AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT (Desktop) vs Apple M1 8-Core GPU vs Apple M1 Max 32-Core GPU

AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT (Desktop)

The AMd Radeon RX 5500 XT is a lower mid-range desktop graphics card. It is manufactured in 7nm and based on the RDNA architecture. The RX 5500 XT offers 1,408 cores and 4 or 8 GB GDDR6 video RAM that is connected via a 128 Bit memory bus (max. 224 GB/s).

The Navi 14 chip uses the RDNA architecture with support for PCIe 4.0, RIS (Radeon Image Sharpening) and a new Media Engine for 4K H.265 content.

The gaming performance of the RX 5500XT is comparable to a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 desktop card and stays behind the AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT. This means, most demanding games of 2020 can be played in 1080p and high settings.

The RX5500XT is rated at 130 Watt (TGP) and therefore similar to a GTX 1660 (120 Watt).

Apple M1 8-Core GPU

The Apple M1 GPU is an integrated graphics card offering 8 cores (1 deactivated core in the entry MacBook Air) designed by Apple and integrated in the Apple M1 SoC. According to Apple it is faster and more energy efficient as competing products (like the Tiger Lake Xe GPU). The peak performance of the high end variant is 2.6 teraflops and thanks to the unified memory architecture it should have fast access to the RAM.

The Apple M1 is manufactured in the modern 5nm process at TSMC and should offer an excellent energy efficiency. According to internal tools, the M1 GPU uses under load approximately 10 Watt (11.5 Watt package power including the RAM).

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.