Apple M3 Max 40-Core GPU vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

Apple M3 Max 40-Core GPU

The Apple M3 Max 40-Core GPU is a self-designed graphics card in the Apple M3 SoC and according to Apple with forty cores. According to Apple, the GPU uses a new architecture and now offers dynamic caching, mesh shading and ray tracing acceleration.

The GPU can access up to 128 GB LPDDR5-6400 unified memory via a 512 bit memory bus (max 400 GBit/s). Thanks to dynamic caching, the GPU should only reserve as much memory as is required.

Since the SoC is manufactured in the current 3nm (probably N3B) at TSMC. According to powermetrics, the GPU requires up to 60 watts (chip incl. CPU total 78 watts).

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).