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iCame, iSaw, iConquered: With its new M5 chip, the Apple MacBook Pro is now a gaming PC. Just, y'know, without the games

Apple 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 processor inside it
(Image credit: Future)

As my muscular colleague Jeremy pointed out already, Apple has been making gains. It's doubled the single-core performance of its in-house chips, the M-series, in five years, and while the predicted single-core score in Geekbench 6 for the new M5 was 4100 (based on the M5 iPad Pro), in my actual testing of a 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro that figure is 4310.

You know what else scores 4310 points in that test? Nothing. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D? 3332. The Core i9 14900KS? 3238. The Core Ultra 9 285K? 3214. When Apple claimed the ARM-based M5 had the best single-core performance in the world, it sure meant it.

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I tried it out already with an extraordinarily expensive Mac Studio containing a 16-core M4 Max CPU with a 40-core GPU, but what I'm attempting to play games with here is a standard M5 MacBook Pro. It's got a few upgrades—32 GB of RAM and a 4 TB SSD—but nothing that actually increases its ability to process graphics. It's a lovely laptop to use, with what Apple calls a Liquid Retina XDR screen (something the rest of us would call an IPS with mini-LED backlighting). It has a 120 Hz max refresh rate, a resolution of 3024 x 1964, and can display almost the whole DCI-P3 wide-colour gamut for a vibrant image.

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When it comes to graphics, Apple is claiming another 30% uplift over M4 in general, and 45% when you look specifically at ray-tracing. In the demanding Cinebench 2024 test, which is based on the Cinema4D 3D animation package, the M5's GPU scores about the same as an RTX 4050.

So, what games can we think of that feature ray-tracing? As it happens, Cyberpunk 2077 is now available on Mac, and Apple has been using it in its product demonstrations to show off its new chips. As an integral part of the PCG benchmark suite, the familiar run through Night City at Ray Tracing Ultra settings is a good place to start.

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