Thinking of Switching to a Mac

mleaf · 2023-08-19T00:55:14.286Z

I recently picked up an M2 Max Mac Studio, thinking it would be powerful enough to explore some 3D stuff, but I was kinda wrong. Wishful thinking maybe, but later looking at Blender opendata, I realised how far down the chain the M2 Max sits in terms of GPU performance, a 4060 is like 3 times as fast. Even the top M2 Ultra is like, only equivalent to a 4060 and for that, on the Mac side you are paying some serious top dollar.

So I returned the Mac Studio, and now building a PC with a 4070ti, which is exciting. I haven’t done a build in a long time, but parts are starting to trickle in. Cost will wind up about 1/4 less what I paid for the Mac Studio.

I still have my M2 Air which is basically fantastic for everything else, while the PC can cover 3D and gaming. I guess that’s always been the case but I’ve just never taken the plunge. Crossing my fingers the build goes well…

Blender - Open Data

Blender Open Data is a platform to collect, display and query the results of hardware and software performance tests - provided by the public.

Robobot · 2023-08-19T01:28:07.919Z

mleaf:

I still have my M2 Air

Did you upgrade the storage or ram?

mleaf · 2023-08-19T02:05:16.757Z

yeah 16/512. it flies

fish233 · 2023-08-19T06:51:50.008Z

interesting, i thought the mac studio would fly for 3D/graphics. i don’t get why they make the mac pro not competitive with top of the line Nvidia cards, since you pay big bucks for that + to me it feels they are targetting video/post/3D audience with that machine (i’ve only been toying with shaders for fun on my m2 pro mbp and they run smooth if translated to metal)

mleaf · 2023-08-19T07:29:37.495Z

I think yeah, Pshop, FCP, after effects, all that content creator jazz, sure, it runs fine. And 3D yeah you can do it, but yeah in heavier scenes and viewport render is where it starts to chug. At least that was my experience, maybe the 38 core would have helped?

But yeah, for non linear editing and compositing the current line smashes it, particularly pro res output, but I think the next line will start to see some serious gains - with their AR thing on the horizon they’re going to need to put some cash behind that or what are devs going to make their work on… Windows?

Even still, by the time that drops the 5000 series will be here. But I do think Apple want to start being a competitive platform for gaming. M3 will show signs… ie M3 Max will be where the M2 Ultra currently is. So Apple Silicon is gaining pace. But for the minute you still just get more bang for the buck by going a dGPU.

And I think for me in the end - all of that Adobe stuff and video editing software - it all runs fine on my MacBook Air - like totally fine. So I didn’t see the point of the Mac Studio in my case. Too little gain for too much dosh.

Jazzmess · 2023-08-19T07:42:25.876Z

I have been doing this journey backwards. I don’t find Ableton on my Mac mini pro M2 to handle well heavy workloads. I really love the Slate and Ash libraries, but it puts me off when the load is allocated to the efficiency cores, while the performance are just idle. For the usual loads, it does the load spreading across the cores quite well. But still with all those great M4L devices, I don’t feel like dropping Ableton, so I’ll be building a 7950x desktop.
Still I feel the Macbook air M1 is an incredible all rounder, nearly 3 years after it’s launch. Gonna keep that one !

fish233 · 2023-08-19T08:25:11.932Z

Did you run at 128 buffer size? I read somewhere using higher buffer sizes Live switches to efficiency cores more often. TBH i ran the ableton 11 demo and was a bit disappointed with CPU performance in general but i’m so used to Reaper its awesome efficiency.

Soarer · 2023-08-19T08:33:12.930Z

I bought a MacBook Pro M2 when it came out and I am very happy with it. It runs my Resolume projects without any problems and they are quite heavy with generators and effects (the fan is rarely running). I’m surprised to hear that a maxed out Studio M2 cannot run some 3D stuff. Could there have been some problems with it?

Jazzmess · 2023-08-19T08:40:22.608Z

Yes, I tried of course, that the only way to force the allocation to the perf cores, you don’t have process lasso on macs. That’s to do with the way Ableton handles buffering so that’s to be expected. Still pretty impressive what a 25w tdp can do !

mleaf · 2023-08-19T08:58:55.620Z

Well yes Resolume is not 3D work exactly. I’m not saying there were problems explicitly with the Studio, but that, I could feel the ceiling of performance in certain apps (Blender, Unreal Engine, for example). And some native game titles to Mac OS gave a mediocre experience also.

But yeah I’ve run Processing and VDMX and apps like that even on an Air and it flies, as would Resolume, it’s the specific use case of runtime 3D apps where the horsepower became obvious to me.

