I really did try this time guys I even went as far as to ask my team if there
was some positive spin that we could put on our review of the M2 ultramax Studio
I kind of wanted a a glass half full angle before I had to dunk on the
outrageously priced Mac Pro that's going to be arriving in our lab shortly but we
failed and the blame Falls squarely on
Apple not on the engineers they're amazing and apple silicon is a miracle
of Modern Hardware engineering but on the marketers
all they had to do was say M2 Ultra it's
M1 Ultra but more betterer and we could have said yup sounds good but no instead
they're back to their old tricks with performance claims that would get any
other company sued Weiss in this paragraph Apple compares
the M2 Ultra to the M2 Max then they've
got these eye-catching performance claims that are floating down beneath it
then we scroll down more down further and this is where those numbers come
from they're doing it again with the unlabeled graphs and frankly comical
comparison points for their claims this is really misleading they weren't
comparing to M2 Max or even M1 Apple
silicon does Apple really think we're gullible enough to believe a
three-year-old iMac is a sensible performance reference for a professional
machine also where did this number even
come from click on any other heading and
even directly from Apple the M2 ultra's performance leadership looks a lot more
narrow so I think it's time to roll up our lab coats cut through the marketing
read the fine print and figure out what apple is trying to hide from me
and hide from our sponsor eugreen do you
need some on-the-go juice the ugreen 145
watt power bank is equipped with PD 3.0 QC 3.0 and a massive 25
000 milliamp hour battery check it out at the link below externally the new Mac
Studio is identical to its predecessor right down to its total weight and that
means that everything I have to say about it concerns what's under the hood
you've got substantially more bandwidth for displays than the previous
generation to the point where it greatly exceeds what a single GPU PC can handle
plus you get Apple's upgraded Wi-Fi 6E module with support for Bluetooth 5.3
and the 6 gigahertz Wi-Fi band since it's the same Wi-Fi e module that's
found in M2 MacBooks that makes for a maximum transfer rate that is double
that of last gen should your wireless router supported of course the stars of
the show however are the upgraded M2 based socs M2 Max is the same SOC that's
found on the MacBook Pro 14 and 16 while M2 Ultra is only available on the
desktop Mac Studio and the Mac Pro it's
the most powerful silicon that Apple can build and ours is the most powerful
version of it with 24 CPU cores and 76
GPU cores which is not a massive
Improvement on paper next to our M1 Ultra Studio especially since the memory
bandwidth and Ultra Fusion fabric that connects the two dies together is the
same as last gen but with the extra course also comes
higher clock speeds both for the CPU and the GPU which according to Apple gives
the M2 Ultra over double the 3D rendering performance compared to last
gen this is achieved in large part by the move to tsmc's enhanced n5p
manufacturing process which makes the die denser and more energy efficient so
far so good then but as soon as we tried to replicate Apple's performance claims
things went South faster than a Gamepad controlled submersible headed for the oh
sorry things went bad let's start with their
deeply suspicious octane X render performance the x-axis on their graph
isn't labeled but we can infer from the numbers that are listed that the M2
Ultra should be about three times faster than the M1 Ultra that is not what we
found nor is it what this user from the otoi forums observed we had some ideas
um like maybe our test was too short and a longer higher resolution render would
give the new Ultra more time to spool up and flex its muscle but that didn't pan
out either and come to think of it why would it Apple doesn't even claim to
have done a complete architectural overhaul here the new GPU got some more
cores and a faster clock speed and when we click on 3D interaction another GPU
bound test we see a much more realistic generational bump so what is going on
here truthfully we're still not sure what we know is that it almost certainly
has to do with the unspecial specified project that Apple used to generate
their numbers what we don't know is exactly how they managed to create a
perfect storm of conditions to support these numbers
one idea we had was it could be that the project is larger than 128 gigs which is
the maximum amount of unified memory that's supported by the previous
generation Apple silicon if they pushed the project out of RAM that would have
severely hampered M1 ultra's ability to keep up and that would have hampered our
test machine too since we didn't spring for the full 192 Gigabyte config
but then that still doesn't explain their M2 Max numbers since that machine
was configured with 96 gigabytes of memory all we can say for sure right now
then is that the improved GPU performance is clearly very dependent on
what exactly the GPU is crunching away at and even in this case it doesn't hold
a candle to an RTX 4090 which completes the render at the maximum resolution
available in just three seconds ouch okay well what about other 3D
rendering Suites like redshift then here the M2 Ultra looks like it's doing about
how you'd expect against both its predecessor and its little brother M2
Max but again when we add the PC into the equation we can see why Apple didn't
want to invite these comparisons that's about the same degree of demolition as
we saw in octane with the M2 Ultra managing just under 30 percent of the
