eye-opening, with the M1 Max MacBook besting the Core i9 device by up to 5 times. This largely appears to be due to the massive gain in GPU performance. Apple claimed that the M1 Max offered graphics horsepower on par with the GeForce RTX 3080. While gaming benchmarks tell another story - it keeps up with the GeForce RTX 3060 - that's still a massive leg up on the integrated graphics found on the Core i9.
According to the CNET benches, the M1 Max MacBook handled a panorama merge of six 30 MP images within just 14 seconds. The same operation took 67 seconds on the Core i9 system, a 4.8x increase. Lightroom's Super Resolution, a deep learning system that leverages the hardware AI acceleration on the M1 Max chip, fared 2.4 better than on the i9 system.
All in all, the benchmarks indicate that the M1 Max MacBook is a solid upgrade for users demanding more grunt for video and photo editing. And with GeForce RTX 3060-beating gaming performance, it's no slouch in the gaming department, either.
Check out the MacBook Pro with M1 Max here on Amazon.