Apple's newest M3 processors landed in late 2023, with the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max arriving in the latest 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models. The newest Apple silicon comes with several firsts, from the 3-nanometer manufacturing process that crams billions of transistors onto the chip die to a revamped GPU that introduces hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading. That's all before we've even discussed the 40 GPU cores or 192GB of memory that the top versions support. It's a major upgrade to the visual capabilities of Apple silicon.
Even more exciting? Apple didn't trickle these upgrades out over time, but announced and launched the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max simultaneously, with new MacBook Pro models available with the entire M3 range of chips.
We've already reviewed the individual MacBooks (and iMac) that arrived with M3, but we wanted to take a closer look at Apple's advancements in graphics. Check out our reviews of those below, if you haven't already seen them:
Now, let's dive deep into Apple's upgrades with graphics and gaming on M3 and whether they make Mac a better place to play games.
All About M3 Graphics
Apple unveiled the new M3 chips at the end of October 2023 and launched them immediately in the latest MacBook Pro laptops and the iMac desktop. After our initial testing and reviews, I decided to run some additional tests to see what makes the new GPUs tick and find out how they compare with the previous M2 chips for graphics performance from more than a glance.
But first, I wanted to learn more about the new features, so I went straight to the source: Apple. In a conversation with Apple's Doug Brooks and Laura Metz from the Mac product marketing team, I gained plenty of deeper insight into the new GPU features and how they fit into the latest Mac lineup.
Doug Brooks was quick to give us the highlights. "We introduced a completely new GPU architecture that's faster and more efficient," says Brooks, "and it added these new features, like dynamic caching, new rendering features, hardware accelerated ray tracing, and hardware accelerated mesh shading."
The new ray tracing and mesh shading tools mean more realistic light, shadows, and even reflections in games, but the benefits aren't restricted to gaming. They also benefit any other rendering task, whether it's modeling a scene for computer animation, or adding realism to a rendered engineering part.
Brooks also clarified one common point of confusion: "And just to be clear, because some people have asked, these features are implemented in hardware, in the silicon itself. This isn't a software strategy. So, this is fundamental to the new hardware of these chips and fundamental to the new GPU design."
The other major change to Apple's graphics processing is the introduction of dynamic caching. Instead of each GPU function using the full allotment of memory, regardless of how much memory that function needs, the new dynamic approach tailors memory allotment to the function. That frees up memory and makes this information available to developers, so they can apply that unused memory to other GPU-intensive app functions.
"It's an industry first," says Brooks. "And it allows the GPU—in hardware, in real time—to allocate the really valuable on-chip memory, the registers that are used in GPU calculation, and use only the exact amount that's needed. That's versus a traditional approach, which tends to over-allocate for most tasks. This allows us to dramatically increase the average GPU utilization and deliver more performance, especially for the most demanding pro apps and games."
M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max: Features and Specs
I'll save more details about cores and classic CPU aspects for our separate M3 CPU comparison-test article, which we're publishing alongside this one. (You can also check out our general introduction to Apple M3 from the launch date.) Still, let's look at the different specs of each chip, and how these play into the graphics performance.
"... Just to be clear...these features are implemented in hardware, in the silicon itself. This isn't a software strategy...this is fundamental to the new hardware of these chips and fundamental to the new GPU design."
All three M3 processors are made with Apple's new 3nm process, which allows transistors to be packed more densely than ever. The result is not only an increased transistor count, but also an increase to the number of GPU cores, expanded memory bandwidth, and better power efficiency.
The quick rundown of everything updated in the third generation of Apple silicon includes: more processing cores, more GPU cores, a revamped neural engine, higher transistor counts, boosted memory capacity, and a new GPU architecture. The AI and AV processing has received some new features, as well, such as more AI support for all sorts of background processes and new support for AV1 video.
Apple M3: An Expanding Apple Chip Buffet
You'll notice one more subtle development: The lineup of chips actually includes more than one tier for each chip model. You'll now find lower and upper tiers for each, differentiated by core counts. The M3 has an eight-core CPU and two GPU flavors, with the base model including eight cores and a step-up model with 10. Then the M3 Pro starts with 11 CPU cores and 14 GPU cores, but it can step up to 12 CPU cores and 18 cores in the GPU. Finally, the M3 Max has 14- and- 16-core CPUs, and its GPU cores go from 30 to 40, with a big jump in maximum memory support, topping out at 96GB and 128GB, respectively.
The reality is that Apple's processor lineup is wider and more varied than ever before, and that makes our sampling of the current M3 lineup a bit limited. For example, we tested the basic M3 with eight-core GPU in the 24-inch iMac, and tested the higher-level M3 (the one with the 10-core GPU) in the 14-inch MacBook Pro.
