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by bigyabai 144 days ago
It's because of the hardware. For mobile Apple is competitive, for desktop applications they don't even show up on most benchmarks next to AMD/Nvidia hardware.

For example, you have to scroll beneath last-gen laptop GPUs before you can find any Apple hardware on the OpenCL charts: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
1 comments
Miraste 144 days ago
That's also because of software. Apple deprecated OpenCL in MacOS eight years ago. In productivity software with solid Metal implementations, like Blender, the M4 Max is on par with the top of Nvidia's (mobile) 5xxx line, except with much more VRAM.
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bigyabai 144 days ago
No software fix exists, Apple's GPUs are architecturally limited to raster efficiency (and now, matmul ops). It's frankly bewildering that a raster-optimized SOC struggles to decisively outperform a tensor-optimized CUDA system in 2026.
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Miraste 144 days ago
I get the feeling you had a specific use case that didn't work well with Apple GPUs? I'd be curious what it was. The architecture does have some unusual limitations.

By software problem, though, I meant referencing OpenCL benchmarks. No one in 2026 should be using OpenCL on macOS at all, and the benchmarks aren’t representative of the hardware.

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