NerdBench Full

Little benchmark application for Apple Silicon and Metal/Vulkan.

NerdBench puts your Mac's GPU and CPU through real rendering and compute work – ray tracing, path tracing, rasterization and matrix maths – on Metal, Vulkan and the CPU, so you can compare them side by side and see where the performance comes from.

THE TESTS

Compute • SGEMM – single-precision matrix multiply, in GFLOP/s • Matrix Transform 4×4 and Matrix Chain 4×4 – the vertex and hierarchy maths behind every 3D engine • Vector Math ALU – normalize, dot, cross, reflect and FMA at full load • Memory Bandwidth – streaming reads and writes over a large buffer, in GB/s • Parallel Reduction – tree reduction through threadgroup memory

Rasterization • A textured, lit 3D scene of more than 134,000 triangles, at up to 3840×2160 • Fillrate / Overdraw – heavy blended overdraw, in GPix/s

Ray tracing and path tracing • Each in two versions: software BVH traversal that runs on all three backends, and Metal ray tracing with acceleration structures refitted every frame, using the dedicated ray tracing hardware on M3 and later • The path tracer computes Monte Carlo global illumination: diffuse bounces, GGX metals, clear and frosted glass with refraction, emissive surfaces and sky light. There is no denoiser – every sample is really traced.

THE SCENE

A detailed 1990s desktop computer stands in a mirrored room. Three colored lights orbit it while twenty-five glass, plastic, metal and copper objects drift and spin the other way, and the camera circles the room. Turn the animation off and the path tracer refines a still image sample by sample, right in front of you.

THREE BACKENDS, ONE WORKLOAD

• Metal – the Mac's native graphics API • Vulkan – through MoltenVK, to compare a portable API with Metal on the same GPU • CPU – multithreaded NEON code with a software rasteriser and the same ray and path tracers, on as many cores as you choose

All three share the same algorithms, shading and scoring, so a result on one compares directly with the others. Every test runs on every backend, except the two that need Metal ray tracing.

HONEST NUMBERS

Discovery signals