Apple M4 Pro 20-Core GPU vs Apple M2 Max 38-Core GPU

Apple M4 Pro 20-Core GPU

The Apple M4 Pro GPU (20 cores) is an integrated graphics adapter designed by Apple that's built into the 14-core Apple M4 Pro SoC. It features 20 "cores" and has access to at least 24 GB of fast 273 GB/s LPDDR5x on-package RAM depending on the configuration. As is typical for graphics adapters released in 2024, it has hardware support for ray tracing as well as mesh shading and other modern technologies. It also supports external displays with resolutions as high as "8K" and it can HW-decode a few popular video codecs such as h.264, h.265 and AV1.

Performance

Its gaming performance is at least as good as that of the GTX 1660 Ti Laptop. Please keep in mind that 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.

• The Witcher 3 1080p Ultra = 53 fps (close to the GTX 1660 Ti Laptop)
• Baldur's Gate 3 1440p Ultra = 42 fps (close to the GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop)
• Cyberpunk 2077 2.1 Phantom Liberty 1080p Ultra = 40 fps (close to the GTX 1660 Ti Laptop)

In synthetic benchmarks, the iGPU is about 30% faster than the old M3 Pro GPU and is even on par with a fast GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU (3DMark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited).

Power consumption

When under heavy CPU and GPU load, the iGPU portion of the 14-core M4 Pro consumes about 32 W according to monitoring software "powermetrics". With no load, it makes do with as little as 1 W to 3 W.

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

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.