M5 Max tops 5090 in Blender
New benchmarking shows the M5 Max outpacing an NVIDIA 5090 in Blender 5.1 workloads — another datapoint for Apple’s hardware‑software co‑design edge in creative and ML‑adjacent tasks. The result reinforces why internal teams keep prioritizing Metal and optimized runtimes for on‑device workloads. (x.com)
The result was published as a Blender Open Data submission and amplified on X by @jimmyjames_tech. (t.co) The tested machine matched Apple’s highest M5 Max configuration: an 18‑core CPU with a 40‑core GPU and up to 128 GB of unified memory with 614 GB/s memory bandwidth per Apple’s tech specs. (apple.com) Blender 5.1’s release notes call out shader‑compile speedups of roughly 25–50% on the Barbershop scene and texture‑memory savings of about 30–40%, changes that specifically improve results for Metal and other modern backends. (cgchannel.com) By contrast, the Blender Open Data medians for the 5.0 dataset showed the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 at a median score of 14,247.62 and the Apple M5 Max (40 cores) at 7,136.10, illustrating how a renderer/backend update can materially shift comparative standings. (opendata.blender.org) Independent testing notes the 40‑core M5 Max GPU drawing up to about 72 W under load, a sustained power envelope reviewers use when comparing the M5 Max’s efficiency against high‑power laptop RTX 5090 SKUs. (notebookcheck.net) Hands‑on reviews from Tom’s Hardware and PCMag highlight the M5 Max’s 40‑core GPU and large unified memory as reasons it performs strongly on creative and local AI workloads in real workflows. (tomshardware.com)
