The main thing to understand about Apple's M1 is that it's a very specialist SoC. While in the CPU benchmarks, you look at it and it's able to keep up with a desktop 5950x, in the gaming tests, here's this note in the review:
"Digging deeper, there are a couple of factors in play here. First and foremost, the M1 Max in particular is CPU limited at 1080p; the x86-to-Arm translation via Rosetta is not free, and even though Apple’s CPU cores are quite powerful, they’re hitting CPU limitations here."
So on one hand, it's about to keep up with a 5950x yet on the other hand, it's hitting CPU limitations so quickly under gaming? Again technically under Rosetta 2 which is their translation layer but one would think with desktop levels of CPU performance, it would be able to brute force through it as many other productivity applications that are CPU intensive, it's able to keep up with x86 even when going through Rosetta.
I think that overall, this is a case where in certain situations, M1 is indeed able to keep up with a 5950x because of all of it's special additions to it's SoC such as media accelerators from Apple. But when it comes to more generalized computing such as with gaming, x86 CPUs starts showing their advantages. Still it's hard to deny it's efficiency.
PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850
