Ahead of the launch of the new MacBook Pro, powered by two more powerful siblings of the (already powerful) M1 processor chip, much of the interest revolved around the new machine’s graphics capabilities. We already knew Apple could beat Intel, but what about AMD and Nvidia?
The laptops were announced on Monday and will hit shops on 25 October. (Here’s where to pre-order the new MacBook Pro.) But we don’t have to wait that long to glimpse their graphical power, pleasingly, because benchmarking scores have leaked.
An unexpected score for Geekbench 5’s Metal-based graphics card test has appeared in Geekbench’s database: it purportedly shows a MacBook Pro equipped with an M1 Max with the maximum allocation of 32 graphics cores and 64GB of RAM, 9to5Mac reports.
The score is 68,870 points, which is an exceptional performance for a laptop: as 9to5Mac observes, it’s 62% faster than the AMD Radeon Pro 5600M, the most powerful GPU available for the previous, Intel-based MacBook Pro 16in. If we compare to the entry-level Intel Pro and its AMD Radeon Pro 5300M, the difference is 181%.
Indeed, this is comparable performance to a high-end desktop. It’s about the same as the Pro Vega 56 in the (now discontinued) iMac Pro, and slightly slower than the Radeon RX 5700 XT.
A single result should be taken with a degree of scepticism, as anomalies are always possible. But this at least gives a first indication of what we can expect from the new MacBook Pros.
This article originally appeared on Macworld Sweden. Translation (using DeepL) and additional reporting by David Price.
Author: Anders Lundberg, Contributing Editor
Anders has worked for Macworld Sweden for many years. He writes news, reviews and tutorials related to the Mac, iPhone and Apple Watch.