NVIDIA Maxwell GPU Surface Book vs Apple M1 Max 32-Core GPU

NVIDIA Maxwell GPU Surface Book

The Nvidia Maxwell GPU is a dedicated graphics card in the Microsoft Surface Book laptop. It is based on the Maxwell GM108 chip as the Geforce 940M with 384 shaders. Instead of the DDR3 graphics memory, the Surface Book graphics card features faster GDDR5 memory (both 64 Bit though). 

Thanks to the faster graphics memory, the Surface Book Geforce is performing better than the average GeForce 940M. However, the 945M and GTX 950M are still noticeably faster. Demanding games therefore only run in low settings fluently.

More details can be found in our extensive review of the 2015 Microsoft Surface Book with the dedicated Maxwell GPU.

Apple M1 Max 32-Core GPU

The Apple M1 Max 32-Core-GPU is an integrated graphics card by Apple offering all 32 cores in the M1 Max Chip. The 4,096 ALUs offer a theoretical performance of up to 10.4 Teraflops. 

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).

The GPU clocks between 389 and 1296 MHz and offers no short term boost (389, 486, 648, 778, 972, 1296 MHz steps according to Powermetrics). 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).

The Apple M1 Max is manufactured in the modern 5nm process at TSMC and offers an excellent energy efficiency.