Apple M4 Max showcases excellent performance in Blender, even against dedicated desktop hardware. The chip managed to beat Nvidia’s RTX 4070 while consuming a fraction of its power.
According to the Blender Open Data benchmark results, M4 Max delivered 5,209 points, averaged from 32 tests. This puts it just at the same level as an RTX 4080 mobile or desktop RTX 4070. That said, against Nvidia’s flagship RTX 4090 mobile, M4 Max lags behind by around 30%. Not surprising, considering that an RTX 4090 mobile alone consumes as much as an entire M4 Max machine.
Furthermore, Apple also improved M4 Max in the CPU department, scoring higher than its predecessor. It even outperforms the massive 24-core M2 Ultra in Geekbench. Not too shabby for a 16-core CPU with 40 GPU cores and 128GB of unified LPDDR5X-8533 RAM.
Things may get even more interesting if Apple releases an Ultra version of this chip. While scaling isn’t always perfect, such a monster may be able to beat or at least come close to Nvidia’s greatest consumer GPU with its 10,888 points.
Exploring the hypothetical, an M4 Ultra would pack two M4 Max dies linked together to simulate a single large processor. In other words, you double every aspect of the Max variant, resulting in 32 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, 32 neural engine cores, up to 256GB of unified memory, and 1,092GB of bandwidth. That said, we didn’t see an M3 Ultra, so maybe Apple has unfortunately dropped these kinds of projects.
Generally, this is not a surprise jump in performance as M4 Max is only 1.2x faster than its predecessor, according to Apple. What it shows is Apple’s continued improvement of the M series, which now delivers nearly double the performance of their first-gen equivalents, at least when it comes to GPU horsepower.
Regardless, Apple is slowly but surely reducing the gap between its designs and its competition with each passing generation. The question is, will these improvements continue long enough to catch Nvidia or not? Time will tell.
