When Apple announced the Mac Studio, they unveiled a new iteration of the M1 chipset called the M1 Ultra, which essentially merges two M1 Max chipset together using what Apple is calling “UltraFusion” technology.

Apple and its allies in the Tame Apple Press made some rather ridiculous claims that the new chipset was so powerful that it matched “the highest-end discrete GPU”, which right now is NVIDIA’s RTX 3090.

Now, the Tame Apple Press printed these claims without checking because Apple always tells it the truth. However, it now appears that more cynical testers working for the Verge did what journalists are supposed to do and checked Apple’s claims.

Sure enough, it found that Apple’s claims to be a world GPU leader are about as reliable as a Reliant Robin.
Testing out the computer and the M1 Ultra using different benchmarks and apps, it seems that the M1 Ultra’s graphics don’t even come close to the RTX 3090.

In fact the numbers are not even close enough to say that it is within a margin of error.

In the Geekbench 5 Compute, the RTX 3090 achieved a score of 215,034, while the M1 Ultra snagged only 83,121.

Testing the chip on Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the RTX 3090 managed to get 142 fps at 1080p resolution, while the M1 Ultra only managed 108 fps.

So while the figures show that Apple’s chip performs better than the more expensive out-of-date Intel-based Mac Pro it is hardly the cure for cancer that Apple has been telling everyone.

So while the M1 Ultra is Apple’s most powerful chipsets to date, it is certainly behind what the rest of the world can manage.