Transcription
Are Macs finally powerful enough that they can now compete with powerful PC systems, or are they just a big shiny waste of money? Well, that is kind of what I wanted to find out in this video.
And this is my M3 Ultra Mac Studio. It has a 28 core CPU, 60 core GPU, 96 GB of unified memory, and I paid extra for the 2 TB SSD upgrade. So, in total, it cost me around $4,400 before taxes.
For my PC, here it is on PC Part Picker at the time I bought it, which was roughly June 2025. So I did get some really good end-of-financial-year discounts. Now, most of my budget went into the CPU, which is the Ryzen 9 99950X3D, and of course, the GPU, which is the Asus Tough RTX 5090. After taxes and a few miscellaneous items like additional fans and thermal paste, etc., I came out to almost exactly the same price as the Mac Studio.
And in this video, I don't want to do a, you know, full-on comprehensive comparison where I compare every single difference in workflow. Uh, I just want to focus on a few things. For example, how the CPUs or the GPUs compare and their performance, if gaming on a Mac is maybe finally catching up to the PC, and some other little observations that I've noticed.
First up, I was really curious about how the CPU performance compared. Now, there are obviously quite a few differences between the M3 Ultra and the 9950X3D. Uh, you know, things like core count, frequency, uh, one being ARM-based versus x86. But all that really matters at the end of the day is the performance. And surprisingly, the M3 Ultra performed better when it came to typical multi-core and single-core processors.
But pure performance is not the whole picture. So, I wanted to take a look at efficiency as well. Now, I maxed out both CPUs at 100% utilization doing a CPU-intensive workload like encoding in Handbrake. The AMD CPU was pulling roughly 200W versus the M3 Ultra, which was around 76W. So, looking at performance from a performance-per-watt perspective, again, the M3 Ultra comes out ahead.
But to be fair, these are, you know, desktop systems at the end of the day. They're not laptops. So, I think efficiency is less important. And at this price range and performance level, I doubt many people are worried about their power bill. Uh, unless, of course, you know, maybe you have 10 of these big things in a room for a whole team of video editors or something. Note that the AMD CPU is not overclocked, and I haven't really changed much of the default BIOS settings apart from turning on Expo and some minor fan curve tweaks.
Taking a look at creative workflows, for example, anything involving the Adobe apps. This is where Apple usually performs strongly, but it is not enough to beat out the PC. So, despite the M3 Ultra having, you know, faster single-core performance, which typically impacts workflows that mostly rely on individual cores, like Photoshop, for example, the 9950X3D still beats it. That being said, I use Photoshop a lot, and I didn't notice any major performance differences in real life.
During tasks like video editing, overall, they were roughly equal. Uh, but again, delving in deeper, a lot of this is due to the M3 Ultra's built-in hardware encoders and decoders doing a lot of the heavy lifting during timeline playback and, of course, rendering. Now, I use DaVinci Resolve frequently, and one thing that really hammers the M3 Ultra is real-time playback of footage that I've applied temporal noise reduction to. And when moving to the PC, I almost doubled the amount of frames per second I was getting. Same with anything involving GPU effects. The RTX 5090 is just a beast.
Moving to After Effects, it looks like the M3 Ultra is roughly half as powerful, but this is a little misleading because the M3 Ultra is actually slightly better in some areas like tracking and anything involving 2D. But as soon as I moved into anything involving 3D, the PC just destroyed the Mac, and it wasn't even close. And because After Effects is heavily skewed towards those 3D tasks, that has a big impact on the overall comparison. And note that while the M3 Ultra has 96GB of unified memory or RAM, my PC only has 64GB. So, ideally, I would have more than that if I was using After Effects heavily.
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So, moving into 3D workflows, there is just no comparison here. And in all honesty, there hasn't been for pretty much the entire time Apple Silicon has existed. Now, Nvidia GPUs with all the ray tracing and CUDA cores and just, you know, sheer amount of wattage that's pumped into them, plus all of the existing software support for them, uh, Apple just got left behind a long time ago.
That being said, I've been comparing Nvidia GPUs to Apple Silicon GPUs for a few years now, and I have noticed that the 3D performance gap between the two is closing. So, back in, I think, early 2022, uh, I did a similar video to this one, and the PC was roughly five times more powerful than the Mac. Versus now, in late 2025, uh, that has actually reduced to roughly 2.5 times faster. Now, a lot of that is going to be due to ray tracing being introduced on Apple Silicon. Uh, but still, I think the PC is going to be vastly superior here for at least the foreseeable future.
