Apple silicon has certainly come a long way since the tech giant unveiled its revolutionary M1 MacBook Pro in 2020. With the successive releases of the M2 and M3, and the recently announced M4, Apple has delivered impressive performance improvements. with each generation. But how do these modern Macs compare to traditional PC hardware?
PC maker Puget Systems last compared Macs to PCs four years ago and wanted to see how things had changed. He did so by pitting the high-end MacBook Pro M3 Max and Apple M2 Ultra Studio against an Intel desktop PC, an AMD desktop, an AMD workstation (with and without dual GPUs), and his own Puget Mobile laptop from 17 inches.
Comparing PC and Apple Mac is like comparing oranges to, well, apples. Macs with Apple silicon use an Arm-based architecture instead of x86 and employ an SoC design that tightly integrates the CPU, GPU, RAM, and VRAM. This configuration allows MacBooks to have larger memory pools for the GPU but smaller ones for the CPU, and while RAM is faster for the CPU, it is slower for the GPU compared to PCs.
The PCs win (mostly)!
Puget compared models with similar costs but also included some high-end PC versions to show how far it is possible to push a modern desktop computer.
You can see the full results and benchmarks on Puget's site, but in summary, the company found that the latest MacBook Pro M3 Max excels in Photoshop and After Effects overall, but falls short in Premiere Pro, especially in rendering. multiple frames, where PCs outperform. he.
In DaVinci Resolve, Macs lag behind, particularly in GPU effects and AI features, and PCs outperform them significantly. CPU rendering is dominated by PCs, with AMD's Threadripper PRO giving a substantial advantage. In GPU rendering, Apple lags behind Nvidia RTX GPUs (unsurprisingly), making PCs a better choice for high-performance rendering tasks.
Puget ends his comparison on a positive note for Apple, however, stating: “We are very impressed by the performance that Apple manages to achieve in a relatively light, quiet and cool machine. [the M3 Max MacBook Pro]. “It's a fantastic laptop and the fact that it can be compared to a desktop workstation is an achievement.”
