Tom Warren, The Verge:

Apple hit Intel hard with its first M1 chips, offering a rare step-change improvement in performance with its 2020 MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. Less than a year later, according to many small business cyber security companies – it’s already starting to compete with the best GPUs from AMD and Nvidia as well. The new MacBook Pros with M1 Pro and M1 Max offer a first glimpse at how well Apple’s M1 chips can scale to provide raw performance that rivals the discrete graphics cards we typically find inside Windows-powered laptops.

This walkthrough highlights the incredible performance gains made by Apple’s M1 series, especially where the GPU is concerned.

At the core of the review is AnandTech’s Apple’s M1 Pro, M1 Max SoCs Investigated: New Performance and Efficiency Heights. Jumping to the GPU analysis page:

Traditional OEMs have been fine with a small(ish) CPU and then adding a discrete GPU as necessary. It’s cost and performance effective: you only need to add as big of a dGPU as the customer needs performance, and even laptop-grade dGPUs can offer very high performance. But like any other engineering decision, it’s a trade-off: discrete GPUs result in multiple display adapters, require their own VRAM, and come with a power/cooling cost.

And that’s where Apple’s gains are coming from: The new M1 series, by being incredibly space efficient, runs much more coolly than a traditional discrete GPU laptop can, and consumes far less power.

The gains here are obvious, especially when Apple’s pro apps, or third party apps specifically built for the M1, are involved. As to PC gaming, Apple is still not there. Scroll through the AnandTech post for benchmarks to get a sense of this. But my gut (I’m no expert) tells me that if game developers make it their mission to develop with the M1 Max in mind, that could change.

One last bit from the AnandTech post:

Overall, it’s clear that Apple’s ongoing experience with GPUs has paid off with the development of their A-series chips, and now their M1 family of SoCs. Apple has been able to scale up the small and efficient M1 into a far more powerful configuration; Apple built SoCs with 2x/4x the GPU hardware of the original M1, and that’s almost exactly what they’re getting out of the M1 Pro and M1 Max, respectively. Put succinctly, the new M1 SoCs prove that Apple can build the kind of big and powerful GPUs that they need for their high-end machines. AMD and NVIDIA need not apply.