M5 Ultra vs RTX 5090: 80-core M5 Ultra GPU crushes RTX 5080, trails 5090 by less than 5%

As tradition, Apple's newly announced M5 Ultra and M6 chips have started appearing in benchmark databases. According to a bunch of recent entries into Blender's Open Data benchmark database, it appears that the new M5 Ultra chip is packing quite the storm inside.

The 80-core M5 Ultra GPU managed to score a mind-numbing 15,350 points on the Blender benchmark. For comparison, Apple's M5 Max only managed around 8,112 points, while the previous Ultra SKU, the M3 Ultra, managed to score only around 7,234 points.

M5 Ultra almost topples the RTX 5090 in Blender's leaderboard

When compared to options on the PC side, the M5 Ultra effortlessly sweeps the floor with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GPU, which managed to score an average of around 9,100 points on the same benchmark. The RTX 5090 is still quite a bit ahead at around 16,000 points.

Needless to say, real-life workloads will vary greatly from synthetic benchmarks. Blender utilizes a few standardized scenes with varying degrees of simple and complex geometries. The APIs also matter, with Apple's M5 Ultra most likely running on the Metal API, whereas Nvidia's cards most likely utilizing CUDA/OptiX .

That said, it is quite clear that Apple's latest silicon packs a ton of punch and is more than equipped to take on the best that the PC world has to offer. Nvidia will still likely have a massive upper hand when it comes to raw compute and AI workloads, while the M5 Ultra will have the benefit of a massive amount of VRAM that is still unparalleled in the consumer space. 

Of course, there is also the price consideration. An M5 Ultra-equipped Mac Studio with 80 GPU cores, 96 GB of unified memory, and 1 TB of storage costs just under $6,800. 

An RTX 5090-equipped build, on the other hand, with a much less powerful 16-core Ryzen 9 CPU, 64 GB of much slower RAM, and 1 TB of storage, can easily cost around $9,000, given the current insanity surrounding GPU and RAM prices. 

Hilariously enough, an RTX 5090 can alone costs around $6,700 right now. An RTX 5080, on the other hand, is a lot less powerful and, of course, a lot cheaper at 'just' around $1600.