4090s performance potential but Linus you might say that's unfair the RTX 4090
is overpriced it costs 6 600 US Dollars
and that's true but the GPU and the M2
Ultra costs more than that it costs
whatever Apple included in the base config pricing plus a thousand dollars
to upgrade it to the best config the one that we're using okay how about blender
then version 3.5 added an official metal
renderer that promises a major speed up and yeah it's fast like this data from
our M1 Ultra review is a little old now but if we slot our new numbers in we're
seeing nearly RTX 30 90 levels of raw
GPU compute power here though again depending on the scene M2 ultra's best
showing is still trumped by the ray tracing cores on the RTX 4090 and even
gets beat by the card's slower Cuda renderer so then maybe applement CPU
based 3D rendering in their claims sure why they would focus on that but
sure let's talk about it compared to the M1 Ultra it's about as fast as you'd
expect from an extra four efficiency course and a bit more clock speed then
compared to a core I9 13900k PC well
it's about that much slower still I mean
it's a pretty impressive showing considering that it's fairly Apples to
Apples in terms of core count against that Intel chip and that's a pattern
that continues when we hit it with synthetics like geekbench 6 where single
threaded performance is about 90 percent of what the I9 can do but multi-threaded
performance is more or less on par if not faster and we see a bit more of that
it depends performance with geekbench's GPU test where opencl is above where our
previous results were but metal is actually higher than what the RTX 4090
is capable of this highlights two very important
things first that optimization is King
and second that you cannot rely on a
single Benchmark to determine what your real world performance will be even if
that Benchmark happens to be derived from a real world workload you've got to
have a full suite for an example in the other direction then cinebench while it
is an apple silicon native app cinebench is a notoriously Intel optimized
Benchmark that hasn't yet been updated with Cinema 4d's Apple silicon
optimizations so while we are seeing
okay scaling between our apple chips Intel absolutely dominates here again
this isn't something that we saw in real world workloads and shows you how
important Benchmark selection can be whether you're trying to paint a
narrative about your own product or a narrative about a competitors let's look
at another of Apple's chosen benchmarks then color grading Apple's using DaVinci
Resolve Studio here and the test sequence is a 28 second prores project
with noise reduction last time I checked that's not really what color grading
means so our project then is four minutes of mixed 4K and 8K Blackmagic
raw and red raw Clips with actual HDR
color grading and denoising and I'm
starting to feel a bit like a broken record here but the PC is faster and for
whatever reason our M2 Ultra machine far
from being 50 faster like apple claims ended up running slower than our M1
Ultra machine this has to be some kind
of bug maybe something kind of like what we saw with the game porting toolkit
video where we used M1 Ultra silicon because it was what we happen to have
and it turns out it's totally bugged and performance was way lower than it's
supposed to be but then in this case we went out of our way to test with resolve
Studio 18.5 beta just like apple did we
tried changing the export parameters and we just got the same results every time
all I can guess is that because this is beta software maybe something thing
broke in between apple doing their testing and me doing mine so Apple I
know you've got my digits if you want to help us look into this hit me up and
guys we'll pin a comment if we hear back from them and get this resolved pun
intended uh what's left then oh how about code compiling Apple used an open
source project built with xcode thanks very reproducible Apple so we used
chromium and whatever Apple was compiling we are just not seeing the M2
Ultra getting double the performance of the M2 Max though the M1 Ultra number
does look like it's in the ballpark just by eyeballing the bar graph links Apple
does manage to outperform Intel here though but that could be partly down to
the build Target Apple didn't specify whether they were targeting Apple
silicon or x86 on the Intel Mac so we
just built native for each platform just like we built our screwdriver available
at lttstore.com so far all of this
sounds pretty bad for Apple then and as
far as their Shady marketing is concerned turned it very much is but
there's an elephant in the room that we haven't talked about yet and that's
power in our M1 Ultra Max studio review
We observed power consumption that never pushed Beyond 227 Watts for the entire
box however while we had a pretty good CPU
stressor at the time we didn't have a great way of stress testing the GPU but
now that blender has a metal renderer we can give it a bit more of a workout do
bear in mind of course that this is a worst case scenario
and uh it's pretty impressive it looks like the
total power from the wall Peaks at around 331 Watts at room temperature
which Real Talk guys either a core I9 or
an RTX 4090 could draw on its own
sometimes even more and the idle power
consumption is maybe even more impressive at just 18 and a half Watts
my phone charges with more juice than
that given that we're looking at CPU performance that's roughly 90 of the way
to a core I9 and a GPU that's anywhere from about 30 to all the way as fast as
an RTX 4090 this efficiency is nothing short of
unbelievable this is what Apple should have been
shouting from the rooftops about not cherry-picked benchmarks compared
