> 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.