Can the M5 MacBook Pro’s boosted graphics challenge PC gaming laptops?

In my review of the M5 MacBook Pro, the laptop’s graphics performance stood out. It offers a 35 percent boost in Metal performance over the M4, which is significant. It’s also good for Apple’s Mac marketing, which, nowadays, includes a bigger effort to promote game performance on the Mac. The M5’s boost will certainly help.

However, when it comes to gaming, the story isn’t how the new Mac performs compared to old ones, but how the Mac performs compared to Windows PCs. So, how does the M5 MacBook Pro compare to gaming laptops?

During my testing of the M5 MacBook Pro, among the tests I ran was the Geekbench 6 OpenCL Compute benchmark. The Compute benchmark is designed to test a computer’s GPU. OpenCL is a platform-agnostic framework, and while it’s not specifically geared for graphics (there’s OpenGL for that), it is designed for parallel computing by GPUs. Below are the OpenCL results of the M5 MacBook Pro, compared to two of PCWorld’s top picks for gaming laptops.

Granted, there are several caveats to this comparison. First, it’s not a pure graphics test, but this is an indicator of the parallel processing ability of each laptop. Second, Apple promotes and prefers that developers use its Metal API, which is designed for direct GPU access and is optimized for performance. In my M5 MacBook Pro review, Geekbench Metal Compute results are presented and highlighted (they’re impressive), but Metal is a Mac-only tech and can only be used to compare between Macs. Third, an argument can be made that framerate data from video games themselves is a better real-world datapoint, but that itself is complicated. The Mac gaming library is notorious for not having current games, and some of the available games use Metal, while others don’t.

Even when you consider the caveats, the M5 MacBook Pro lags behind the Alienware 16X Aurora, a $1,649 laptop with an Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU, and an Acer Nitro V 16 with a list price of $1,099, which comes with an Nvidia RTX 4060 GPU. The M5 MacBook Pro’s Metal score was 76963, which closes the gap, but the PCs still have an advantage. (One note from a Geekbench 5 support document, which states, “While it is possible to compare scores across APIs (e.g., a OpenCL score with a Metal score) it is important to keep in mind that due to the nature of Compute APIs, the performance difference can be due to more than differences in the underlying hardware (e.g., the GPU driver can have a huge impact on performance).”)

So, the Mac’s GPU keeps getting better, but still has some ways to go. One thing to keep in mind is that Apple still has to release the M4 Max and M4 Pro chips, which will almost certainly bring the GPU performance even closer to the PC GPUs–but that boost also comes at a significant cost.