Apples charts set the M1 Ultra up for an RTX 3090 fight it could never win

When Apple introduced the M1 Ultra — the company’s most powerful in-house processor yet and the crown jewel of its brand new Mac Studio — it did so with charts boasting that the Ultra capable of beating out Intel’s best processor or Nvidia’s RTX 3090 GPU all on its own. The charts, in Apple’s recent fashion, were maddeningly labeled with “relative performance” on the Y-axis, and Apple doesn’t tell us what specific tests it runs to arrive at whatever numbers it uses to then calculate “relative performance.”

But now that we have a Mac Studio, we can say that in most tests, the M1 Ultra isn’t actually faster than an RTX 3090, as much as Apple would like to say it is.

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