M3 Max GPU uses at most 60-70w. Meanwhile, the 7900XT uses up to 412w in burst mode.[0] TSMC N3 (M3 Max) uses 25-30% less power than TSMC N5 (7900XT). [1] In other words, if 7900XT used N3 and optimizes for the same performance, it would burst to 300w instead which is still 5-6x more than M3 Max. In other words, the perf/watt advantage of the M3 Max is mostly not related to the node used. It's the design.
[0]https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-radeon-rx-7900-xt/37....
[1]https://www.anandtech.com/show/18833/tsmc-details-3nm-evolut...
The article is MI300X, which is beating NVidia's H100.
> Do you have benchmarks for when AMD doesn't nerf Blender performance?
Go read the article above.
> Notably, our results show that MI300X running MK1 Flywheel outperforms H100 running vLLM for every batch size, with an increase in performance ranging from 1.22x to 2.94x.
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> Why does AMD nerf RDNA3 when they're so far behind Nvidia and Apple in Blender performance?
Nerf is a weird word.
AMD has focused on 32-bit FLOPs and 64-bit FLOPs until now. AMD never put much effort into raytracing. They reach acceptable levels on XBox / PS5 but NVidia always was pushing Raytracing (not AMD).
Similarly: Blender is a raytracer that uses those Raytracing cores. So any chip with substantial on-chip ray-tracing / ray-matching / ray-intersection routines will perform faster.
Blender isn't what people do with GPUs. The #1 thing they do is video games like Baldur's gate 3.
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It'd be like me asking why Apple's M3 can't run Baldur's gate 3. Its not a "nerf", its a purposeful engineering decision.
The M3 Max is also in a sense a generation ahead in terms of perf/watt of the 7900 XT as it uses a newer manufacturing node.
I suppose it's also worth highlighting that if you enable Optix in the comparison above, you can see Nvidia parts stomping all over both AMD and Apple parts alike.