Unlike Hitman, this Lara Croft epic shows a large performance gap between the M1 Pro and M1 Max, more pronounced at Very High. The next title, Rise of the Tomb Raider, is even more demanding than Hitman.
The Hitman results also show that there’s something else besides the GPU power limiting performance, since the M1 Pro and the M1 Max have wildly different GPU capabilities but perform within a few frames per second of each other on this game, and indeed, lowering the graphical preset to Low didn't increase frame rates by much. Surprisingly, the Macs run neck-and-neck with the Razer RTX 3070 system at Ultra! Sure, Hitman is an older title, but there still aren’t many non-gaming laptops made in 2021 that can average more than 100 frames per second (fps) on its in-game benchmark, and fewer still that can maintain that performance when you turn the detail settings up to Ultra. From the get-go, it’s clear that the new MacBook Pros are both theoretically capable of enjoyable experiences even when running truly taxing games. Let's start with the real-world games.įirst up: the 2016 edition of Hitman. Use the drop-down menu to cycle through all of the games and simulations as we explain them. Without further ado, here are the results of our tests. Game Testing: A Look at M1 Pro and M1 Max Frame Rates As it turns out, that isn’t always the case. With twice the number of graphics cores and memory in our sample M1 Max machine, it stands to reason that however good these two chips might be at rendering games, the M1 Max would be the better of the two by far.
The M1 Pro in the 14-inch laptop has 16 graphics cores and 32GB of memory shared between the CPU and GPU, while the M1 Max in the 16-inch MacBook Pro has 32 graphics cores and 64GB of shared memory. Both of our test units have the upgraded configurations of each CPU. The M1 Pro and M1 Max processors both have high-end and low-end configurations, and that affects the number of GPU cores. The slightly fewer pixels being pushed on the Razer machine (the Apple machines are pushing around 11% more at 1,920 by 1,200) will give it a modest advantage.īefore we get to the results, some words about the actual graphics hardware in the new MacBook Pro laptops.
Note that because the 1,920 by 1,200 resolution was not available on this Windows machine, we ran the games at a close equivalent of 1080p (1,920 by 1,080). This Core i7-based system represents a state-of-the-art high-end Windows gaming laptop for comparison. We also ran a subset of these games and synthetic tests on a GeForce RTX 3070-equipped gaming laptop we are in the process of reviewing: the Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition. (Testing at each laptop's native resolution would have rendered the scores non-comparable.) All games were run at a full-HD-equivalent resolution (1,920 by 1,200 pixels) because the two new MacBook Pros have differing native display resolutions. The last game has far lesser demands on a computer’s graphics power than the rest of the lot, so we used its built-in benchmark for simulating how long it takes the AI to complete a turn, for a different perspective on game performance. We also tested out a Total War game ( Total War: Warhammer II (Opens in a new window)), the Hitman reboot (Opens in a new window) from 2016, and Sid Meier’s Civilization VI (Opens in a new window). Among the most graphics-intensive Mac titles in our benchmark suite are the Tomb Raider series, from which we ran the built-in benchmarks in Rise of the Tomb Raider (Opens in a new window) and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Opens in a new window). Many of the AAA titles compatible with Macs come from British developer Feral Interactive (Opens in a new window), which partners with studios to bring their creations to platforms other than Windows. So we ran a handful of graphics-intensive games (and a few less-demanding titles) released in the past few years on both the M1 Pro-equipped 14-inch MacBook Pro and the M1 Max-equipped 16-inch MacBook Pro to see what they are capable of.