The MacBook Air M3 made available to us by Apple is equipped with an M3 chip bringing together 10 GPU cores, 16 GB of unified memory and a 1 TB SSD.
Thus equipped, the ultraportable obtains a performance index of 132 and holds its own against the Qualcomm Snapdragon ). Compared to its predecessor, the MacBook Air M3 (2024) is 18% more efficient (132 versus 112).
The Cupertino company is still in the race with its M3 released in November 2023, while the Snapdragon X Plus and the Core Ultra Series 2 have been available for a month.
In practice, the MacBook Air M3 with its 16 GB of unified memory can handle all the office tasks you throw at it. It is even capable of doing photo editing on the go while waiting for your train on a station platform, or even making some video renderings. In addition, the graphics part makes it possible, for example, to drastically reduce rendering times. In Blender, our scene is rendered in just over 2 minutes on the GPU, compared to just over 17 minutes on the processor cores. In the same vein, video encoding time in Premiere is reduced by almost 50%.
To evaluate the progress of the graphics part in the game, we subjected this MacBook Air to the game once again Shadow Of The Tomb Raiderone of the only titles fully compatible with the Apple Silicon M and having a built-in benchmark to measure performance. At 1920 x 1200 pixels with the Very High preset, this terminal obtains a framerate of 33 fps. This is twice as much as the MacBook Air M2, as announced by Apple.
On the other hand, the SSD does not evolve and our 1 TB version obtains speeds close to 3 GB/s in reading and writing. While not among the fastest SSDs on the market, it’s more than enough for a laptop like this.
