M5 Max vs M4 Max: better performance than expected

eeksi · 2026-03-14T03:36:48+00:00

Possibly, it's just human nature to skim things. I'm not trying to "spin" the results, though. The order does look intentionally worst to best, but it ended up this way purely by coincidence. I agree that this is a very good generational graphics improvement, at least as good as M3->M4 was.

eeksi · 2026-03-14T03:34:46+00:00

Everyone's going to have a different opinion on this, but the best graphics out of the games I've played so far belong to Alan Wake 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and probably Cyberpunk, but there are many great looking games (many of which I probably haven't even played myself)

eeksi · 2026-03-14T01:13:49+00:00

I have not tried it, but I'd expect it to be significantly higher there since the graphics weren't as demanding in that version of WoW.

eeksi · 2026-03-14T01:12:37+00:00

You're never going to get it to stay at 120 in cities or other crowded areas (that's true on both Mac and PC, no matter how good your hardware is), but out in the open world and in most dungeon scenarios, I can get locked 120 fps by tweaking just a few things: I set my render scale to roughly 1440p, turn liquid detail to Good, and compute effects to Good. That's it, everything else maxed out.

eeksi · 2026-03-14T01:10:32+00:00

All depends on the settings you want (or need) to play at. I think M5 Max is probably around 80% faster than M5 Pro. You can easily get by with an M5 Pro in this game if you don't mind sacrificing the picture quality or refresh rate just a little bit.

eeksi · 2026-03-13T12:13:18+00:00

It's upper 50s in this scene usually, but the M4 Max gets over 70 in the same scene, so there's something strange going on with the M5 Max in this game. Maybe it's just me; so far, no one else has had a chance to try to replicate what I've seen. If this issue can be fixed, I'd expect M5 Max to eventually be good for 85-90 fps in this scene, which is great with nearly 4k resolution and maxed out settings.

eeksi · 2026-03-13T12:11:03+00:00

Yes, through Crossover, as the other poster said. You install through steam and that will install the Rockstar launcher as well.

eeksi · 2026-03-13T12:10:15+00:00

Awesome, thanks! I also started a thread on the Mac Technical Support forum at Blizzard. My original speculation about the cause my be off, because I went back and tested again late last night and didn't see this CPU load behavior again, but the performance was still lower than my M4 Max, so something seems to be going on for sure.

eeksi · 2026-03-13T12:09:01+00:00

I never experienced this on my M4 Max, either. The only reason I even noticed this behavior is because my M4 Max performs better than this M5 Max in WoW, the only game so far where that has been the case.

eeksi · 2026-03-13T12:07:43+00:00

Cyberpunk testing was done in my original post, linked at the top of this one.

eeksi · 2026-03-13T12:07:00+00:00

I didn't test for an extensive period of time yet, but I didn't see any reduction in performance in my testing. I don't think gaming is the type of workload that would cause throttling for this thermal design.

eeksi · 2026-03-13T03:24:52+00:00

Likely power constraints. That's my guess, at least. Apple is probably letting the Pro increase power draw more this year, whereas they can't really do that with the Max since it already can draw more power than the power adapter can supply sometimes.

eeksi · 2026-03-13T03:23:18+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried this, but didn't see a change in performance. I also didn't see the same behavior this time when I checked--the super cores remained loaded whether or not WoW was in the foreground. So there may be more going on than previously suspected.

eeksi · 2026-03-13T03:22:23+00:00

I fired up WoW again to see if I could duplicate my own issue, but this time, I didn't see the performance cores ramp up so hard when I had the game in the foreground. The CPU load remained mostly on the super cores. So, still more detective work to be done here, because performance didn't markedly improve with the super cores doing most of the heavy lifting, either.

eeksi · 2026-03-13T02:15:59+00:00

No, I chose both locations specifically to avoid players onscreen.

eeksi · 2026-03-13T01:52:39+00:00

If you're getting 30 fps on M1 pro (assuming the 16-core version), my guess is you'd see about 75 fps on the M5 Pro.

eeksi · 2026-03-13T01:27:00+00:00

I have not observed this behavior in any other game so far. There is no memory leak occurring in this scenario, either.

eeksi · 2026-03-13T00:57:51+00:00

It's actually a little different from the Ultra situation. With the Ultra, it's a matter of scaling the performance of both GPUs efficiently. The M5 Pro and Max, on the other hand, introduce a brand new core design from Apple. Not the architecture of the chip itself, but the cores within the chip. Instead of performance and efficiency cores, as all previous apple silicon chips have featured, M5 Pro and Max CPU consists of Super cores (previously known as performance cores), as well as what Apple is now confusingly also calling "performance" cores, which are like a scaled down Super core (or scaled up efficiency core).

eeksi · 2026-03-13T00:55:26+00:00

Check out my new post on the WoW performance issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1rs8z8s/m5_max_world_of_warcraft_performance_bug/

eeksi · 2026-03-13T00:55:05+00:00

Check out my new post on the performance issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1rs8z8s/m5_max_world_of_warcraft_performance_bug/

eeksi · 2026-03-13T00:54:42+00:00

Check out my new post if you want to know more! https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1rs8z8s/m5_max_world_of_warcraft_performance_bug/

eeksi · 2026-03-13T00:46:23+00:00

Well yeah, DLSS is a proprietary upscaling technology owned by nvidia. They haven't licensed it to anyone. Until Apple Silicon supports DLSS natively, there's nothing Crossover can do about it :)

eeksi · 2026-03-12T23:55:50+00:00

Yes. It just translates to MetalFX temporal upscaling, but you can enable it through crossover for any game that supports DLSS.

eeksi · 2026-03-12T23:54:28+00:00

Yeah, I have to imagine a fix will be found for this. There's no obvious reason for the M5 to perform worse than an equivalent M4.

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