It doesn't go as fast as a 3090 even with two. It does go about twice as fast as an M1 Max.

In the analogy the Lamborghini would be an RTX 3090, and the macrumors article makes it abundantly clear the Ultra isn't even half of the RTX 3090 performance.

Right, but rather than getting bogged down with the analogy, do we agree that performance per watt is what matters? It doesn't matter whether you need 2 or 2.43 of them to match an RTX 3090, if it has better performance per watt, it's better.

> Right, but rather than getting bogged down with the analogy, do we agree that performance per watt is what matters?

No, I am not in agreement with you, the RTX 3090 is clearly better at being a GPU.

> clearly better

better is subjective, it depends on your needs.

sometimes performance per watt is more important especially when you're mobile or trying to be conservative w/ electricity.

> sometimes performance per watt is more important especially when you're mobile or trying to be conservative w/ electricity.

There is an obvious implicit context when you're comparing performance to an RTX 3090, and it is not mobility or your electric bill.

There may be only one implicit context for you, which is why I said "better" is subjective.

Personally the M1 Ultra would be better imo as a desktop GPU than RTX 3090 in certain contexts. Putting it in a van, traveling with it, etc.

I'll probably wait until the next go around of them, but I'm loving nearing desktop performance w/ reduced loads.

The RTX series has lower power variants. When you compare against the 3090 you are establishing a context with power consumption as a low priority.

Considering the 3090 had over double the performance, the lower power parts may well be both faster and more power efficient. You'd have to do the comparison to know, if that's what you care more about.

> 3090 had over double the performance

The FPS was closer than double. The flawed benchmark the 3090 had double.

I'm not sure how the lower power RTX variants compare, maybe that's a closer comparison, has there been a review against those?

I would ask if the RTX 3090 is competitive in some of the specialized things the Mac chip is made to do: there's a hell of a lot of dedicated video processing stuff in there that seems to exist to serve Final Cut Pro, not gaming. Are we comparing apples and oranges, in the sense that video editing at 4k, 5k and beyond might call upon a different set of skills than gaming benchmarks? How much would it matter if this translated into rather proprietary things like ability to pump impossible amounts of ProRes video compression on the fly and scrub ridiculously giant frame sizes? Are there benchmarks along those lines?

Performance per watt is very important for devices that need to run on battery and for cloud compute where you're running thousands of them and saving on electricity/cooling would be significant.

But it's almost completely unimportant for always-plugged-in-to-wall-socket desktop chips. Because even the power consumption of stuff like the 3090 is still pretty insignificant on your power bill compared to up front cost, and relative to the power consumption of all the other stuff in your house.

Remember even the 3090 consumes very little power when idle - it's only pulling the rated ~300w when you're maxing it out playing heavy games or rendering or whatever.

> do we agree that performance per watt is what matters?

No? Certainly not on desktop computers.

First graph with geekbench scores.

RTX3090: 215,034

M1 Ultra: 102,156

That’s nice to know, but for me the M1 Ultra performance is not very relevant. Apple has a history of introducing proprietary architectures, not-quite-compatibles interfaces and non-standard software.

MacOS has nice UI? Great, I will use it. Anything computationally intensive? - Why bother? I would use only Linux on the back end. It’s very easy to couple mid-range Apple product with high-end Linux workstation at your desk. I don’t need to run compute-intensive Deep Learning load while I am at the coffee shop.

>I don’t need to run compute-intensive Deep Learning load while I am at the coffee shop.

Well they're putting it in a desktop and claiming desktop performance...

If Apple is going to put up graphs saying they beat i9 and 3090RTX machines, it's worth investigating even if I plan to put Linux on it.

In this instance it seems like the reality doesn't match the hype as well as in the laptop space, but if it had I would surly consider the option.

Geekbrench has already been debunked a long time ago by Anandtech as not sustaining the full load enough to show the real pref.

The CPU and GPU tests finishes too fast for the system to ramp up to the full power load.

That's not to say that M1 Ultra is equal or better than 3090, just that Geekbench isn't the right test for this.

You can see more detailed analysis here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ7WN3yome4

Is that an indication that the M1 has latency issues vis-a-vis power delivery, then?

The GB Compute test is widely viewed as worthless for the m1 Ultra chip because it’s too fast for the chip to ramp up. It’s even too short for the m1 Max.