Wait, did the Apple M2 chip just beat AMD at in-game performance?

techradar.com:

Apple has been keen to display how its own in-house silicon copes with running games, but a recent benchmark in which the recently released M2 chip edges out an AMD Ryzen iGPU really puts its determination to enter the gaming market into perspective.

The M2 chip was benchmarked against a variety of processors from both AMD and Intel by popular tech YouTuber HardwareUnboxed(opens in new tab), who found the new addition to the Apple line of SoCs (system-on-a-chip) outperformed the RDNA 2 iGPU featured on the AMD Ryzen 7 6800U CPU by around 10%.

It's worth noting that this specific test involves running Shadow of The Tomb Raider (released back in 2018) at a modest 1200p with SMAA (enhanced subpixel morphological antialiasing) enabled.

It also beat the same processor and the Intel Core i7-1260P in battery life when running a 4K Youtube video playback test, offering 48% more juice than AMD's offerings and a whopping 2.2x increase over Intel, so while the gaming test itself isn’t particularly demanding, it's still incredible to see what the M2 can do with a much lower power budget.

HardwareUnboxed ran many other tests across a wide range of other processors, including those from the 12th Gen, 11th Gen, Ryzen 6000, and Ryzen 5000 lineups, with varied results, so we recommend checking out the full video below if you're especially keen on knowing how the M2 fared. As WCCFTech reports(opens in new tab), the M2 proved to be slower than the Intel Core i7-1260P and the Ryzen 7 6800U in Cinebench R23, while the M2 leads against the same Ryzen processor but loses to the Intel chip in In the Cinebench R23 Single-threaded tests.

The summary across all of the benchmarks is that while some folks are disappointed in the M2’s performance when