this is the most powerful computer you can buy
for four thousand dollars or so apple would have you believe could
this tiny box basically two mac minis
stacked on top of each other really be more powerful than a core i9 or an rtx
3090 from the pc world or is apple cherry picking their data again come
along for the ride because it's more difficult than you'd think to find out
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we've got both the m1 max and m1 ultra
max studios here along with the 16 inch m1 max macbook pro and a pc bench to
compare against for reference that pc bench runs a little more with shipping
than a base spec m1 ultra while our ultra as specked costs about 1800 more i
want to start off with gaming this time because it highlights exactly why it's
so difficult to benchmark apple silicon dolphin a native gamecube emulator that
i've tested extensively with m1 chips was struggling to reach frame rates
above 120 when i know it should be capable of much more because i can crank
the resolution without losing much performance that indicates that we're hitting a CPU
bottleneck since it only uses a few cores at once
we are off to a bad start here the rest of the games in our typical lineup use
the rosetta compatibility layer to translate Intel native apps because
native apple silicon ports are few and far between civ 6 is such a mess that i
don't even want to talk about it thoraxis really needs to get on a native
port maybe bundle it with some nice expansion packs if they need to
m1 ultra doesn't perform very well at all in cs go either with a measly 95 FPS
average and a healthy dose of stuttering to go along with it thanks to that
game's use of the opengl API long ago deprecated on macOS
feral interactive's port of shadow of the tomb raider does a little bit better
thanks to using apple's modern metal 2 API but remember we're running at 1080p
here the frame rate simply does not compare to the pc bench
and this clearly isn't indicative of m1 ultra's performance potential the same
is true of total war warhammer 3 a game that straight up requires apple silicon
but runs through rosetta anyway yeah they say that there's no
performance penalty and they're doing it because they need certain features only
found on Intel max what a mess
the m1 ultra for its part breaks the 60fps barrier at nearly double the
performance of the m1 max but lags to about half the performance
of the pc bench so a win of the loss
gaming on m1 is such a minefield that the only two games that are fully native
to apple silicon are massively multiplayer
world of warcraft and eve online i've never played eve and i honestly have no
idea how it would benchmark it as for wow
last time my lack of game knowledge made our previous benchmark pointless
thankfully i do know someone who still plays wow and she threw together a
simple lua script that longs the current frame rate at regular intervals letting
us for the first time truly get something close to frame data out of a
mac without pulling a digital foundry and analyzing video capture
this is its own minefield within the minefield however
even local multiplayer games introduced two machines worth of uncertainty
instead of just one let alone an mmo with other players and server instances
to deal with so we made the script also output the current location and the
number of players in the vicinity into csv format which should let us sanitize
our data for our testing we dragged a heal shaman
through the same area a total of four times across each of our test systems
and average the results before we talk numbers though check this
out the m1 ultra exhibited some visual artifacting with assets blinking in and
out of existence this didn't affect stability but it was
definitely a thing clearly they didn't have the m1 ultra in mind when they made
this native port now the numbers the m1
ultra impressively captures between 70 and 88 percent of the rtx 3090 pc bench
and doesn't dip below 60 FPS meanwhile the m1 max doesn't do so hot
which indicates that wow is able to utilize either those extra CPU cores or
the additional memory bandwidth available on m1 ultra
since this test skews heavily towards the GPU at 4k max settings my money is
on memory bandwidth interestingly the max studio loses less
performance than the pc bench does with a consistent 25 players compared to runs
where the players dropped out this could just be run to run variants
but the fact that it held across both of our mac studios is a pattern worth
bringing up but productivity not gaming is what
apple was talking about when they said that this was the most powerful desktop
you can buy for four thousand dollars and to be fair to them it's where most
potential buyers will spend their time with a mac studio but there are
inconsistencies here too and we'll go through them one by one
cinebench and cinema 4d in general isn't
fully ready for apple silicon but multi-threaded CPU performance isn't
far off from the core i9 which is frankly amazing it's basically what we'd
expect at double the performance of our m1 max
geekbench is another test that's not fully optimized CPU usage doesn't quite
max out for some reason but it's not far off per thread and it
does surpass the core i9's multi-threaded performance that is
impressive though it does slip when we move over to the GPU test which is
obviously not correct with double the GPU cores we'd expect a
linear improvement unless we're limited somewhere else but m1 ultra is only
about 60 faster than the m1 max here way behind the rtx 3090
let's move away from synthetics and into the real world starting with blender's
CPU rendering we're looking at a worse showing than our core i9 from both apple
machines albeit with roughly correct scaling between the m1 ultra and m1 max
this tells me that perhaps there's some optimizations still left to be done here
