The Apple M3 Max 40-Core GPU is a self-designed graphics card in the Apple M3 SoC and according to Apple with forty cores. According to Apple, the GPU uses a new architecture and now offers dynamic caching, mesh shading and ray tracing acceleration.
The GPU can access up to 128 GB LPDDR5-6400 unified memory via a 512 bit memory bus (max 400 GBit/s). Thanks to dynamic caching, the GPU should only reserve as much memory as is required.
Since the SoC is manufactured in the current 3nm (probably N3B) at TSMC. According to powermetrics, the GPU requires up to 60 watts (chip incl. CPU total 78 watts).
The Apple M1 GPU is an integrated graphics card offering 7 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 with 8 cores is 2.6 teraflops, therefore the 7 core version should offer around 2.3 teraflops. 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.
Average Benchmarks Apple M3 Max 40-Core GPU → 100%n=12
Average Benchmarks Apple M1 7-Core GPU → 29%n=12
- 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.
[X]Apple MacBook Air 2020 M1 Entry Apple M1 2.1GHz M1 7-Core GPU Problem during benchmarking occured: small graphical problems smog not perfect min: 88 fps, max: 102 fps
[X]Apple MacBook Air 2020 M1 Entry Apple M1 2.1GHz M1 7-Core GPU Problem during benchmarking occured: severe graphical problems black squares min: 22 fps, max: 28 fps
[X]Apple MacBook Air 2020 M1 Entry Apple M1 2.1GHz M1 7-Core GPU Problem during benchmarking occured: severe graphical problems min: 15 fps, max: 19 fps