Apple's M5 Pro and M5 Max Crush the RTX 5090 in PugetBench Creator Benchmarks
MacBook's are very popular among content creators and the two new SoCs M5 Pro as well as M5 Max manage excellent results in the PugetBench tests for Adobe apps and DaVinci Resolve. They also clearly beat the mobile GeForce RTX 5090.
Apple's M5 Pro & M5 Max easily beat the RTX 5090 in PugetBench creator benchmarks
Apple's latest silicon has once again raised the bar for creative professionals, with the newly released M5 Pro and M5 Max system-on-chips delivering outstanding performance in industry-standard creator benchmarks. The two processors, which power the latest MacBook Pro lineup, achieved exceptional scores in PugetBench tests designed to measure real-world performance in Adobe Creative Cloud applications and DaVinci Resolve. The results confirm that Apple continues to dominate the content creation space, offering professionals a compelling reason to stay within the Mac ecosystem.
In the PugetBench tests for Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, After Effects, and Lightroom Classic, both the M5 Pro and M5 Max posted scores that significantly outpaced competing Windows laptops equipped with NVIDIA's flagship mobile GeForce RTX 5090 GPU. The M5 Max in particular demonstrated a commanding lead in GPU-accelerated tasks within DaVinci Resolve, a favorite among professional video editors and colorists. These benchmarks simulate actual production workflows rather than synthetic operations, making the results especially meaningful for creators who depend on their machines for daily work.
The dominance over the RTX 5090 in mobile form is particularly notable given that NVIDIA's top-tier laptop GPU is no slouch in its own right. However, Apple's tightly integrated approach to hardware and software optimization appears to give its silicon a decisive advantage when running creator-focused applications. The unified memory architecture of the M5 Pro and M5 Max allows the CPU and GPU to share a large, fast memory pool, eliminating bottlenecks that traditional laptop architectures face when shuffling data between separate components during complex rendering and editing tasks.
For content creators weighing their next laptop purchase, the benchmark results present a clear picture. MacBooks have long been popular among video editors, photographers, graphic designers, and music producers, and the M5 generation only strengthens that position. While Windows laptops with the RTX 5090 remain highly capable machines, especially for gaming and certain specialized compute workloads, Apple's latest chips appear to have established a significant performance gap in the creative applications that matter most to professional users. The M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models are available now, with pricing starting in line with previous generations.