Apple's flagship M4 Ultra expected to beat RTX 4090 in OpenGL and Vulkan APIs, not everywhere

Apple's new M4 Ultra processor will reportedly come with double the GPU cores that the M4 Max features -- up to 80 GPU cores in total -- and in estimated benchmarks, will beat NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card.

In some estimated benchmarks, Yadim Yuryev from YouTube channel Max Tech, the Apple M4 Ultra processor will feature a Geekbench 6 compute score of 333,000. This is compared to the 192,812 that the Apple M4 Max spits out, with Yuryev saying that the "GPU scaling from the leaked M4 Pro score to the M4 Max chip is 78 percent higher performance".

Yuryev played it safe accounting for Apple to hit just 70% scaling for the M4 Ultra over the M4 Max, with a maximum expectation of seeing 385,624 points, while in comparison the RTX 4090 hits 317,162 points and a Vulkan score of 262,907. If Apple does indeed hit a home run with scaling on the M4 Ultra, it will top the RTX 4090 in this test at least, but not everything across the board.

• Read more: Apple M4 Ultra should feature up to 32-core CPU, up to 80-core GPU to run Cyberpunk 2077

The new Apple M4 family of chips all feature 16GB of unified memory across the board, with the M4 Pro and M4 Max supporting more memory (M4 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory).

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Apple's new M4 Ultra is expected with a much larger 32-core CPU, and double the GPU power with an 80-core GPU, and we should expect to see up to 256GB of unified memory. This is an exact doubling of the M4 Max specs, as Apple effectively combines two M4 Max chips together to make the M4 Ultra.

Apple M4 family of processors:

• Apple M4: 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, up to 16GB unified memory
• Apple M4 Pro: 14-core CPU, 20-core GPU, up to 64GB unified memory
• Apple M4 Max: 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, up to 128GB unified memory
• Apple M4 Ultra: 32-core CPU, 80-core GPU, up to 256GB unified memory

Apple is expected to launch its new M4 Ultra processor in 2025 inside of its new Mac Pro and Mac Studio systems.