Apple M1 Max 24-Core GPU vs Intel Arc A770 vs Apple M1 8-Core GPU

Apple M1 Max 24-Core GPU

The Apple M1 Max 24-Core-GPU is an integrated graphics card by Apple offering 24 of the 32 cores in the M1 Max Chip. The 3,072 ALUs offer a theoretical performance of up to 8 Teraflops. 

The graphics card has no dedicated graphics memory but can use the fast LPDDR5-6400 unified memory with a 512 bit bus (up to 400 GBit/s).

The GPU clocks between 389 and 1296 MHz and offers no short term boost (389, 486, 648, 778, 972, 1296 MHz steps according to Powermetrics). The GPU is intended to use Apple Metal 2 API and could still be based on the older PowerVR architectures (last used in the Apple A10).

The Apple M1 Max is manufactured in the modern 5nm process at TSMC and offers an excellent energy efficiency.

Intel Arc A770

The Intel Arc A770 is a mid-range desktop GPU and is manufactured using the 6 nm process at TSMC. The graphics processor has 4,096 shader units and 8 or 16 GB GDDR6 VRAM with a 256-bit interface (16 Gbps, 512 GB/s).

Features

As the top model based on the Alchemist architecture, Intel offers the Arc A770, the top model in the series. As a completely new development, Intel wants to put pressure on AMD and Nvidia with these graphics cards. Features such as ray tracing are supported and the Intel Arc A770 comes with 32 RT cores. Intel is also implementing 512 Tensor Cores, which we can already find in the current graphics cards from Nvidia. With support for AV1, the graphics card is particularly interesting for content creators. Only the Ada Lovelace models from Nvidia and the RDNA3 GPUs from AMD are currently capable of hardware-side encoding and decoding with the new codec.

Performance

The performance of the Intel Arc A770 is comparable with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or an AMD Radeon RX 7600 comparable. The Intel model copes much better with newer games. With ray tracing enabled, the Intel Arc A770 can even outperform its two competitors. Based on the performance shown, the Intel Arc A770 is ideally suited for 1080p gaming in 2023.

Power consumption

The manufacturer specifies the power consumption of the Intel Arc A770 at 225 watts (TGP). This is slightly more than a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or the AMD Radeon RX 7600.

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).