The 256GB Mac Studio (the one with "eight times the RAM") is listed for ~$2000 more than the current 5090 prices, and another additional $1500 for the 80-core GPU variant. Only the "base" model with 96gb is a remotely similar price, $3600-$4000.

And a 5090 has a little over 2x the memory bandwidth - ~820GB/s vs ~1790GB/s. And significantly higher peak FLOPS on the 5090 too.

Sure, if the goal is to get the "Cheapest single-device system with 256GB ram" it looks pretty good, but there's lots of other axes it falls down on. Great if you know you don't care about them, but not "Better In Every Way". Arguably, better in only a single way - but that single way may well be the one you need.

And the current 5090 price might be a transient peak - only three months ago they were closer to $2500 - significantly less than half the $6000 base-spec 256GB Mac Studio. While the Mac Studio has been constant.

Yes but the 5090 can run games.

Running games on my loaded M4 Max is worse than on my 3090 despite the over-four-year generational gap.

Like, Pacific Drive will reach maybe 30fps at less than 1080p whereas the 3090 will run it better even in 4K.

That could just be CrossOver's issue with Unreal Engine games, but "just play different games" is not a solution I like.

It seems like general improvements in ram efficiency, such as that used in Gemma 4, means it’s back to memory bandwidth as the bottleneck and less about total available memory size. I’m also curious to see how much more agent autonomy will reduce less need for low latency and shift the focus to more throughput. Meaning it’s easier to spread the model out over multiple smaller GPUs and use pipeline parallelism to keep them busy. This would also mean using ram for market discrimination becomes less effective.

But the 5090 can run Crysis