What is the level of the M3 Max on the top-end MacBook Pro 16? Someone spent 56,000 yuan for evaluation

Can it replace Core i9 and RTX graphics cards?

On October 31, Apple released a new generation of laptops and Macs at the "shortest press conference in history", along with a new generation of M3 chips.

For the first time, the new generation chip uses the leading 3-nanometer process technology, adding new technologies such as dynamic cache, hardware ray tracing, and grid coloring. It is said to be able to beat Intel processors and independent graphics cards with only half the cost. The power consumption can reach the same computing power of the M1 chip. All this brings Apple Silicon M series chips to new heights.

As Intel continues to improve its process technology and Qualcomm is about to enter the PC field, whether Apple chips are still competitive? Shortly after the official release, the evaluation of the M3 series chips also One after another, we can find the answer.

If the M3 chip and its features were to come out in 2021, we would all be stunned. But now it’s 2023, and M1 and M2 have already shown us the capabilities of Apple’s chips. So the M3's performance improvements must be big enough to shock us.

Recently, The Verge senior reporter Victoria Song conducted an in-depth review of the M3 Max on Apple’s MacBook Pro 16. Compared with the two lower-level models, the M3 Max can be said to have opened up a considerable gap.

Specifically, the configuration of the MacBook Pro reviewed by Victoria Song is a 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 128GB of memory, 8TB of storage, and the price is US$7,199. On the Chinese official website, this configuration is 56,999 yuan.

You can buy two ROG i9 13980HX plus RTX 4090 laptops at this price.

Benchmark Scores

The main differences between the M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max chips are the number of CPU and GPU cores, and the performance and efficiency of the CPU cores. Compare.

The top-of-the-line M3 Max configuration used here: 16 CPU cores (12 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores) and 40 GPU cores, 128GB RAM, 8TB SSD. Victoria Song compares it to the M3 MacBook Pro 14, which has 8 CPU cores (4 performance, 4 efficiency) and 10 GPU cores, and the M3 MacBook Pro 14, which has 12 CPU cores (8 performance, 4 efficiency) and 38 GPU cores. M2 Max MacBook Pro 16 for test comparison.

For single-core CPU benchmarks, the M3 and M3 Max are roughly on par, and about 10%-15% faster than the M2 core. In multi-core benchmarks, the M3 Max sometimes scales linearly. Take Cinebench 2024's multi-core test as an example: With 12 performance cores, the M3 Max is almost three times as fast as the M3 with 4 performance cores, and about 60% faster than the M2 Max with 8 performance cores.

GPU-wise, on Geekbench 6, the performance of the M3 GPU core is about the same as that of the M2. On the other hand, the M3 GPU was more than twice as fast per core as the M2 in Cinebench 2024, likely because the benchmark has been updated to take advantage of the M3 GPU's new features (such as ray tracing). There seems to be a lot of potential for further GPU improvements once applications are updated to take advantage of them.

The M3 Max in this computer has four times the number of GPU cores as the M3 in the 14-inch MacBook Pro, and can sometimes be up to four times faster, like in the case of Tomb Raider. In Geekbench, OpenCL mode is about three times faster than Metal mode and a bit faster than Metal mode.

If your work is not major with video editing, engineering software, etc., then there is not much difference between M3 and M3 Max.

Victoria Song ran a number of benchmarks against the MacBook Pro 16 and Macbook 14 Pro M3 simultaneously. Is the difference significant enough to have an impact on workload? No, obviously, most people are not the target users of this laptop.

The battery life of Apple notebooks has always been a selling point, even on models with the most powerful configurations. Even with high-performance mode turned on, the MacBook Pro 16 can work for about 18 hours.

Victoria Song started her workday around 8:30am, with the battery at about 49%, using the notebook unplugged at about 200 nits, and at 5:40pm, the battery 23% remains.

Let’s conduct a generational analysis again. Compared with the 8 large cores and 4 small cores of the previous generation M2 Max, the CPU specifications of the M3 Max have increased to 12 large cores and 4 small cores. It seems that the performance of each version of the M3 series is better. The gap has widened significantly.

