maxed out max or max max with m1 max to
the max the 14 inch max books pro represent
double the GPU and media horsepower the m1 pro models but
this raises a very interesting question
how can apple fit that much more power on this same
architecture no less into the same chassis
for that matter is there any other advantage to getting out a macbook pro
with an m1 max or is it only really useful for video editors thanks to its
expanded media engine the answer may surprise you i know it surprised me
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from the outside there's very little to distinguish the m1 pro from m1 max so we
went with space gray for the max books and silver for the pro books to tell
them apart jonathan horst over at Mac Address commented that he liked silver
better than space gray this time around and honestly i kinda agree it's not that
the space grey looks bad but there's too little contrast for me particularly
considering the blacked out keyboard that apple chose for the new generation
macbooks but this is a matter of taste and i'm sure
there are plenty of folks who'd like to see this thing totally stealth instead
there is one major external difference between the m1 pro and m1 max though and
that's in the display support where the m1 pro can handle up to two external pro
display xdrs via Thunderbolt the m1 max can handle up to three while also using
the HDMI 2.0 port for up to 4k 60 output that extra flexibility could lead to
some impressive battle station setups for professional workloads you've got
the integrated mini led display a span of three big displays worth of workspace
and a large tv or color calibrated 4k display for output preview
one question that's been asked a lot is whether the Thunderbolt ports could handle an HDMI 2.1 adapter and
unfortunately hours didn't arrive in time for testing these laptops i'll test them all when we
review the 16-inch model so make sure you get subscribed for that it's coming
soon
how about on the inside with these machines being otherwise so similar
could apple also have given them the exact same cooling setup remember the m1
pro caps out at 16 GPU cores while the m1 max can double that number
and doubles the memory bandwidth which together are sure to increase the heat
output let's pop the hood and compare the two oh hey apple color matched the screws
how thoughtful and they're the same picture if i hadn't
told you that the space gray was the m1 max you wouldn't have been able to tell
the difference just by looking at them unless you looked really closely at that
heat spreader it's just a little bit wider on the m1 max to cover that chip's
larger footprint other than that same fans same heat pipe same everything
given how hot the m1 pro got this makes me worry that we'll see some significant
throttling with the m1 max we'll button everything back up and give it a go this
time with the zephyrus m16 repping the pc with its cry9 and rtx 3060 mobile
first we'll see if anything changed for the CPU cores on the m1 max and
predictably it absolutely did not none of the m1 max's CPU scores are
appreciably different in cinebench r23 and this translates over to geekbench
where we're effectively looking at run to run variants same deal with blender
where we're stuck with CPU rendering until blender 3.1 releases with metal
GPU rendering support sometime in 2022 you don't have to wait that long for our
new shirt designs and a new water bottle from ltdstore.com though they're
available right now you may be surprised by these results
though given how much faster the system memory is i mean ryzen would sure love
to have memory that fast but it seems apple's CPU cores just
aren't taking full advantage of it and based on these results alone you might
not be too impressed by the m1 max at all but the CPU is only half the picture no
we don't have more CPU cores or even faster CPU cores but what we do get are
more GPU cores and an expanded media engine with double the encoder blocks
and double the prores blocks nowhere would this be more apparent than final
cut pro for this test we set up a 5x5 grid of 4k plus prores raw files and set
them to appear one by one in the timeline then we set final cut to stop when it
detects a drop frame with the original m1 macbook pro stalled out at just four
streams and the m1 pro dropped at seven the m1 maxes manage 10 and 12 suggesting
that the cut down model either has a slightly less capable prores engine
or the extra GPU cores on the high end model are picking up the slack whatever
the case this is a truly ridiculous number of pixels being processed all at
once with no stuttering whatsoever like four or seven simultaneous streams is
already a lot but let's say you don't run final cut you're a resolve shop well
good news for you too when rendering the prores 422 hq to take advantage of the
pro res blocks the higher end model gets scary close to a sub 10 minute mark on a
timeline that is stacked with denoising chroma keying and filtering
not a bad result and our timeline's frame rate keeps up too where we
observed as high as 16 FPS for the high end model scaled by about 2 FPS for each
step down you take from there the zephyrus meanwhile can only roughly
match the lower end m1 pro that's a great result but what if you need to
render some 3d assets right now the best solution on mac is cinema 4d with the
redshift renderer surprisingly the jump in performance
from the m1 pro to the lower end m1 max is substantial likely thanks to the
doubled memory bandwidth to go along with the extra GPU cores the higher end
max gives us nearly a 10 minute render which seems impressive up until the
zephyrus comes along and smacks it down with a 539
of course that is a 16 inch pc laptop
but um spoiler for the 16 inch review
the 16 m1 max doesn't do that much better we were told that the m1 max
could outperform the rtx 3060 or even match the rtx 3080 and apple calls out
redshift on their product page so m1
gotta take the l on this one geekbench 2 shows the zephyrus and its rtx 3060
absolutely pummeling the m1 max in both render modes which places the m1 max's
GPU horsepower further behind than apple had led us to believe maybe there's more
optimizations that still need to be done for non-video tasks on these GPU cores
or maybe it's just the media engine was
doing all the heavy lifting in our video editing tests to be clear it is scaling