and that's definitely the case with the GPU renderer which is still quite early
and falls well behind our rtx 3090 which
we tested with the traditional cuda renderer not the ray accelerated optics
renderer another major category for prospective apple customers is
development compile time isn't everything but with the mac studio
coming with a minimum of 32 gigs of RAM to take care of most other aspects of
devwork compile time is likely to be the
limited factor so we grabbed the chromium source code and compiled it m1
ultra is twice as fast as the m1 max and nearly 5 minutes ahead of the 12 900k
that's more than 20 percent faster i'm not sure that platform differences alone
would really make that much of a difference but devs can feel free to
correct me if i'm wrong here i can picture them now just typing out angry
comments and their wan hoodies and dad hats from
lt2store.com majestic now for apple silicon's bread and butter video editing
final cut pro allows for timelines with up to 24 simultaneous raw streams on m1
ultra before any frames drop in our multi-cam test
which is such ludicrous performance that it's tough to imagine how you would even
fully utilize it that's the magic of fixed function
hardware what's more our davinci resolve timeline
rendered out in a little under five and a half minutes on the m1 ultra which
while not quite double the performance of m1 max is still a huge improvement
it's over 25 ahead of our pc bench here
video and coding however is rough thanks
to the magic of that fixed function hardware
see on Floatplane you can download videos directly and when i did that with
our mac studio unboxing on ShortCircuit both apple's own compressor and the
third-party app handbrake failed but only while encoding the h.264 codec
compressor falls back to the CPU without a word and takes forever while handbrake
just errors out it turns out that apple's h264 compression engine and
NVIDIA's end bank to be fair doesn't support our 2 1 aspect ratio if i scale
the consumer 4k during the transcode instead it works just fine
performance wise this is worse than a straight trans code
but it is still somewhat favorable against NVIDIA
what's really a head scratcher for me is that the cheaper m1 max pulls ahead in
both h.264 and h.265 encoding for
reasons i struggle to comprehend i
retested this at least a dozen times and
here we are to apple's credit prores is probably a
more common target for transcodes from raw especially given the timeline
performance we saw in final cut but prores encoding time isn't materially
better between any of our macs wait what no m1 ultra is clearly several
seconds faster than the max what am i talking about well
okay prores is more limited by how fast
the SSD can write than how fast the encoder is
our ultra equipped mac studio and our macbook pro both have one terabyte of
storage while our base model m1 max equipped studio
has a 512 gig module the bigger ssds boast much better write
performance in most scenarios and the difference in prores encoding
performance roughly corresponds to the difference in write speeds across
amorphous disc mark moral of the story avoid the base tier storage option if
you want the best possible performance out of your mac studio
there's a reason why the m1 ultra comes with a terabyte by default
moving on to creative cloud while most of puget bench can run natively on apple
silicon the photoshop plugin needs to run via
rosetta accordingly we get overall poor performance in photoshop here but
after effects and especially premiere are way better like they're they're out
ahead of the pc bench to pull one of the highest scores that i have ever seen
in fact even the m1 max is out of head in this test too which tells me that
apple's decoders are doing a lot of heavy lifting here
now we need to talk thermals the cooler design of the max studio differs between
the m1 max and m1 ultra with the lander getting a copper rather than aluminum
heatsink a difference that makes the ultra two pounds heavier
in both cases the heatsink is attached to the same thermal module that handles
cooling for the entire machine testing thermals turned out to be
another difficult task blender alone wasn't cutting it so
instead i turned to stress ng a cross-platform stress test suite that
has native apple silicon support through brew these are the parameters that i
found stress to CPU the most add in gooseberry at 3 000 samples to hit the
GPU as well and you've got yourself an apple cooker
i'm not sure if anyone outside of apple has pushed m1 ultra to quite these
temperatures before this is a mostly synthetic and highly unreasonable load
but the copper cooler design is more than capable of handling it yes the
hottest CPU cores are in the mid to high 90s but the hottest GPU clusters and
memory sensors are nowhere near that meaning the soc itself is comfortable
not only that but the fans only ever ramped up to around 50 percent
throughout the entire run not bad though i bet we could push the
GPU a little harder if we had a dedicated apple silicon native stress
test the m1 max by comparison fares a bit
better in terms of raw heat output but we knew that already
while the hottest core sensor does slowly creep up past the 90 degree mark
that aluminum heatsink is more than adequate sensors elsewhere in the
package showed downright cool thermals by pc standards and
this time the fans never spun up much faster than they did
at idle with results like that like how much power could they possibly be drawing
with this load to get a good idea we're using a power
meter at the wall it's worth noting that we've seen at least three different
power supply designs from apple at this point which means efficiency will differ
very slightly between each design is there a best one
that's a question for ltd Labs later for now we can see the idle consumption for
