Apple M2 Max 30-Core GPU vs AMD Radeon RX 7900M vs AMD Radeon RX 7700S

Apple M2 Max 30-Core GPU

The Apple M2 Max 30-Core-GPU is an integrated graphics card by Apple offering 30 of the 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).

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 Pro is manufactured in the second generation 5nm process at TSMC.

AMD Radeon RX 7900M

The AMD Radeon RX 7900M is a mobile upper high-end graphics card based on the Navi 31 chip (RDNA 3 architecture) manufactured in 5nm. It features 4,608 cores (72 CUs - compute units) and 16 GB of fast GDDR6 graphics memory connected with a 256 Bit memory bus. The chip also includes 64 MB Infinity Cache. The clock speed of the cores will depend on the laptop according to AMD. The specified game clock speed is 1825 MHz (most likely at 180 W TGP). 

AMD compares the performance to the mobile RTX 4080 and shows a number of games where the 7900M is on average 7% faster. Raytracing is supported in hardware, but usually slower than the Nvidia counterpart. Nvidia also has the advantage of DLSS support in selected games.

The Navi 31 chip is manufactured at TSMC in the current 5nm process. The power consumption (TGP) is specified at 160 to 180 Watt (200 Watt including SmartShift from the CPU).

AMD Radeon RX 7700S

The AMD Radeon RX 7700S is a mobile upper mid-range graphics card based on the Navi 33 chip (RDNA 3 architecture) manufactured in 6nm. It features 2,048 cores (32 CUs - compute units) and 8 GB of fast GDDR6 graphics memory connected with a 128 Bit memory bus. The chip also includes 32 MB Infinity Cache. The clock speed of the cores will depend on the laptop according to AMD. The specified game clock speed is 2200 MHz (most likely at 100 W TGP). The 7700S is the power efficient version of the RX 7600M XT with slightly reduced clock speeds (-100 MHz) and TDP (-20W max).

AMD compares the performance to the old Radeon RX 6700S, that is easily beaten by the 7700S. As the theoretical performance is only slightly below the 7600M XT (at 100W TGP), the 7700S should also beat the RTX 3060 desktop GPU. Although the Raytracing performance did increase for RDNA 3, the GeForce GPUs are still faster in this regard.

The Navi 33 chip is manufactured at TSMC in the current 6nm process (versus 4nm of Nvidia RTX 4000 series). The power consumption (TGP) is specified at 75 to 100 Watt.