

When you dig into the individual tasks that PugetBench tests, though, you can see where the M1 Max’s strengths lie. To put it in context, it’s also a 58% higher score than the M1 Mac Mini. That might not sound like a lot, but a score of 1,167, which is what the M1 Max MacBook Pro achieved, is still the highest score I’ve ever recorded in this test on a laptop by a mile.

In terms of its overall score, the M1 Max was only 16% higher than the M1 Pro. Both systems were tested with 32GB of Apple’s unified memory. The Adobe Premiere PugetBench test benchmarks a number of tasks to show how a system balances performance between both components. Video editing is a good example of a workflow that relies equally on the power of both the CPU and the GPU, depending on what specific task you’re testing. If you’re comparing apples to apples in terms of processors, you’re not going to see twice the performance when you upgrade your graphics. The problem is that not many workflows or applications depend only on graphics. In terms of pure graphics performance, it gets close. In other words, is the 32-core M1 Max really twice as powerful as the M1 Pro? You can opt for the 24-core option for $200 over the base configuration, or twice that for another 12 cores of GPU strength.Īll of that seems priced correctly - so long as the performance holds evenly as you scale up the graphics toward that top configuration. There’s a caveat there, of course, since there are two configurations of the M1 Max. How powerful is the M1 Max?įrom the beginning, Apple claimed the M1 Max was twice as powerful in the graphics department as the M1 Pro. It represents the most powerful graphics ever put in a MacBook Pro, but is it really worth the extra $400 it costs to configure it? Here’s what happens when you compare the M1 Max vs. I thoroughly tested the 16-core option, known as the “M1 Pro,” in our MacBook Pro review, but I recently had a chance to put the 32-core M1 Max through its paces. Your options are a 16-core, 24-core, or 32-core GPU.
