At the beginning of the new year, Apple's next-generation high-end self-developed chip M5 series has quietly kicked off. There are signs that the flagship M5 Max is expected to equal or even surpass Nvidia's notebook RTX 5070 Ti in terms of gaming performance, and will bring a frame rate increase of more than 50% compared to the previous generation M4 Max.
It is reported that a Reddit user summarized the performance of multiple NVIDIA desktop and laptop GPUs with Apple M4 Max and the speculated M5 Max in games. The comparison data mainly came from Notebookcheck, and combined with the previous Apple Silicon generation performance increase, to make an estimate for the yet-to-be-released M5 Max. In the two games "Cyberpunk 2077" and "Assassin's Creed: Shadow", the test resolution was 1080p, and the image quality was set to the highest quality preset to simulate the real gaming experience in high-load scenarios.
Under the highest image quality setting of 1080p in "Cyberpunk 2077", the M5 Max's estimated frame rate is 125 frames, which is about 47% higher than the M4 Max's 85 frames. It is also slightly higher than the 120 frames of the notebook RTX 5070 Ti, and about 12.6% higher than the 111 frames of the desktop RTX 5060; and the same as the desktop RTX 4070's. Compared with 126 frames, it is only less than 1% behind. In "Assassin's Creed: Shadows", the M5 Max is estimated to be 51 frames, which is also about 54.5% higher than the M4 Max's 33 frames, ahead of the desktop RTX 5060's 43 frames, but slightly worse than the notebook RTX 5070 Ti's 53 frames and the desktop RTX 4070's 55 frames.
Judging from the comparison results, in the 1080p high-definition scene, the M5 Max has a considerable jump compared to the M4 Max. These two 3A masterpieces alone have shown the potential to be close to or even comparable to mainstream desktop independent graphics. This also means that if Apple maintains a similar GPU core size on the M5 Max, it can achieve significant generational gains through architectural optimization and frequency improvement. It is currently speculated that Apple may maintain the M4 Max 40-core GPU level and improve the architecture and energy efficiency to fully utilize more GPU cores, thereby achieving gaming performance close to desktop graphics cards on the notebook platform.
However, there are still many unknown variables in this data and it is not enough to draw a final conclusion. The specific number of GPU cores of the M5 Max was not disclosed in the comparison, nor was it stated whether Apple's MetalFX upscaling and frame generation technology was enabled during the test, nor was it confirmed whether high-load special effects such as ray tracing or path tracing were turned on, so the actual experience may be significantly different. In the previous official demonstration of the M4 Max hitting 120 frames in "Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition", the outside world has pointed out that to achieve this frame rate at high image quality, some form of image quality upscaling and frame interpolation technology will almost certainly be needed. This also makes the current speculative data for the M5 Max more cautious.
Taken together, if these estimates are eventually verified by official products, the improvement in gaming performance of M5 Max is expected to further consolidate the competitiveness of Apple's self-developed chips in the high-performance notebook market and put greater pressure on traditional x86 independent graphics notebooks. However, before more real-machine testing and official technical details are disclosed, the outside world still needs to reserve these early comparison results and wait for the answer after the M5 Pro, M5 Max and M5 Ultra are officially launched in the first half of this year.