Apple has undoubtedly come a long way since the tech giant introduced its groundbreaking M1 MacBook Pro in 2020. With successive M2 and M3 releases – and the recently announced M4 – Apple has achieved impressive performance improvements with each generation. But how do these modern Macs compare to traditional PC hardware?
PC manufacturer Puget Systems last compared Macs to PCs four years ago and wanted to see how things have changed. This was done by comparing the top-end M3 Max MacBook Pro and Apple M2 Ultra Studio against an Intel Desktop PC, AMD Desktop, AMD Workstation (with and without dual GPU) and its own 17-inch Puget Mobile laptop.
Comparing PCs and Apple Macs is like comparing oranges to, well, apples. Macs on Apple’s silicon use Arm-based architecture instead of x86 and use a SoC design that tightly integrates the CPU, GPU, RAM and VRAM. This arrangement allows MacBooks to have larger memory pools for the GPU, but smaller for the CPU, and while the RAM is faster for the CPU, it is slower for the GPU compared to PCs.
PCs win (usually)!
Puget compared models with similar costs, but also included some high-end PC builds to show how far it’s possible to push a modern desktop.
You can check out the full results and benchmarks on Puget’s site, but in summary the company found that the latest M3 Max MacBook Pro generally excels at Photoshop and After Effects, but falls short at Premiere Pro, especially in the area of Multi- Frame Rendering, where PCs gain the upper hand. It.
In DaVinci Resolve, Macs lag behind, especially in GPU effects and AI features, while PCs perform significantly better. CPU rendering is dominated by PCs, with AMD’s Threadripper PRO giving a significant lead. In terms of GPU rendering, Apple lags behind Nvidia RTX GPUs (unsurprisingly), making PCs a better option for high-performance rendering tasks.
However, Puget ends his comparison on a positive note for Apple, saying: “We are very impressed with the performance that Apple is able 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 compete with a desktop workstation is an achievement.”
