Initial benchmarks confirm performance improvements of over 50% for the 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro with an AMD Radeon Pro 5600M GPU

Apple announced its US$800 and Navi 12-based upgrade for the MacBook Pro 16 on Monday, and early benchmark results are already in. To recap, the new GPU option is the AMD Radeon Pro 5600M, a 40 Compute Unit (CU) part with 8 GB of HBM2 VRAM. TSMC manufacturers the Radeon Pro 5600M on a 7 nm die, which houses 2,560 stream processors. According to AMD, the GPU has a memory bandwidth of 394 GB/s, and it can deliver up to 5.3 TFLOPs of FP32 performance.

According to tests conducted by Max Tech, the Radeon Pro 5600M outperforms the Radeon Pro 5500M by over 50% in Geekbench 5 Metal. The new GPU option achieved a similar margin in the Unigine Heaven benchmark, where it even managed to outperform the Radeon Pro Vega 56 version of the iMac Pro. In more practical tests like stabilising a 60 FPS C200 RAW video, the Radeon Pro 5600M completed the task about three times as fast as the Radeon Pro 5500M could.

Similarly, @_rogame has shown that the Radeon Pro 5600M falls less than 20% short of the Radeon RX 5600M with SmartShift. This feat is even more commendable considering that the Radeon Pro 5600M only has a 50 W TDP. 3DMark and Geekbench have also confirmed that Apple has assigned the Radeon Pro 5600M models the identifier MacBookPro16,4.

This added performance will costs an awful lot, though. Equipping the Core i7 MacBook Pro 16 with a Radeon Pro 5600M causes its price to balloon to US$3,199. Nonetheless, you could buy two of those machines with some money left over for the price of a top-tier Core i9 model with 64 GB of RAM and an 8 TB SSD.