This includes gaming, too. I remember at the same time ray tracing was announced, Apple had this, you know, big exciting media release where they featured a macOS optimized version of Resident Evil and, you know, all these other games in the pipeline for macOS. And I did think for just a second, maybe one day gaming on a Mac might finally get some attention. Fast forward to today, uh, yeah, no, I think Apple just completely gave up on it.
Right now, most games use APIs like OpenGL, Vulkan, or, you know, DirectX12. Uh, none of which Apple supports natively. Apple actually uses an API called Metal, which is actually really quite good. Uh, when implemented correctly, its performance is a little bit more comparable to DirectX12. The problem, though, is that game developers currently have almost zero motivation to support or develop games for Apple Silicon because Windows is still by far the most popular platform for PC gaming.
Notable mention here is Assassin's Creed Shadows. Uh, it was actually supposedly optimized for macOS using the Metal API, but its release was a complete dumpster fire. But I thought it would be an interesting comparison against the PC because even though it's not the best running and optimized game on either system, to be fair, uh, it is still a recent macOS release and it shares a lot of similarities to the PC version. So, I ran the Assassin's Creed Shadows benchmark on both systems with all settings the same, but of course, using MetalFX as the upscaler for the Mac and DLSS for the PC. And yeah, the PC was significantly better. Not only that, but there is just less screen tearing and dropped frames overall. Uh, even if I drop the settings down on the Mac to pump up the FPS.
Now, don't get me wrong, you can still do some gaming on the Mac. You know, there are some games that are fully optimized and actually run really well, but the overall gaming experience is just so vastly better on the PC that it's just not really comparable.
So, moving on to some areas where the Mac performs really well. Firstly, and most obviously, the physical size. I mean, look at this thing. It is tiny. Uh, the M3 Ultra Mac Studio is just super small. You know, it fits anywhere on my desk and takes up almost no room. In comparison, you know, PC sizing obviously does vary. Uh, I'm currently using a mid-tower ATX case, the H6 Flow from NZXT, and it is absolutely huge in comparison. Now, my previous Intel and RTX 3090 build was a small form factor PC in a smaller NR200P case from Cooler Master, but SFF cases are more difficult to build in, uh, and are still much bigger than the Mac Studio.
Fan noise is another area where the Mac is just in a class of its own. Uh, I don't think I've ever heard the fan. It's dead silent. Even under full load, it only goes up to about a thousand RPM versus the PC, which is much louder and very distracting unless I'm wearing closed-back headphones. Here is a noise sample. When idling, the PC is of course much quieter, but still significantly louder than the Mac, even when I tweak the fan curves to make it as silent as possible. And, you know, if there's a reason why the PC is not currently on right now, so I can show off my really cool, you know, RGB and all that kind of stuff, it's because this microphone here is just going to pick up all of that really loud fan noise and mess up the audio.
And then, of course, which I've already briefly touched on. So, I loaded up both systems with a really demanding task to stress both the CPU and the GPU, but mostly the GPU, and the PC was sucking up almost 1,000W versus the Mac, which was much less power-hungry. I also checked power draw and both systems were idling. Uh, the PC used about 240W versus about 33W on the Mac. But again, desktop systems, not a portable laptop. So, power draw and efficiency is less relevant.
So, overall, I guess I wasn't really surprised by the results in this video. You know, both systems have their pros and cons, and the differences between them haven't really changed that much in the last couple of years. You know, Mac, uh, super power-efficient and quiet, comparable or occasionally better performance in some specific areas, talking about Apple Silicon specifically here, by the way. Uh, the PC, you know, shreds the Mac in anything 3D-related, and I can replace or upgrade individual components as well, which is really nice.
Now, I personally use both. Uh, I actually prefer using my Mac and macOS for my 9-to-5 work stuff and just, you know, everyday tasks, but I'm also a gamer, and you just can't beat a beefy PC system when it comes to that. Especially the RTX 5090. It is absolutely insane when it comes to performance. In fact, I did a video on a 4K ultrawide monitor from LG that also blew me out of the water, and I use this PC to run it in that video. So, if you want to check that out, click the link. I'll put it up here or down in the description. And thanks for watching.