# , the specifications have not been greatly improved, but it has a similar architecture to the A17 Pro on mobile phones, and has added new features such as hardware ray tracing and grid coloring. The press conference highlighted "dynamic cache", which allows the GPU to dynamically allocate video memory size from the memory according to the load, which can effectively improve the efficiency of the GPU.

It can be seen that in the Cinebench test, the performance improvement of M3 Max compared to M2 Max has reached 60%.

##                                                                                                                                                                                                                     mp out out out out out out out right out out out out out out out out out behind The power consumption has increased from 32W of M2 Max to about 51W. Correspondingly, the laptop's fan noise will become louder, but the MacBook's original noise is very small, and the current noise level is acceptable.

If you test some generative AI capabilities, you can see that the performance of M3 Max has been greatly improved compared to the previous generation, but it is still not as good as a standard independent graphics card.

##                                                                               Picture source: Geeker Bay Geekerwan

Game performance

What’s interesting is that this year Apple has put more emphasis on the gaming capabilities of the M series chips, and many game masterpieces have landed on the Mac platform.

It is worth noting that it may be difficult for you to maximize the performance of this MacBook. The only time it feels like this laptop has to work is when gaming on high graphics settings. The fans were noisiest when running Shadow of the Tomb Raider at its highest settings, with the benchmark briefly pushing the machine to around 200 fps. Try the 4K export test and Adobe Premiere Pro's PugetBench simulated video editing workload, which the M3 Max easily slayed, completing it in 90 seconds, more than twice as fast as the M3. PugetBench tests typically take around 15 or 20 minutes, and this M3 Max machine finished it in an average of seven minutes, a bit faster than the M2 Max completed it.

M3 Max can fully meet the capabilities of gaming notebooks in terms of technical indicators. But that doesn't mean it's a completely viable gaming laptop. Take, for example, the three native Apple Silicon games Apple made available to reviewers: Baldur's Gate 3, Pinocchio's Lies, and Disney's Stars Nest.

#When playing games on MacBook Pro, the hardware is not an issue.

First of all, these three games are very playable on this machine and can turn on high enough special effects. Among them, "Pinocchio Lies" can be turned on with all the highest graphics settings. The graphics of "Baldur's Gate 3" are a bit poor, especially the texture of objects in the screen.

Specifically, on Baldur's Gate 3, the highest 4K image quality can reach about 40 frames. It is much improved compared to M2 Max and exceeds the RTX 4060 notebook, but it cannot be called It’s a smooth experience.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a game running on Mac via Rosetta 2, and Victoria Song found that the frame rate on the M3 Max was roughly four times that of the M3. Frame rates are about 16% higher than the M2 Max, which has two fewer GPU cores.

Overall, there are still very few Mac-version games to choose from. Apple is taking some steps to build out its gaming library, which currently stands to benefit the most from the M3 Max.

To be a true gaming laptop, the MacBook Pro needs to match consoles and gaming PCs in terms of libraries. Having a handful of triple-A hits isn’t enough. Racing games available on Mac are Asphalt 8 and Asphalt 9, and these games are usually played on iPhone.

Earlier this year, Apple also announced a new game porting toolkit, Game Porting Tookit, which can directly play Windows versions of games. Unported games like "Cyberpunk 2077" can also be directly clicked. Start running. However, due to the performance loss of translation, in most cases, the loss of game performance will be serious, and the performance is close to that of an RTX 4060 notebook.

There is no doubt that Apple is working hard to explore the gaming market.

To sum up, with the development of the M3 Max generation, Apple has made up for most of the shortcomings of the PC side in terms of chip capabilities, and it can be regarded as truly on an equal footing with the X86 chip. However, when the power consumption ratio is dominant, the price of MacBook Pro is still a bit high.

Will this generation of MacBook Pro be your choice?

^{Reference link:}

^{https://www.theverge.com/23949207/apple-macbook-pro -16-m3-max-review-price-specs}

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