relative to the m1 and m1 pro but it's just not reaching those dedicated GPU
levels of performance we kept hearing about hmm
maybe they meant games yeah no again we're seeing mostly linear
performance improvements across the lineup in shadow of the tomb raider where feral interactive's port makes use
of apple's metal API but it's not enough to catch up to the zephyrus
at least not at 14 inches few other games use metal so it's all downhill
from here when we switch over to cs go where there's no difference whatsoever between
the m1 pro and max ironically this time not because it's using opengl but
because we've hit a CPU bottleneck at 100fps thanks to rosetta since we're
looking for more ways the m1 max can differentiate itself there's one final
ray of hope the venerable dolphin emulator which is native apple silicon
support via universal binary unfortunately
dolphin doesn't yet support the metal API but in testing we did discover a
number of interesting points to cover the first head scratcher is that the
high level opengl renderer is more performant than the closer to metal
vulcan API this may be because apple never embraced
vulcan necessitating the use of a third-party library called molten vk if
developers want to support it on macOS because apple deprecated opengl several
macOS revisions ago the implementation while performant is missing some new
features that makes dolphin think that the GPU might be underpowered
second multi-sample anti-lacing that can be enabled in most games
is a huge performance killer on apple silicon it easily takes rendering speed
from an impressive double of native speed to just half third some titles
like rogue squadron 3 depend so heavily on the CPU that they never run at full
speed even at native resolution just like the original m1 this makes sense
though because the main differentiator between the m1 m1 pro and m1 max's CPU
cores is that there are more performance cores available and dolphin doesn't
utilize more than a couple at a time we did get performance data however by
firing up super mario sunshine at 8x native resolution and an uncapped frame
rate to place the burden squarely on the GPU bearing in mind that the game is
native to 30fps the starting area runs at about 67 FPS on the lower end m1 max
and 77 on the high end that's a pretty good improvement from the m1 pro that
topped out at 47 with the original m1 taking up the rear at the sub native 21
except then we look at the zephyrus again and it's a slaughter
that right there is over four times the native frame rate for this game and
nearly double what the best m1 max can put out in a laptop that costs a little
over half as much at retail
so again we're seeing differences between the chips and the performance is
objectively good but we're just not coming up to the performance claims apple made during
their unleashed event no matter what we do we're legitimately not sure if this is
an optimization problem or if apple over-promised with cherry-picked data
because as we've seen it's quite difficult to find anything that runs
metal on apple silicon to take full advantage of the m1 max
now let's take a look at thermals for a test we could run in our m1 pro video we
focus on the CPU so we'll be looking at the GPU this time around for the m1 max
by running redshift the fact that it hovers around 90 degrees isn't too
surprising but given how much surface area the GPU occupies the rest of the
soc is also brought up to those temperatures which indicates that we're
probably at the threshold of what the cooler can manage without maxing out the
fans those only ever got to around 50 speed
so there's definitely still some headroom if you want to max the fans out manually we'll be doing a more strenuous
combined CPU plus GPU torture test when we test out the 16-inch form factor in
our next review so stay tuned to find out by how much when we look at the
flare it becomes clear that the m1 max is really pushing the upper limits of
the 14-inch chassis cooling capacity easily hotter than even the CPU test we
did on the m1 pro chips in our previous review we're seeing over 50 degrees in the
hotspot and well above that exhausting out of the display the bottom is still
within the realm of comfort and if it's sitting in your lap chances are the underside's hot spot won't be touching
your skin so points to apple there now
let's talk battery last time we showed the m1 pro's
endurance was nothing short of amazing while doing youtube video playback
easily beating out contemporaries like the surface laptop studio with a literal
all-day battery life result for the m1 max we matched all the
screens at 4 ticks of brightness and let them go this time around both of the m1
pro models lasted a little over 2 hours longer than both of the m1 max models so
while battery life is still phenomenal at about 20 hours in this test you do
give up a little bit of endurance for the extra horsepower even when you're
not making use of it depending on your priorities though this could be a side
grade a net benefit or a net loss a fun
fact this test failed once and these endurance figures being what they are
made that a huge pain overall for an extra 200 for the 24 core
variant m1 max is not a bad upgrade
it's just difficult to recommend in general unless you've got a need for
more than 32 gigs of memory the extra GPU horsepower and memory bandwidth seem
very situational particularly in light of the dearth of apple silicon native
applications with metal support this may change moving forward but it's a
teething pain that's going to hamper these higher end socs for the coming
years rosetta can only do so much as we've
seen as such m1 max only really shines
in high-end video editing as of right now for everything else we're looking at
something much more akin to the rtx 3050 ti much less the rtx 3080 we were
promised apple's leaning heavily on special purpose silicon here and while
that's an approach that may work out for them they run a very real risk of having
purpose-built hardware that becomes dead weight once consumers inevitably move on
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thanks for watching guys the 16 inch review is going to include both
processors so go check out our review of the m1 pro macbooks for a little more on
the whole platform before the finale