Apple M3 10-Core GPU vs Apple M1 Pro 16-Core GPU

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 M1 Pro 16-Core GPU

The Apple M1 Pro 16-Core-GPU is an integrated graphics card by Apple offering all 16 cores in the M1 Pro Chip. The 2048 ALUs offer a theoretical performance of up to 5.3 Teraflops. 

The graphics card has no dedicated graphics memory but can use the fast LPDDR5-6400 unified memory with a 256 bit bus (up to 200 GBit/s).

The GPU clocks between 389 and 1296 MHz and offers no short term boost (389, 486, 648, 778, 972, 1296 MHz steps according to Powermetrics). 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).

The Apple M1 Pro is manufactured in the modern 5nm process at TSMC and offers an excellent energy efficiency. According to the internal sensors, the GPU uses 15 Watt (Valley) to 20.6 W (Eve Online) under full load.