Apple M4 10-core GPU vs Apple M2 8-Core GPU

Apple M4 10-core GPU

The 10-core Apple M4 GPU is a graphics adapter built into the 9-core and 10-core Apple M4 processors that has direct access to fast on-package LPDDR5x-7500 RAM (120 GB/s bandwidth) as well as hardware support for ray tracing and mesh shading and other modern technologies. It supports up to 3 displays with an "8K" resolution attainable on a single display. It also can HW-decode a few popular video codecs including first and foremost AVC, HEVC and AV1.

Performance

As our Fall 2024 Mac mini review confirmed, the iGPU is fast enough to run many 2023 and 2024 games at 1080p on low or medium quality settings. It appears its real-world performance is almost as good as the GeForce GTX 1650 Laptop. That being said, very few games have been compiled specifically for Apple silicon Macs meaning most titles have to be run via emulation layers. Some of them are displayed with visual artefacts as a result, or don't start at all.

• Сyberpunk 2077 2.1 Phantom Liberty (1080p, Med): 28 fps

M4-powered iPad Pros will be much slower in long-term GPU-intensive workloads than M4 iMacs, Mac minis and MacBook Pros due to the lack of proper cooling.

Power consumption

In M4 Mac minis, the GPU gets just slightly over a half of the total 40 W power budget allocated to the entire M4 chip. Needless to say, it has to be a lot more modest in iPad Pros where the entire M4 chip can consume ~14 W in short-term tasks and less than half of that in long-term tasks.

Just like the rest of the M4 chip, the graphics adapter is manufactured on a "second generation 3 nm" TSMC process which is still cutting-edge as of late 2024.

Apple M2 8-Core GPU

The Apple M2 8-core GPU is an integrated graphics card offering 8 of the 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 128 execution units.

The performance is positioned right between the old 8-core model in the M1 GPU and the higher end 10-core model in the M2. The theoretical performance should be around 2.9 Teraflops, as the 8-core version offers the same 1,398 MHz maximum clock rate as the 10-core version. 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 10 Watt (in our tests under load of the MBP13) compared to the 13.5W of the 10-core version.