Soarer · 2023-08-19T09:03:19.435Z

I see. That’s too bad for such an expensive machine.

mleaf · 2023-08-19T09:06:03.695Z

I think it’s pretty clear tho, the consensus at the moment is that that is absolutely the case, but I sort of jumped in all wishful thinking like, and you’re right and as I said you can certainly get on making some stuff. If you have a certain workflow that matches the Studio/M2 Max you’re good. But for certain apps it’s another generation or two off. Which is cool, Apple absolutely smashed it for most tasks. I bet their sights are absolutely on 3D for the next couple iterations

Soarer · 2023-08-19T09:20:53.957Z

Do you know if 3D graphics also would be a problem on an M2 Mac in TouchDesigner or does it run well?

mleaf · 2023-08-19T09:52:05.334Z

Touch Designer runs nicely in my experience. I mean with Touch it all depends on what you’re doing, but I dunno those days of TD just instantly turning your fans on seems to be over. You can cruise around casually and patch things. I haven’t pushed it far enough to a point where I’m seeing dips to be honest, but I’ve opened some pretty sweet patches and they all seem to hum along at 60. All depends on your output res and stuff tho. I’m just on non commercial which caps you at 1024 or whatever it is

deadfly · 2023-08-19T10:13:22.781Z

You might find this useful:

It sounds like 8gb is fine but I think I’ll go for 16 when I eventually get one just to be on the safe side

Storage space is a personal thing - I currently have 512 on my Intel MBP which is enough for me but I’m already using over half of it so I wouldn’t want any less

holonology · 2023-08-19T10:51:27.186Z

fish233:

Did you run at 128 buffer size? I read somewhere using higher buffer sizes Live switches to efficiency cores more often. TBH i ran the ableton 11 demo and was a bit disappointed with CPU performance in general but i’m so used to Reaper its awesome efficiency.

This is a good video explaining the how and what of current M2 CPU use (though to be clear, it is based on mastering not mixing or creative workflow.)

I’m on M1 standard in Live 11 (latest version) and have a session at the moment where I deliberatley pushed it (real world use, not the 100+ tracks test.) It survived without breaking up at around 70 tracks (needing to freeze one or two heavy things here and there) I set the buffer at 64 samples to see if the idea of lowering it helped any. More than enough headroom for hobby production, but I am relearning the idea that lower (rather than higher) is better for the buffer with M1.

I haven’t tested which cores this session is actually using yet. But from reading around the issue seems to be that Ableton can somewhat use the efficiency cores but doesn’t exploit them fully like Reaper. This explains Pro performance being higher because of course the Pros have at least 2 performance cores. The more puzzling thing is that anecdotally, people say that Logic runs very well (as you’d expect from an Apple product.) But James’ video suggests in theory Logic runs more or less the same as Ableton. Abelton has seemingly become more unstable and seems the chew up CPU more readily; specifically this seems to be tied to the slew of new features released around Push 3.

It does feel like M1 was a big step forward and it’s just going through a bumpy phase now. I guess 70 tracks is still pretty mega performance wise, but it does feel like you need to freeze & flatten more than the vanilla v11 release. I’m not sure how possible it is for developers to target the efficiency cores, but for Live 12 and beyond that would make a big difference.

g3o2 · 2023-08-19T12:01:07.886Z

deadfly:

Storage space is a personal thing - I currently have 512 on my Intel MBP which is enough for me but I’m already using over half of it so I wouldn’t want any less

With SSD, it makes sense for purposes of storage medium longevity to go bigger.

fish233 · 2023-08-19T12:35:01.037Z

personally i had the impression Logic got better compared to the intel era. But after a long transition i finally switched to Reaper, it just worked better for me. currently working on projects for somebody else and these span about 150-180 tracks with loads of busses and auxes, hitting reaper at 650% cpu or so on my m2 pro mbp (it’s kinda crazy). but i switched almost completely to arm plugins.

Novitchok · 2023-08-21T11:40:03.035Z

My personal impressions from M1 8/256 and M1 16/1Tb: the one with bigger RAM size is snappier. And in case of RAM hungry tasks it will help to reduce memory swap thus saving some life to SSD. If you are in DAW, VST, video editing - go with 16. AS for M2 - never buy base model! he base model for everyone must be 8/512 and not 8/256! 8/256 configuration of M2 is very slow when copying files as 256 GB SSD is the slow one.

victorcampos · 2023-08-21T11:48:05.284Z

Just to add personal experience: I’m a software engineer and completely switched to Macs for the past 10+ years (before that I was used to Windows and Linux machines for almost 2 decades), my workhorse is a M1 Max 64GiB, etc. but for my personal needs in photography and music I bought a M1 Air 16GiB/512GiB storage in 2021 and have been 100% satisfied with it. There’s nothing I’ve tried to do yet that I felt the M1 Air being slow, I don’t do 3D but I play around with Resolume and some other lighting/DMX stuff.

It’s snappy, much more than my old work computer (a 2019 MacBook Pro Intel maxxed-out with the i9 and 64GiB RAM), I don’t see myself needing a new personal computer for at least the next 3-5 years, by then my M1 Air will be 5-7 years old.

Storage will eventually thin out, even with a 1TiB internal SSD I wouldn’t be able to have most of my photos + music projects in the computer so I preferred to save money and only get 512GiB. I have 2 external SSDs of 1TiB each for longer term storage, any project I’m currently working on can live in the computer and I offload to the external SSDs once I see my storage filling up.