Since the release of the Apple M1 Max laptop, the performance data comparing it to its Nvidia, AMD, and Intel competitors has become more and more detailed. Late last month, David Huang took to Twitter to share a specific performance comparison of the M1 SoC against the Intel Arc A380 GPU, and the results were also somewhat surprising.
Apple Silicon has delivered pretty impressive CPU performance before, and while the GPU is also quite large and powerful, there are some areas where it falls a little short.
For example, compared to NVIDIA RTX 30 series cards, the M1 Max’s graphics rendering time can be nearly 1/3 worse.
Although the Intel Arc GPU has considerable room for improvement at the driver optimization level, the M1 Max’s video decoding unit performance is only half that of the 1299 RMB priced DG2 in extreme cases of ultra-high bit rates.
However, at lower bit rates, the difference between the two is much smaller. In addition, it should be noted that M1 Max has two media units as well as DG2.
Therefore, when decoding more than two video streams in parallel, their frame rates can be easily doubled, which is more conducive to smooth playback during video editing.
Video decoder performance comparison (Photo by: David Huang)
David Huang did not further test formats such as HEVC 422 / 444 or ProRes, after all, Apple still has a huge advantage in this area, not to mention the actual sales reputation of M1 SoC is much higher than Intel GPU.
After many jumps, Intel DG2 still has quite a few problems in terms of driver and ISV adaptation. For example, some UP owners have complained that software such as Da Vinci may pass a splash screen when exporting videos.
In contrast, Apple’s software support is much better. And even if Intel’s video playback performance is slightly better, the lead is relatively limited — the advantage over Apple Silicon is not as significant as with AMD VCN.
Finally, for the data in the charts, at Jellyfish 4K HEVC @ 30fps frame rate / 400Mbps bitrate, and at Station B 4K HEVC HDR @ 120fps frame rate / 14Mbps bitrate.
"● Apple M1 Max -- 61 bitrate. ● Intel Arc A380 GPU -- 118 bitrate."
Also in video streaming projects, both behave similarly.
"● Apple M1 Max -- 417 bitrate. ● Intel Arc A380 GPU -- 542 bitrate."
Finally, if you don’t use much of the Apple Silicon SoC and Apple software ecosystem in real life, the combination of Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA configurations and application scenarios are still much richer.
