Although the M4 MacBook Pro has been out since last week, we’re still learning just how capable its most high-end M4 Max chip performs. A new series of tests pit the M4 Max against Nvidia GPUs to see which can render Blender projects faster. In an interesting twist, the M4 Max MacBook Pro wipes the floor with the Nvidia RTX 3080 — and even comes close to matching the RTX 4080 Super.
The impressive data comes from Robbie Tilton, who does Blender tutorials on YouTube and has now tested the M4 Max and the other Apple chips in Blender against the two generations of Nvidia graphics.
I just watched a comparison of M4 chips against dedicated NVIDIA GPUs, and it's just astonishing – M4 Max on MBP came in second to a 4080 Super on a desktop PC. If you're not sure why that's incredible, you should see the size and weight of a 4080
https://t.co/QrB8S0PApK pic.twitter.com/G7qBxRN6AQ
— Paul Hudson (@twostraws) November 13, 2024
As coding teacher Paul Hudson points out in his post on X about the results, this is a pretty amazing achievement. The Nvidia GPUs are massive, 30-centimeter-long graphics cards inside desktop PCs. The fact that is tiny chip with integrated onboard graphics inside a MacBook Pro can produce similar results is mind-blowing.
The difference in energy used is also significant. An RTX 4080 Super uses a power connector rated at 320 watts maximum, meaning that’s the max amount of energy the graphics card can draw (and there are tests out there showing it’s capable of drawing the full amount). It’s harder to find this data for the M4 Max, but it seems the maximum consumption for the M4 Pro is 46 watts, so we can assume that whatever the exact number is for the Max, it’s way below the RTX 4080 Super.
In our own testing of the M4 Pro in the Cinebench R24 benchmark, the M4 Pro landed in between the RTX 4060 and RTX 4070 mobile GPUs. But clearly, once you double up to the 40 GPU cores in the M4 Max, it makes quite a difference.How good are the Apple M4 chips when rendering in Blender?
You do have to pay to get this kind of power, however. The test results show the base M4 chip at the bottom of the pile, taking four times longer to render than the M4 Max. That isn’t a slight against the M4– it’s really just there for comparison and isn’t aimed at people who do 3D modeling work in the first place.
The gap between the different chips is evident in the pricing as well. A MacBook Pro with the base M4 chip costs $1,599, while upgrading to an M4 Max configuration will set you back at least $3,199. For comparison, the 4080 Super retails at $1,000 but it is, of course, just one of the many parts you need to build a working desktop PC.
Numbers aside, the main takeaway here is that the M4 Max is quite impressive, and it even has 3D artists feeling the temptation to switch over to Mac.
