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Do you think a theoretical M5 Extreme's GPU could match the RTX 5090?
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There is no Extreme CPU from apple.
Lets do some conjecturing.
If the 40 gpu core M4 Max is close a RTX 3090, and assuming the M5 Max has the same 40 core count with a 30% improvement. We're looking at a 4080, maybe a 4090 class GPU.
The as yet unannounced M5 Ultra will conceivably have 2x the gpu cores, so we should see nearly double the performance, which does put us in the 5090 range.
This is just fast and loose napkin math type of conjecture, don't hold me to this given that we don't even have a M5 Pro, never mind, Max or Ultra.
Lets do some conjecturing.
If the 40 gpu core M4 Max is close a RTX 3090, and assuming the M5 Max has the same 40 core count with a 30% improvement. We're looking at a 4080, maybe a 4090 class GPU.
The as yet unannounced M5 Ultra will conceivably have 2x the gpu cores, so we should see nearly double the performance, which does put us in the 5090 range.
This is just fast and loose napkin math type of conjecture, don't hold me to this given that we don't even have a M5 Pro, never mind, Max or Ultra.
Thanks.
You said the M5 Ultra could match the RTX 5090 but would that also be in Mac native games?
Yes, natively running apps, or games, not using crossover. If you take the benchmarks for the existing apple silicon chips, you can extrapolate a possible scenario where the M5 Ultra is on par with a 5090 - again its conjecture since we don't have a M4 Ultra, never mind an M5 Ultra
According to ChatGPT, an RTX 5080 (not RTX 5090) gets around double the fps at 4K native ultra settings in Resident Evil 4 or Village (can't remember which) when compared to an M3 Ultra. Does this bode well for the M5 Ultra to match the RTX 5090? ChatGPT could be wrong about the fps numbers though.
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I would say it depends. For a lot of gaming titles, even native ones, I suspect an M5 Ultra might struggle to get close to a 5090's performance. But to give you a concrete example of one where it is very likely to get close: Blender (which is ray tracing + raster). Here are some illustrative scores to underpin a back-of-the-envelope calculation:
| Apple M3 (GPU - 10 cores) | 919.06 |
| Apple M5 (GPU - 10 cores) | 1734.16 |
| Apple M3 Ultra (GPU - 80 cores) | 7493.24 |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 | 14933.08 |
Based on this, the projected M5 Ultra score would be ~14138, roughly within 5% of a 5090. Now we don't know if the M5 Ultra will hit that (or get more depending on Apple's design for the M5 Max/Ultra), but the Blender GPU benchmark ranks amongst Apple's best performing GPU benchmarks. So again, in a lot of games, even native ones, an M5 Ultra may not hit this level of relative performance. But it is still likely to be closer than Apple has ever gotten before to a (near) contemporaneous top Nvidia GPU (also unknown when the M5 Ultra will launch, it could be awhile, hopefully less time than the M3 Ultra took).
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