The M2 Max renders on-par with a 90 watt, 12nm RTX 2070 laptop card. From 2018.
Would be good to at least see it stabilise and optimised a bit before jumping to conclusions.
And yes Apple could make a better GPU by building a 450W discrete card but given that they make the most sales from lower end devices probably not a sensible strategy.
How much further do you think they can optimize? Nvidia cards have hardware-accelerated BVH traversal and have been designed with ray-tracing in mind since 2009. Apple Silicon in it's current incarnation closer resembles a phone GPU with dedicated media engines. Maybe Metal will improve in time, but it's not going to close the performance gap. It probably won't even close the performance-per-watt gap, at least in Blender demos.
> And yes Apple could make a better GPU by building a 450W discrete card
They're already halfway there with the M1 Ultra's 200w TDP. It's concerning that their desktop focused SOC is being outperformed by last-gen 90w laptop GPUs, at least in my book. It signals that scaling the Mac beyond mobile SOCs will require a unique approach.