Our other 14-inch MacBook Pro review, however, centered on the entry-level M3 Pro, which has 11 CPU cores and 14 GPU cores. We haven't had the opportunity yet to test the M3 Pro with 18-core GPU. On the other end of the spectrum, our review of the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M3 Max is a top-tier model, with a 16-core CPU and 40-core GPU paired with 128GB of memory—a level of memory that not all M3 Max versions will support.
The point to all of this talk of tiers in the M3 family? Our comparisons may be skewed slightly by the variety in hardware that we've tested so far, which doesn't cover every possible M3 configuration. That is not to mention the differences among laptop sizes, cooling systems, and other model-specific differences in performance.
Testing Apple M3: Comparing Performance
Setting aside those caveats, we can still compare what we've got now with what came before. For this closer look at M3's graphics prowess, we compared it primarily with systems from the M2 series, which launched in 2022 with the M2 chip, and then expanded in early 2023 with the addition of the M2 Pro and M2 Max.
We've tried to keep these comparisons as direct as possible, comparing laptops directly where we can. However, the only M2 Pro model we had on hand to test earlier this year was the compact Mac Mini. So add another grain of salt to this well-seasoned benchmark dish.
For this go-around, we've pared down the number of comparisons for readability's sake, tweaking how the benchmark charts are organized, with M3 models up top and M2 models below, increasing from M3 to M3 Pro and then M3 Max as you move down the chart. Hopefully this makes it easier to compare the specific models you're interested in.
Testing Apple M3: Synthetic Graphics Tests
Our testing starts with synthetic graphics tests, the first being 3DMark's Wild Life Extreme subtest. We run this first test in Unlimited mode to accommodate variations in native display resolution. Unlike our usual 3DMark tests, Wild Life runs natively on Apple silicon, letting us compare graphics performance among different Mac systems. The higher the score, the better the overall graphics performance. It's also one of the only tests we haven't run on every model in our comparison, having introduced it to our test lineup only in early 2022. We've been able to pull out a few past models we still have on hand to test them with the new benchmark subtest, but not all. Higher scores indicate better graphics performance.
We also use GFXBench. The version that works with Apple systems uses the chip maker's Metal graphics API and stress-tests both low-level operations like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. However, we value this test primarily for its cross-platform availability, letting us reasonably compare Mac and Windows systems' graphics performance. For this test's results, the more frames per second (fps), the better.
Finally, we've added the Cinebench 2024 GPU test, which focuses on graphics rendering using Maxon's Redshift rendering engine. Cinebench traditionally has been a CPU-only test, but the 2024 edition adds a GPU-accelerated component to the mix. (The GPU test generates a different score from the Cinebench CPU numbers, which we continue to report separately.) This is presented mainly to illustrate the clear differences among the various M3 chips, since we haven't run this test on older M2 models. However, the benchmark requires more than 8GB of memory to successfully conduct the test, so that left the base-level M3 MacBook Pro out of the running.
Basic performance tests showed exactly what we expected, with the newer M3-based MacBook Pro models routinely outperforming the M2-based models from earlier this year. Sometimes, as in 3DMark Wild Life, the margin between the old and new chips would be several thousand points, while GFXBench performance gains were more modest.
Starting with 3DMark Wild Life, we see a pattern that came up several times in this analysis: The basic M3 chip drove a clear lead over M2, and the high-end M3 Max displayed clear gains over the M2 Max. But the middle-tier M3 Pro wasn't a clear winner over M2 Pro. In fact, it routinely fell around 7% to 16% behind the previous M2 model on these tests.
Whether this is due to our specific test configurations (M3 Pro MacBook Pro vs. M2 Pro Mac mini) or the versions of these chips used is unclear. Our M3 Pro is the lower-tier model with 11 CPU cores and a 14-core GPU. Would we see better numbers testing the 12-core M3 Pro with 18-core GPU? Probably, but without actually having one on hand to test, it's hard to guess how different the results would actually be.
Testing Apple M3: Gaming Tests
To see how well the new models deliver on AAA gaming, we started by looking at the built-in benchmark in Rise of the Tomb Raider. In addition to being one of the few Mac-compatible games in the Steam library with a benchmarking tool built-in, it's also one we've been running on Macs the longest, so we have directly comparable data between first- and second-generation Apple silicon in multiple models. (Check out our survey of M2 graphics and gaming to see the evolution from M1.)
We also added two more gaming tests to our normal review test regimen, with Shadow of the Tomb Raider (sequel to Rise of the Tomb Raider) and Total War: Three Kingdoms.
More caveats with the gaming tests: Astute readers may have realized that we're running Steam games for macOS, not Apple Arcade games from Apple's own game store. The reasoning is simple: Apple Arcade doesn't yet have any games we're aware of with built-in benchmarks.
