Apple M2 10-Core GPU vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 vs Apple M2 Max 38-Core GPU

Apple M2 10-Core GPU

The Apple M2 GPU is an integrated graphics card offering 10 cores designed by Apple and integrated in the Apple M2 SoC. It uses the unified memory architecture of the M2 SoC (up to 24 GB LPDDR5-6400 with 100 GB/s bandwidth) and should offer 160 execution units.

According to Apple it offers a 25% higher performance at slightly higher power consumption. The theoretical performance is rated at 3.6 Teraflops and therefore 1 TFLOP higher than the M1 8-core GPU. In our benchmarks, the GPU was able to top the M1 with up to 40%, but still stays behind the 14-core GPU in the M1 Pro. Compared to other iGPUs from AMD and Intel, the M2 benefits greatly from the unified memory architecture and the high bandwidth.

The M2 chip is manufactured in the second generation 5nm process at TSMC (most likely N5P). The power consumption is around 13.5 Watt (in our tests under load of the MBP13) and up to 15W according to Apple.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is a mid-range desktop graphics card. It is based on the GA106 Ampere chip and offers 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 128 Bit memory bus. It offers 2,560 cores and supports PCIe 4.0.

The performance is similar to the older GeForce RTX 2060 and therefore best suited for 1080p gaming of modern and demanding games in high settings.

The GA106 chip offers 3,840 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 1,920 INT32 ALUs). With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).

The GA106 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip). The TDP of the RTX 3050 is specified at 130 Watt and therefore better than the previous RTX 2060 (160 Watt).

Apple M2 Max 38-Core GPU

The Apple M2 Max 38-Core-GPU is an integrated graphics card by Apple offering all 38 cores in the M2 Max Chip.

The graphics card has no dedicated graphics memory but can use the fast LPDDR5-6400 unified memory with a 512 bit bus (up to 400 GBit/s).

Thanks to the additional cores and architectural improvements, the M2 Max GPU should clearly best the old M1 Max GPU with 32 cores and therefore be the fastest iGPU currently available.

The GPU is intended to use Apple Metal 2 API and could still be based on the older PowerVR architectures (last used in the Apple A10). A new feature in the MacBook Pro 14 and 16 of 2023 is the support for HDMI 2.1 and 8k output.

The Apple M2 Max is manufactured in the second generation 5nm process at TSMC. According to the internal powermetrics tool, the GPU uses up to 53.6 Watt (performance mode) and the whole chip (including the CPU) up to 89 Watt.