You may have seen that Apple is releasing some new MacBooks next week. Pre-orders are already live for M5 MacBooks featuring upgraded M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. The latter is Apple’s new flagship processor, and benchmarks for this chip have started to surface online – so how does the M5 Max size up versus its predecessors?

The M5 Max is available in the latest MacBook Pro 16-inch and 14-inch models, and it’s already delivering more than 10% better multi-core performance, according to early benchmarks. The flagship laptops will be widely available on March 11, just one week after Apple launched pre-orders. We compare the M5 Max to the standard M5 and the last-gen M4 Max.

Apple M5 Max versus the standard M5 & last-gen M4 Max

Early results are starting to show up on Geekbench, one of the go-to sites for hardware benchmarks. The site hosts a leaderboard for Mac benchmarks, making it easy to compare older chips with early M5 Max results ahead of launch. Always keep in mind that, since the M5 Max is still unreleased, you should take the results with a pinch of salt – but these numbers are a good reference for now. The tests below are sourced from Geekbench 6 tests, unless stated otherwise.

Since the Apple M4 Max is also available in the Mac Studio desktop, we’ve included those results (though the difference is often negligible). Regardless, for a more direct comparison, let’s focus on the MacBook Pro versus the new M5 Max. Early benchmarks for the code-named Mac17,7 (single/multi-core, OpenCL, Metal) should correspond to the new 16-inch MacBook Pro.

As such, the numbers suggest single-core performance is up about 9%, and multi-core is up by 13.7%. Results for Metal, Apple’s graphics API, reveal an impressive 24.3% uplift compared to the M4 Max. As you can see, the higher CPU and GPU core count in the Max chips allows them to enjoy significantly better performance than the base M5 chip in multi-core and graphics benchmarks. The M5 Max offers up to a 40-core GPU, which is four times as much as the standard M5.

We also have an OpenCL benchmark for the new Mac17,7 SKU, albeit using the older Geekbench 4 standard, so it’s safer to leave that as an anomaly for now, given the supposed uplift of nearly 150%. Apple positions the new M5 Pro and M5 Chips as high-end solutions for productivity, but gaming performance isn’t lacking, either. The Pro, in particular, is highlighted as having “Up to 1.6x faster gaming performance with ray tracing” in titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 compared to the MacBook Pro with M4 Pro.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.