Early benchmarks for the Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra processor reveal that Apple’s new top-of-the-line chip brings a 30% performance increase over its predecessor.
The speed boost is even more dramatic over the original version of the Mac Studio from 2022.
Mac Studio with M3 Ultra performance: 30% faster than M2 Ultra
Apple introduced the 2025 Mac Studio on Wednesday, ushering in the third generation of the pro-grade compact desktop for developers or graphics professionals. It’s available with two processors. The base model runs on an Apple M4 Max, or it can be configured with an M3 Ultra.
The macOS computer has not yet reached customers — that’ll happen on March 12 — but early benchmarks posted on Friday by Primate Labs Geekbench 6 website show the M3 Ultra version earned 27749 in the multi-core test. The M2 Ultra version of the same desktop from 2023 scored 21371 — which means Apple’s new premiere processor performed 30% better.
For those using a MacStudio with an earlier M1 Ultra, the performance boost is 51%.
Fastest. Mac. Ever.
The Geekbench 6 score earned by the M3 Ultra makes the 2025 Mac Studio Apple’s fastest computer ever. It outpaces the MacBook Pro with M4 Max.
That said, the M3 vs M4 comparison in Mac desktops and notebooks shows that the M3 Ultra in the Mac Studio is only 8% faster than the M4 Max in the Mac notebook. An M4 Ultra would have undoubtedly offered even better performance than the M3 Ultra — it would have been two M4 Max chips grafted together, and each of these is 23% quicker than an M3 Max. But Apple isn’t ever going to make that variant of the M4 family.
Benchmarks for the M4 Max version of the Mac Studio are not yet available, but Apple promises the M3 Ultra variant “delivers nearly 2x faster performance than M4 Max in workloads that take advantage of high CPU and GPU core counts.” We’ll have to wait to see if that holds true.
About that name
It’s worth noting that the listing on the Primate Labs Geekbench 6 website is for the Mac15,14, not the 2025 Mac Studio, but there’s no doubt which model it refers to. The computer being tested runs an Apple M4 Ultra, and there is no other computer with that chip — it premieres in the Studio.
When Geekbench doesn’t know the official name of a computer, it defaults to the model identifier. In this case, Mac15,14. For reference, the model identifier for the 2023 Mac Studio is Mac14,13.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