the m1 ultra is a measly 10.8 watts with the m1 max at 8.7
just a little more than an led light bulb this is why the idle thermal output
for both models is incredibly low and makes max studio actually a pretty good
fit for hotter climates it's worth putting into perspective how little
power is being used here despite the load i hit them with the idle wattage of
our Intel bench was just two-thirds of
the full load reading on the m1 max at full bore it pulled 10
times that with CPU cores at 100 degrees under our
knock Noctua nhd15s true even apple's best GPU doesn't come
near the raw performance of this top end pc hardware but the m1 ultra racked up
over 80 percent of the pc bench's performance in overall productivity
at 34 of the power draw at full load
m1 max is even more efficient at 57 of the pc's performance while drawing just
15 of the power under full load
in a world where pc power consumption just creeps ever upward
this is a breath of fresh air fresh
smogless air all this in a machine
with the same footprint as the mac mini only about twice as tall admit it that's
impressive for such a small boy and it's not all for cooling and power
either the addition of front i o was a welcome mom when i unboxed the mac
studio on ShortCircuit and with those type c ports doubling as Thunderbolt 4
ports on the m1 ultra there's a frankly ridiculous amount of Thunderbolt on
display here meanwhile tangie Ethernet as standard
doesn't need anything special to work and this tells me that apple knows what
their professional customers need but
apple has always been hesitant to provide their customers with what they
want and it's finally time to talk expansion and repairability
or lack thereof we know by now that getting into the mac
studio is a bit painful that ring on the bottom will probably never look the same
again unless you're careful but that's not the bad part
it's the SSD you can learn more about our findings in
this previous video but the tldr is that these modules are not ssds in the
traditional sense but rather only contain raw nand chips the storage
controller is integrated into the m1 series socs themselves and is simply
programmed from the factory why can't you just swap or even rearrange them
even with a factory reset well apple has created a de facto allow
list by only supporting the specific combinations they're selling
this because apple says so thing isn't new
i upgraded my 2011 macbook pro with the wi-fi module from the continuity
supporting 2012 model but couldn't use it without a hack
specifically because apple never shipped that configuration with that model it
has the drivers didn't bother loading them it's just
bubble okay you can't you can't use it
but as mad as that makes me consumers have come
to expect this kind of limitation from apple silicon by now so at the end of
the day it all boils down to performance and lasting power
will the max studio and m1 ultra be relevant in the next five to ten years
honestly i'm not so sure the greatest irony with
the m1 ultra is that the one thing that it's really
really good at is also the one thing
that m1 max is already really really good at
video editing unless you absolutely need access to 128 gigs of memory or you do a
lot of vfx work chances are you'll never fully appreciate the extra power that
affords you until it's already obsolete if your use cases are covered by the few
exceptions like compilation and resolve then m1 ultra is great otherwise
wherever it's not within spinning distance of m1 max
it's still matched or outmatched by pcs that cost the same or less
now this could be a optimization thing that apple will just have to deal with
in the future with additional updates to swift and
xcode but for now that's just the reality as for the mac studio itself
like m1 ultra it's impressive but as excited as i was
when it was announced thank you apple
now i'm not sure i get the point it lacks peripherals and a display and it
shares many of apple silicon's current limitations like the lack of 48 gigabits
per second HDMI output if you buy apple's matching peripherals
the cost of owning even the base model works out to be more than a macbook pro
with the same specs and anchors it to a desk
a macbook pro with the same soc can drive the same studio display has the
same HDMI output and has the same card reader you can bring a macbook's i o up
to speed with a dock too this one not only provides more connectivity than the
mac studio would have with a studio display but it costs 400 and also
supports audio video bridging something that i'm told apple silicon's lan ports
dropped support for but is critically important for broadcast
work the total cost of a macbook pro with this dock remains well below that of the
studio setup even if you got the 16 inch model
max studio's only saving grace is that you don't have to buy the studio display
or magic peripherals apple just expects you to we'll have
them linked down below just in case and this really is the overall theme
here apple expects you to want the m1 ultra you probably don't
apple expects you to think that the mac studio is a good value it's really not
what it is is a uniquely compact efficient and surprisingly powerful
machine but with a price tag to match and without matching the pc competition in
terms of performance in most workloads if it aligns with your priorities then
great i can't tell you not to shell out for it
if your priority is value then apple has trapped themselves into a corner with
how ludicrously good the 2021 macbook pros already are
and those even come with magsafe just like this video it comes with a segue to
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Linus or click the link down below thanks for watching guys go check out
our investigation on the mac studios ssds for a little more context into
what's going on there apple silicon really is a new frontier
for better or for worse