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M2 Ultra Chip Benchmark Results Reveal Impressive Performance Gains

Zest28 said:
The $700 Intel i9 is faster in single score but slightly slower in multi score. And once you add a RTX 4090 to it, it will beat the M2 Ultra at a fraction of the cost.
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Yes and that’s why gaming on the Mac will never be more than an afterthought. AAA will only exists marginally on Mac where apple paid for a port (probably like No man sky), at best. Because gamers seek the platform that will give you the best performance per $, not per watt! And that only exists in the PC world where you can customise your machine however you like to suit your performance needs.

But don’t worry, we still have Apple Arcade!
 
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East India Company said:
Yes and that’s why gaming on the Mac will never be more than an afterthought. AAA will only exists marginally on Mac where apple paid for a port (probably like No man sky), at best. Because gamers seek the platform that will give you the best performance per $, not per watt! And that only exists in the PC world where you can customise your machine however you like to suit your performance needs.

But don’t worry, we still have Apple Arcade!
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hardcore gamers - maybe.

Apples problem is more to get critical user mass to justify the incremental effort to port to Mac.
With the performance of Apple Silicon and the porting toolkit they might finally get there.
 
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falkon-engine said:
Intel chips have come a far way since the old intel Mac Pro and the 13900k is faster than the m2 ultra . So is ryzen 7950x. Also, the x86 workstation class chips like sapphire rapids and Genoa blow the m2 ultra away in terms of multithreading. Of course apple leads in terms of performance per watt.

I think the m2 ultra is fine in the Mac Studio but the Mac Pro, with all the extra room, is underpowered. And it’s still using pcie4 with pcie switches and lane sharing, whereas sapphire rapids and Genoa use pcie 5 and have a ton of lanes available. Much more flexible and can access more RAM.

Faster x86 chips are coming: arrow lake, zen 5, granite rapids Xeons.

Unless apple creates a workstation class chip I think apple will lead in notebook perf per watt, but when it comes to workstation and desktop, x86 will pull ahead.

But regardless of all that, competition is great for consumers. And I am glad to see apple start to embrace gaming on the Macintosh. Maybe apple has some wild ambitions in terms of GPU performance and is now laying the groundwork to introduce high performance gaming hardware…
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Unless AMD and Nvidia are opening up their IP Apple has a lot of work to maneuver around in order to achieve what is coming from either one of them.
 
bushman4 said:
Bring back the 27” iMac with an M2 ultra and wow would we have a powerhouse
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I can't believe I'm saying that: But why don't you buy a Studio Display for your Mac Studio with M2 Ultra? This way you can at least be sure, the fastest chip Apple ever made is properly cooled. Yes, we need a bigger more powerful iMac, but within reasonable expectations.
 
MauiPa said:
I'd like primate labs to explain what happened between Geekbench 5 and 6. The Ultra used to score almost double of the M2 Max, then with Geekbench 6 it was much lower. Is this internal Geekbench programming not being as good, are there some new limitations in GB 6 that weren't there in GB5?

I read their blurb, but nothing stood out to me to explain this
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Each time geek bench is updated it scores you against a new baseline score so you should expect results to go down over time .

“
Geekbench 6 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 2500 (which is the score of an Intel Core i7-12700). Higher scores are better, with double the score indicating double the performance”
 
djcerla said:
Go imagine M3.

BTW, no reasons why the Vision Pro must have a M2. It will come out in 2024 with M3, more power, better battery life.
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You want Apple to start mass manufacturing the device this fall with a chip that won't exist yet? Cool.
 
rp2011 said:
The M series chips are impressive, and the Ultra's are overkill for most applications. Where the Ultra's have disappointed was in GPU performance vs a dedicated graphics card. But if Apple's claims hold true, the improved GPU performance on the M2 Ultra should take it into Nvidia territory and finally make it a viable option for 3D graphics work and rendering. Can't wait to see hands-on videos of it with Blender.
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I imagine Apple will make dedicated GPU cards for the Mac Pro at some point. Until then, the only fair comparison is to other integrated graphics chips
 
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Gudi said:
I can't believe I'm saying that: But why don't you buy a Studio Display for your Mac Studio with M2 Ultra? This way you can at least be sure, the fastest chip Apple ever made is properly cooled. Yes, we need a bigger more powerful iMac, but within reasonable expectations.
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A tricked out i7 iMac would cost not much more than a Mac mini does today, and came with a 5K screen. I doubt Apple is interested in that a low margin approach anymore.
 
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Killerbob said:
I still don’t get why Apple did not differentiate the Mac Pro anymore from the Mac Studio. Using the identical CPU there isn’t much reason to spend the much more money. Sure you get PCIe expansion, but you can get that in a TB4 Sonnet expansion box at a quarter the cost. You can’t use the PCIe for graphics cards, and you are still limited on the RAM…
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The expansion slots are the reason, some pros need them. It's far more efficient than TB
 
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JimmyHook said:
The expansion slots are the reason, some pros need them. It's far more efficient than TB
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Agreed, the slots are welcome. I just wish they would give us nvme ssd expansion for storage, I noticed 2 Sata connections, and that's cool for big storage but for video/photo editing systems, fast SSD add ons would be a very welcome addition.
 
How big is the actual AAA game market? How many people spend thousands on pimped out gaming machines? And how much do the software companies make on sales to those people?
Every time Apple makes a machine I always hear that it can't do AAA games etc.. and I'm always wondering how big that market actually is? If it was such a big market why would Apple not cater to it?
My suspicion is that it's very niche and wouldn't move the needle at all for Apple in terms of profits.

Am I wrong?
 
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