Apple M3 8-Core GPU vs AMD Radeon Pro 5500M vs Apple M3 Pro 14-Core GPU

Apple M3 8-Core GPU

The Apple M3 GPU is an integrated graphics card offering 10 cores designed by Apple and integrated in the Apple M3 SoC. It uses the unified memory architecture of the M3 SoC (up to 24 GB LPDDR5-6400 with 100 GB/s bandwidth). The GPU uses a new architecture with support for mesh shading and ray tracing. Dynamic caching is also a new feature that should only us as much shared memory as needed.

The old M2 SoC showed a difference of around 15% between the 8-core and 10-core variant. Therefore, we expect a similar difference for the M3 models. This means, the M3 8-core version should be slightly faster than the 10-core GPU in the Apple M2.

The M3 chip is manufactured in the new 3nm process at TSMC (most likely N3B). The power limit should be around the same 15 Watt as the 10-core variant.

AMD Radeon Pro 5500M

The AMD Radeon Pro 5500M is a mobile mid-range graphics card based on the Navi 14 chip (RDNA architecture) manufactured in the modern 7nm process. It features all 24 CUs of the chip (=1,536 shaders) and therefore 2 more CUs than the similar named mobile Radeon RX 5500M and desktop RX 5500. However, the clock speed of the GPU and memory is reduced by quite a bit in the Pro models. It was announced in the high end models of the 2019 Apple MacBook Pro 16 with 4 or 8 GB of GDDR6 graphics memory.

The Navi 14 chip uses the new RDNA (Radeon DNA) microarchitecture which is a successor the the GCN instruction set. It features a new processor design, a multi-level cache hierarchy and an improved rendering pipeline with support for GDDR6 memory.

The performance of the Pro 5500M is said to be up to 2.1x compared to the old Radeon RX 560X (predecessor). Although the GPU has two more CUs than the Radeon RX 5500M, the slower core clock speed leads to a 13% slower peak performance according to AMD (4 versus 4.6 TFLOPS). Therefore, the gaming performance should be slightly below the Radeon RX 5500M which was about 1.9x faster than the Pro 560X (Alpha 15 vs MBP15 2019) in games under Windows. Compared to Nvidia GPUs, the performance should be between the GeForce GTX 1650 and GeForce GTX 1060.

The similar RX 5500M chip is specified with a TDP of 85 Watt and therefore 20 Watt more than the slower clocked Radeon RX5300M. In games the power consumption of the chip ranges between 64 and 105 Watt (Ghost Recon gameplay recorded with HWInfo64). However, according to AMD the Pro 5500M is rated at a TGP of 50 Watt and may therefore use selected chips.

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.