Just ahead of Halloween, Apple is set to unveil the M3 chip line, new MacBook Pros and an updated iMac at a “Scary Fast”-themed event. Also: The company prepares a total overhaul of AirPods; prices for TV+ and other Apple services go up; and the TV app is getting a revamp later this year.
My assumption is each core with ray tracing consumes more power compared the cores without ray tracing. So their thermal budget likely took a small hit just adding the ray tracing cores to the M3. Meaning they could only bump up the GPU core count by a small amount.