The Mac studio with Apple's new M1 Ultra chip
is a super powerful device.
But is it more powerful
than an Intel 12900K RTX 3080 desktop PC?
In this video we're going to compare
the performance differences in everything
from coding, creative workflows, using Adobe apps,
video editing, 3D modeling applications
like Blender and Cinema 4D Redshift, gaming and more.
We're also going to discuss
some major differences between the two,
that might just be a deal breaker for you.
And if that infamous chart from Apple is just one big lie.
Before we get started though
there are some things you need to know first.
First of all I really don't have
any kind of bias towards either system.
At the end of the day,
I'm going to buy whichever one suits my needs best.
Whether that is a Mac or a PC.
And so should everyone else.
And remember throughout this entire video
we are purely looking at raw performance.
Not the difference between MacOS and Windows, for example.
Okay let's get started.
Now, with the Mac Studio,
this is the base model M1 Ultra version.
I selected this version to keep the price points
of both machines relatively similar.
The PC is the equivalent of the M1 Ultra Mac Studio
in almost every way, such as Ram and price point.
Here's an idea of the cost breakdown
for all the parts involved for the Intel build.
Bear in mind, these parts are not only very expensive
due to the current global conditions,
but many of them
are also extremely difficult to find in stock.
Now the thought process
behind the testing strategy for this video
would take too long to discuss.
So I've put it on the screen
for you to pause and read if you are interested.
Okay, let's start
with some synthetic benchmarks for the CPUs.
Starting with CINEBENCH,
the multicore scores of both the M1 Ultra
and 12900K were fairly similar.
But the thermals, fan noise and wattage definitely were not.
But I'll leave that for a separate section.
For single core scores though,
the 12900K definitely comes out ahead
with a fairly significant performance difference
of around 26%.
So if your workflow
depends more on the speed of individual cause.
For example, many Photoshop workflows
or moving around the Blender Viewport,
you definitely will notice a difference here.
For all you programmers and devs out there,
here's the compile time for Mozilla Firefox.
Now the M1 Ultra is superior here,
but in all finessed the 12900K,
it's not typically used for developing and coding purposes.
There are more specialized CPUs for that
but that's not the topic of this video.
Moving on to some Adobe workflows.
This is kind of where it gets a little bit tricky
because still even 18 months
after the first M1 Mac was released,
a lot of Adobe apps still have not been updated
to natively support Apple Silicon.
At the time of this video,
Photoshop Lightroom and Premier Pro
run natively on M1 Macs.
After effects however does not
but it does have a Beta.
Starting with a synthetic benchmark
and using the M1 native beta version of After Effects,
the 12900K only just outperformed the M1 Ultra.
Taking a look at the results.
It's really close here.
Pretty much everything except tracking score
is within the margin of error.
That being said, if we look at a real life project,
here's a 2D animation test file.
It seems that with native M1 Support
After Effects on the M1 Ultra is quite powerful,
at least for this specific project.
More complex or demanding ones might differ.
Now, seeing as After Effects is extremely Ram hungry,
bear in mind, the M1 Ultra
is able to access its DDR5 unified memory
at a speed of 800 gigabytes per second,
with extremely low latency.
This kind of integration is just something
you can't achieve on a PC build,
due to the plug and play nature
of the different components from different manufacturers.
So I'm definitely excited
to see how these results change,
when After Effects gets native M1 support.
Moving to Premier Pro
which remember is now natively recorded on Apple Silicon,
the M1 Ultra takes the win here.
And if we examine the individual results more closely
it is very close.
Really the only area the M1 Ultra is outperformed in
is the GPU Score, by about 20% in favor of the RTX 3080.
Usually Live Playback Score and effects score
is the most important,
because that's what you actually
spend most of your time doing when editing.
Photoshop and Lightroom
perform about the same as Premier Pro.
So I'd left them out to save time.
Except sometimes in Photoshop
if you're doing some tasks
that rely heavily on single cores,
you might see a bit of an improvement
due to the higher clock speed
of individual cores on the 12900K.
Let's take a look at video editing now.
Starting with a Multicam project,
here we have four streams
of really demanding color corrected 4K footage,
from a sorted GoPro, Sony and BlackMagic cameras.
The most important factor for video editing
is timeline performance.
So let's look at that first.
Timeline playback was very similar
but when scrubbing the M1 Ultra
was in noticeably smoother,
as you can see on screen at the moment.
Likely due to its hardware video decoders
kicking in for the H264 HEVC
and ProRes footage I was using.
When rendering out this 20 minute timeline
in 4K and H264, the M1 Ultra is again superior,
but not by a huge margin.
Moving on to some of the most hardcore footage
you can actually shoot right now.
And that is 4K 120 FPS 4:2:2 10 bit footage
from the Sony A7S Mark III at maximum bit rate.
Scrubbing this footage on the timeline
was once again smoother with less dropped frames
on the M1 Ultra,
but when it came to adding stabilization
to this entire five minute clip,
the PC was superior but not by a whole lot.
When we switch over to 8K R3D RAW footage from a red camera
real time playback and scrubbing is about the same.
But when rendering this two minute project
in 8K DNXHR 444 10 bit,
which is a codec more oriented to Windows workflows,
the M1 Ultra amazingly finished about 15 seconds faster.
