NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q vs Apple M3 10-Core GPU vs Apple M3 Pro 14-Core GPU

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 with the Max-Q design is a mobile high-end GPU from the Pascal series. It is designed for thin and light laptops and about 10-15% slower than a regular GTX 1070 for laptops based on the cooling capabilities. The base frequency (1101-1215 MHz) is also much lower than on the regular GTX 1070 (1433 MHz, at least -10%) and the Boost (1265-1379 MHz) is also much lower compared to 1645 MHz (at least -6%) for the regular GTX 1070. The memory clock, however, is identical.

The clock is not the only difference compared to the regular GTX 1070 though. The drivers for the Max-Q version were optimized for efficiency (and not performance; only for Max-Q models), there are optimized voltage converters for 1V operation, high-end cooling methods, and a 40 dB limit for the fan noise (with clock adjustments to ensure this at all times).

Features

The GP104 chip is manufactured in 16nm FinFET process at TSMC and offers a range of new features. DisplayPort 1.4 (ready), HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP), improved H.265 video en- and decoders (for PlayReady 3.0) are only some of the improvements. See our detailed Pascal architecture article for more details.

The power consumption of the Max-Q design is notably lower than the normal GTX 1070 for laptops and ranges between 80 and 90 Watt (TGP) according to Nvidia.

Apple M3 10-Core GPU

The 10-core Apple M3 GPU is an integrated graphics adapter designed by Apple that features 10 cores. This iGPU is built into the Apple M3 SoC and it uses the unified memory architecture (up to 24 GB LPDDR5-6400 with 100 GB/s bandwidth). Compared to M2 series GPUs, this new graphics adapter uses a new architecture with support for mesh shading and ray tracing. Dynamic caching is another new feature worth mentioning - it is coming to optimize shared memory usage.

In our testing, the M3 GPU (10 cores) mostly was 5% to 20% faster than the 10-core M2 GPU depending on the task.

Just like the rest of the Apple M3 chip, the graphics adapter is manufactured on a 3 nm TSMC process (possibly N3B). Our MBP 14 review revealed sustained power consumption figures of around 15 W for the iGPU.

Apple M3 Pro 14-Core GPU

The Apple M3 Pro 14-Core GPU is a self-designed graphics card in the Apple M3 Pro (with 11 CPU cores) and offers fourteen of the eighteen cores available on the chip. The graphics card uses a new architecture and now offers dynamic caching, mesh shading and ray tracing acceleration.

The GPU can access up to 24 GB LPDDR5-6400 unified memory via a 192-bit memory bus (max 150 GBit/s). Thanks to dynamic caching, the GPU only reserves as much memory as is required.

The entire chip is manufactured in the current 3nm process (probably N3B) at TSMC.