against older Hardware uh speaking of which there is one more claim that we
need to verify though operating temperature to do so we popped the Mac
Studio into our handy dandy environmental chamber and let our
combined CPU and GPU load rip and
fortunately the Mac Studio's thermal design is quite capable of handling the
load at room temperature however it's worth noting that the system does
throttle its performance rather than increase the fan speed Beyond 1900 RPM
that means that you could end up sacrificing some performance for lower
noise unless you use a utility like TG Pro to Auto Max your fans
to simulate a warmer environment we cranked our ambient heat to 35 degrees
and unfortunately it chokes pretty hard
here that's disappointing compared to the perfect performance we saw from an
RTX 4090 at these temperatures at least
the fans do finally push past 2000 RPM
and they do creep a little higher over time but even after 20 minutes they
never managed to Max themselves out despite the fact that the CPU is
obviously throttling we saw power consumption that was rapidly fluctuating
between 215 and 280 Watts so if you're
living in a hotter climate and you don't have air conditioning don't settle for
Apple's Auto settings you're going to want to set an aggressive fan curve cap
off our thermal chamber testing we wanted to see if dropping the
temperature unlocked a little bit more performance so we set it to 10 degrees
roughly fall or spring temperatures around these parts and the answer is no
apple will simply maintain the fan at a lower RPM meaning that you could get
quieter operation but you won't see any more performance and this is confirmed
by the roughly similar Peak wattage that we observed compared to our room
temperature test expansion is an interesting conversation
that we haven't touched on yet though almost all of the criticism for the M1
Ultra SOC aside from our assertion that M1 Max made it a pretty tough sell oh
and Apple's disproven claims of GPU performance kingship was centered around
the lack of 48 gigabit per second HDMI and its General inability to drive 8K
displays well with the HDMI upgrade and
the M2 ultra's ability to drive up to three of those aforementioned 8K panels
those limitations have basically melted away and if you think about it there are
very few scenarios where this much expansion is not going to be sufficient
especially considering that 10 gigabit Ethernet has been standard since the
first Mac Studio imagine saying that about an Apple product class leading IO I love it side
note by the way it's really strange that apple neglects to mention that the first
gen Max studio also has a high impedance headphone jack just like the new one
does in the compare page archive.org exists you guys come on that
is not a value add for this gen speaking of value
there are certainly professionals and prosumers out there who are going to buy
this and be happy with it at any price and I'm not going to mock them for it I
mean Apple's got their ecosystem and
perhaps more importantly they've got applications like Final Cut and logic
pro so if your workflow requires Apple tools that is totally valid and
objectively speaking this is the fastest a Mac can go today and it's going to be
quiet and draw less power than a PC while doing it
that's what you're paying for same price as last gen faster computer
what's there to complain about then aside from the ridiculously expensive
proprietary storage that you can't upgrade post purchase for everyone else
however 4 000 US dollars is a freaking
lot of money and that doesn't even get you the top of the line M2 Ultra that's
going to be an extra thousand dollars on top and then another eight hundred
dollars for the 128 gigs of memory that we put in ours let's put this into
perspective a PC with a core I9 13900k and a GeForce
RTX 4090 with the same capacity NVMe SSD
the same amount of system memory actually more if you count the GPU RAM
and even taking into account the cost of the operating system is going to cost
1722 dollars less you could quite literally buy a
completely Overkill PC that most people wouldn't even consider to begin with and
then with the money left over you could also buy an M2 Pro MacBook or a Mac Mini
that's a yikes and it might be about to get even worse I mean what if anything
is going to be the advantage of using Apple's brand new Mac Pro chassis over
the Mac Studio the soc is the same but
the price is three thousand dollars higher and there's no support for GPU
accelerators in its PCIe slots maybe the entire point of that product is to make
the Mac Studio seem like a somewhat acceptable value
we're gonna find out just like we're gonna find out about our
sponsor it's summer and what better time to enjoy the great outdoors but if you
need to stay connected to the world or just power that fancy electric barbecue
you just brought along with you you're gonna need some power that's where you Green's power roam 1200 watt portable
power station comes in with 1024 Watt hours of battery support for up to 2500
watt devices and 100 watt USBC and a
ports it really is an all-in-one get it all done Workhorse but what about
actually charging the thing won't that take forever you green claims that it
can charge up from zero to eighty percent battery in 50 minutes five zero
minutes with its power zip tech oh and it harnesses the power of the Sun as
well with solar charging that will fully charge it in four hours be prepared for
your next Outdoor Adventure check out the ugreen power ROM 1200 watt portable
power station below if you guys enjoyed this video for more on the M2 go check
out our review of the M2 MacBook Pro turns out cooling is a big deal