Why Apple's M6 Chip Can't Hold Its Own Against Any NVIDIA GPU

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Big Tech Apple Why Apple’s M6 Chip Can’t Hold Its Own Against Any NVIDIA GPU (a chip built for many calculations at once, used for graphics and AI) Apple has just announced the arrival of its M6 chip, but it still can't compete with NVIDIA By Roger Fingas. 8, 2026 2:45 pm EST Pix Lab/Shutterstock Add Engadget on Google: Preferred Source Google Discover In introducing the latest Mac mini , Apple also debuted its sixth generation of M-series processors for Macs.

In fact, you'll want a dedicated GPU for meaningful performance on most PCs since integrated graphics chips tend to be good for little more than streaming and light gaming. With the announcement of its M6, Apple is stepping into a new generation of its processors.

Here's why it still can't compete with NVIDIA GPUs. Apple of course extols the M6 chip as extremely powerful, providing significant boosts to CPU (the general-purpose processor at the centre of a computer) and performance, and there's at least a little merit to those claims.

If you're not wedded to the Apple ecosystem, it's important to weigh the M6's processor tech against what's available on the PC side of the fence. And if you're serious about graphics, that probably means computers with a dedicated NVIDIA GPU.

In short, most NVIDIA GPUs are going to wipe the floor with the M6 when it comes to gaming and other real-time graphics tasks. That said, if you're willing to lock into the Apple ecosystem, the M6 can potentially deliver what you need while costing a lot less.

How NVIDIA GPUs (usually) crush the M6 PixieMe/Shutterstock It's a bit difficult to offer an apples-to-apples comparison, if you'll forgive the joke. Whereas the M6 is an all-in-one processor with 12 CPU and 12 GPU cores, the performance of NVIDIA GPUs is dependent not just on the card you pick but the AMD or Intel CPU you pair it with.