The Apple M2 GPU is an integrated graphics card offering 10 cores designed by Apple and integrated in the Apple M2 SoC. It uses the unified memory architecture of the M2 SoC (up to 24 GB LPDDR5-6400 with 100 GB/s bandwidth) and should offer 160 execution units.
According to Apple it offers a 25% higher performance at slightly higher power consumption. The theoretical performance is rated at 3.6 Teraflops and therefore 1 TFLOP higher than the M1 8-core GPU. In our benchmarks, the GPU was able to top the M1 with up to 40%, but still stays behind the 14-core GPU in the M1 Pro. Compared to other iGPUs from AMD and Intel, the M2 benefits greatly from the unified memory architecture and the high bandwidth.
The M2 chip is manufactured in the second generation 5nm process at TSMC (most likely N5P). The power consumption is around 13.5 Watt (in our tests under load of the MBP13) and up to 15W according to Apple.
The Qualcomm Adreno 504 is a mobile graphics card for lower mid-range smartphones and tablets (mostly Android based). It is included in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 429 SoCs and based on the Adreno 500 architecture (like the Adreno 520 in the S820, which should be fully compatible in software).
The GPU supports modern standards like Vulkan 1.0 (according to Wikipedia), OpenGL ES 3.1 + AE (3.2 in other sources), OpenCL 2.0 and DirectX 12 (FL 12.1 according to Wikipedia, 11.1 according to Qualcomm). Furthermore, the GPU supports Universal Bandwidth Compression (UBWC) to save memory bandwidth.
According to Qualcomm, the GPU is 50% faster than the previous Adreno 308 in the Snapdragon 425.
In the Snapdragon 429, the Adreno 504 is manufactured in the modern 12nm process and should be very power efficient.
The Apple M2 Max 38-Core-GPU is an integrated graphics card by Apple offering all 38 cores in the M2 Max Chip.
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).
Thanks to the additional cores and architectural improvements, the M2 Max GPU should clearly best the old M1 Max GPU with 32 cores and therefore be the fastest iGPU currently available.
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). A new feature in the MacBook Pro 14 and 16 of 2023 is the support for HDMI 2.1 and 8k output.
The Apple M2 Max is manufactured in the second generation 5nm process at TSMC. According to the internal powermetrics tool, the GPU uses up to 53.6 Watt (performance mode) and the whole chip (including the CPU) up to 89 Watt.
Average Benchmarks Apple M2 Max 38-Core GPU → 348%n=6
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance 1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
Game Benchmarks
The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailed information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.