Also notably absent from this round of tests is anything that uses the new hardware-accelerated ray-tracing or mesh shading features. And that explanation is even simpler: Nothing supports those features yet. We'll discuss that in more detail toward the end of this article, but for now, nothing is available to test the new features with. We couldn't test ray-tracing or mesh shading performance for now, but we plan to once it's available.
The good news is that, by and large, gaming is better on Mac than ever before. But that doesn't tell the whole story. Yes, some of this gaming capability has finally made it to M3 and entry-level Macs, but the serious GPU muscle is still reserved for the M3 Pro and M3 Max. Which makes a lot of sense. Current Macs technically run on "integrated graphics" in the sense that they do not have dedicated, separate graphics processing hardware inside, and that the GPU cores share memory with the CPU. But it's a far cry from anything that Intel or AMD are doing on their on-chip CPU graphics. In fact, with the combination of power and memory provided on top models, these are dedicated-GPU-grade systems, and integrated only in the sense that Apple has the CPU and GPU working hand-in-glove from the earliest stages of the design process.
But the move from M2 to M3 isn't a clear win in every gaming test. Yes, the M3 outperformed the M2 in Rise of the Tomb Raider, and the M3 Max put up respectable numbers in every test, but these were small gains, and the M3 Pro continued to puzzle us with lower-than-expected results in spots. When running Total War: Three Kingdoms, the results actually look like they were throttled just below the 60fps threshold at every detail preset, likely an issue with drivers specific to that chip and this game. After all, it was first released in 2019, so optimization isn't expected to be top-notch.
Gaming on Mac With Third Generation Apple Silicon
Of course, now we come to the elephant in the room...er, fab. For all of Apple's advances and newly supported features, the actual number of games that are sold for Mac is dwarfed by the number of games available for Windows PCs. In fact, most of the games Apple has in its own game store, Apple Arcade, are made for iPhone and iPad, not Mac. That's awesome for playing games when you're already all-in on the Apple ecosystem, since it means you can play on your mobile devices, your Apple TV, your MacBook. But for gamers eyeing Apple as a potential switch from PC gaming? It's still a hard sell.
Again no games support hardware-accelerated ray tracing as of this writing, and the titles that will may not excite PC gamers: One, Layers of Fear, from game studio Bloober, was first released in 2016, and will get ray tracing sometime in the future.
In the meantime, PC gamers have already seen two sequels to that game. Cyan Games will bring ray tracing to both Myst and Firmament soon. But Myst came out in 2021...as a remake of the venerable game from 1993. Firmament is a newer game, released in early 2023, but it's not exactly the kind of game that's going to bring hordes of Windows gamers over to Mac.
In fact, the most exciting Apple Arcade inclusions are games like Resident Evil: Village, Death Stranding, and NBA 2K24 Arcade Edition. But only the last is a game from this year. Resident Evil: Village came out for Windows in 2021, and Death Stranding was released in 2019—and it won't make it to Macs until 2024.
The best-case scenario for the games that are in Apple's library is that old games will look better than ever, provided they're available to begin with, and the developer invests the resources into updating these older titles.
It's worth acknowledging that the 2023 Game of the Year, Baldur's Gate 3, was released for Mac just a month after its PC debut, running smoothly at 1080p on the base-level M3 MacBook Pro in our review. So, perhaps, the future will see more current, high-end games come to Macs now that the hardware has proven that it's capable.
Are M3's Graphics Gains Worth an Upgrade?
Apple's Mac gaming fortunes keep turning up as the hardware capabilities of Apple silicon improve and the selection of available games slowly expands. Unfortunately, it hasn't reached the point where anyone would look at their gaming laptop and seriously consider ditching it for a similarly potent MacBook Pro. Until that level of game support is provided, it's hard to recommend Macs for gaming, even as we praise the improved graphics performance and slowly growing games library.
For now, gaming capability is still a welcome extra for Mac users. Apple's not yet playing at the level of established platforms in the computer gaming industry...but it could.
But gaming is only one side of the graphics coin, and Apple has the other on lock. If you're a graphics professional editing video, animating content, or rendering complex designs, the top MacBook Pro models easily compete with the best Windows workstation laptops. Whether it's entertainment or STEM applications, the latest M3 Pro- and M3 Max-powered MacBooks can handle your toughest visual workflows.
If you need genuinely powerful graphical computing, Apple's latest MacBook Pro models and the high-end Apple silicon inside are a smart choice. If you're looking at buying a Mac for games, while M3 can certainly handle current popular hits like Baldur's Gate 3, macOS still lacks the unfettered access to A-list computer games that gamers want. Regardless, Apple's Mac hardware is clearly ready for the time, when and if, its software support catches up.
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