I'm wary of synthetic benchmarks. Are they representative of anything meaningful? Are they gamed? It's why people tend to look for real-world performance. For G

I'm wary of synthetic benchmarks. Are they representative of anything meaningful? Are they gamed? It's why people tend to look for real-world performance. For GPUs this often means games. This system too can be gamed (eg drivers silently optimizing for performance). Some games will also favour a particular architecture. Taken in totality you tend to get a good big picture view. Such real-world benchmarks are thin on the ground for the M1 Ultra thus far and are clouded by things like programs and drivers not being optimized and/or translation layers. This will improve over time. But I've seen a couple of game benchmarks for the M1 Ultra that seem to show it's >50% of the FPS of the 3090. That's honestly astounding. I'm still confused by the power draw of the M1 Ultra. It's claimed to be 60W but the Mac Studio seems to draw >300W so what's the reality? But if a CPU/GPU combo does in fact draw 60W (compared to the 350W+ for the 3090 alone and another 100W+ for any likely CPU) and gets over 50% of the performance? That is absolutely huge (if true). This is still a first-generation product. Many expect the M2 later this year. That may bring respectable (but definitely not cutting edge) GPU performance to the Mac Mini. Apple still has a lot of headroom here.