Apple M1 8-Core GPU vs NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

Apple M1 8-Core GPU

The Apple M1 GPU is an integrated graphics card offering 8 cores (1 deactivated core in the entry MacBook Air) designed by Apple and integrated in the Apple M1 SoC. According to Apple it is faster and more energy efficient as competing products (like the Tiger Lake Xe GPU). The peak performance of the high end variant is 2.6 teraflops and thanks to the unified memory architecture it should have fast access to the RAM.

The Apple M1 is manufactured in the modern 5nm process at TSMC and should offer an excellent energy efficiency. According to internal tools, the M1 GPU uses under load approximately 10 Watt (11.5 Watt package power including the RAM).

NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

The Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada Generation, not to be confused with the A4000, P4000 or RTX 4000 Turing Generation, is a very powerful professional graphics card for use in laptops that sports 7,424 CUDA cores and 12 GB of ECC GDDR6 VRAM. Brought into existence in 2023, this graphics adapter leverages TSMC's 5 nm process and Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture to achieve great performance combined with moderate power consumption. The Nvidia-recommended TGP range for the card is very wide at 60 W to 175 W leading to bizarre performance differences between different systems powered by what is supposed to be the same product.

Hardware-wise, the RTX 4000 is a GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop in disguise. Consequently, both make use of the AD103 chip and have little difficulty running triple-A games at QHD 1440p.

Quadro series graphics cards ship with much different BIOS and drivers than GeForce cards and are targeted at professional users rather than gamers. Commercial product design, large-scale calculations, simulation, data mining, 24 x 7 operation - if any of this sounds familiar, then a Quadro card will make you happy.

Architecture and Features

Ada Lovelace brings a range of improvements over older graphics cards utilizing the outgoing Ampere architecture. It's not just a better manufacturing process and a higher number of CUDA cores that we have here (up to 16,384 versus 10,752); under-the-hood refinements are plentiful, including an immensely larger L2 cache and an optimized ray tracing routine (a different way to determine what is transparent and what isn't is used) and other changes. Naturally, these graphics cards can both encode and decode some of the most widely used video codecs, AVC, HEVC and AV1 included; they also support a host of Nvidia technologies, including Optimus and DLSS 3, and they can certainly be used for various AI tasks.

The RTX 4000 features 58 RT cores of the 3rd generation, 232 Tensor cores of the 4th generation and 7,424 CUDA cores, making it a lot faster than the RTX 3500 Ada Generation. Elsewhere, the graphics card comes with 12 GB of 192-bit wide ECC GDDR6 memory for a very healthy throughput of ~432 GB/s. Error correction can be turned off if desired. The fact that error correction is present here proves that the RTX 4000 is indeed targeted at professional users.

Just like Ampere-based cards, the RTX 4000 makes use of the PCI-Express 4 protocol. 8K SUHD monitors are supported, however DP 1.4a video outputs can potentially prove to be a bottleneck down the line.

Performance

While we have not tested a single system featuring an RTX 4000 Ada Generation as of February 2024, we have plenty of performance data for the GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop, a graphics card with very similar specifications. Based on that, we fully expect the RTX 4000 to deliver:

• a Blender 3.3 Classroom CUDA score of around 23 seconds
• a 3DMark 11 GPU score of around 57,000
• at least 115 fps in GTA V (1440p - Highest settings possible, 16x AF, 4x MSAA, FXAA)
• close to 50 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p - High settings, Ultra RT, "Quality" DLSS)

Nvidia's marketing materials mention "up to 33.5 TFLOPS" of performance which is impressive. The RTX 5000 Ada Generation delivers a little over 42 TFLOPS, for reference.

Your mileage may vary depending on how competent the cooling solution of your laptop is and how high the TGP power target of the RTX 4000 is. One other thing worth mentioning is that enabling error correction appears to reduce the amount of video memory that is available to applications and games by up to a gigabyte.

Power consumption

Nvidia no longer divides its laptop graphics cards into Max-Q and non-max-Q models. Instead, laptop makers are free to set the TGP according to their needs, and the range can sometimes be shockingly wide. This is the case with the RTX 4000, as the lowest value recommended for it sits at just 60 W while the highest is more than two times higher at 175 W (this most likely includes Dynamic Boost). The slowest system built around an RTX 4000 Ada can easily be 60% slower than the fastest one. This is the kind of delta that we've already seen on consumer-grade laptops featuring the latest GeForce RTX cards.

Last but not the least, the improved 5 nm process (TSMC 4N) the RTX 4000 Ada is built with makes for very decent energy efficiency, as of mid 2023.