Now I tested this multiple times and it is legit.
And I couldn't believe it first
because this is a Mac rendering in a Codec,
more typically suited towards high end Windows machines
but the Mac is doing it faster.
And I just couldn't wrap my head around that.
Now this is likely helped
by the M1 Ultra's massive 64 gigabyte pool of unified memory
that the GPU can access during this render,
versus just 10 gigabytes on the RTX 3080.
Now, ideally if you're doing a lot
of really complex video rendering,
you're probably going to go for a CPU such as a Threadripper,
but again we are just comparing these two in this video.
Moving on to some 3D work,
let's take a look at Blender first of all.
Now I'm using Blender 3.1 on both devices
which includes Metal GPU support
for cycles rendering on Apple Silicon Macs.
I'm also using version 12.2 of MacOS Monterey
which introduced additional support.
When considering CPU performance only
they're about the same.
But CPU only isn't indicative of real life performance
because 3D rendering tends to be very GPU heavy.
So after running the GPU benchmark for Blender
you see visually just how hard the Mac gets destroyed here.
In every single EV and cycles render that uses the GPU
the RTX 3080 outperformed the 48 core M1 Ultra,
by a factor of at least five.
Because it's simply more optimized and also uses optics,
which takes advantage of the ray tracing cores on RTX GPUs.
We also see these same performance gaps in 3D software
such as cinema 4D Redshift.
This time by taking advantage of the CUDA cores
on the RTX 3080.
Now I have discussed at length in past videos
that there's still a lot of work,
that both Apple and developers like Blender
need to undertake to increase and optimize performance.
And it is slowly happening.
But at least for the foreseeable future,
Apple Silicon just cannot compete
with an industry dominated by not only specialized GPUs,
like NVIDIA's RTX lineup,
but software designed specifically for GPUs.
Moving on to the most controversial topic of this video
and that is gaming.
Something that Macs traditionally are just not good at.
And this won't change anytime soon either.
Because right now most games use APIs
like OpenGL, Vulcan or DirectX 12,
none of which Apple supports.
Now Apple is too cool for that.
So they have their own API known as Metal
which is actually pretty good.
But the problem is there's only like three games
that are optimized for it.
And game developers currently
have almost zero motivation to support
or develop games for Apple Silicon.
Because Windows is still by far the most popular platform
for not only gaming, but just computers in general.
But what if the M1 Ultra on the hardware level at least
was actually pretty good at gaming?
Let's do a quick synthetic benchmark on GFX bench first.
When the Metal API is selected for the M1 Ultra
and DirectX 12 for the RTX 3080,
the difference between the two is actually not that massive.
Now you can still play some non- Metal games
on Apple Silicon Macs,
but they have to be emulated on Rosetta 2
due to using the OpenGL API.
Which runs great on Windows,
but not so great on MacOS and Apple Silicon,
as you can see here.
So looking at some life gaming examples,
such as Tomb Raider which is actually a best case scenario
because it does in fact have some Metal support.
You'll see that the M1 Ultra
can achieve a decent FPS in its own, right?
But the RTX 3080 greatly outperforms.
And not only that when actually in game on the Mac
you'll get screen terrain, dropped frames and stuttering
making the non-native gaming experience less enjoyable.
Okay, so up until this point the M1 Ultra Mac Studio
has been pretty much neck and neck
with the Intel build apart from of course
gaming and 3D modeling.
But that begs the question,
what are some performance cons
of going with the Intel build?
Firstly thermals and fan noise.
With the 12900K hooked up to a 280 millimeter AIO
in an open test bench and the fans at full speed,
the i9 was still pushing 90 degrees celsius
during a CINEBENCH benchmark.
For reference, he Mac Studio was completely silent
and CPU temps barely reached 70 degrees celsius.
And no matter what I threw at the Mac,
even intensive CPU and GPU loads combined,
it never made any noise
and it didn't produce a noticeable amount of heat.
The PC on the other hand,
well, when it was under load it kind of sounded
like a plane taking of.
And it would also heat up the entire room.
Here's an example.
(fans buzzing)
That's the sound of six fans
desperately trying to keep the 12900K and RTX 3080 cool.
Two on the CPU radiator, three on the GPU heat sink
and one on the Power Supply Unit.
Speaking of power during that CINEBENCH test
the 12900K was using 226 Watts of power,
versus just 60 for the M1 Ultra.
And for the GPU, here's the GFX Bench benchmark
while measuring total power draw from the wall.
Remember that the M1 Ultra was able to score
within about 10% of what the Intel and 3080 PC could achieve
in both these benchmarks.
But only needing about three times less power.
So it looks like those graphs Apple was showing
could be legitimate, at least in certain workflows.
But this is something I'm going to go into more detail in,
in a separate video.
And guys don't forget
that electricity these days is not cheap.
And in fact seems to be getting more expensive
due to what's happening in the world.
So if you are running this machine at full tilt
all day, every day in the long run,
you're actually going to save a significant amount of money
on your electricity bill,
by going with a more efficient machine such as this.
So for some people, even though the M1 Ultra
still falls short in Raw 3D
or gaming performance for example
and likely some other more niche software
the ability to get comparable performance
in all other areas to a high end 12900K RTX 3080 build,
but with no heat, no fan noise
and using much less electricity
is an extremely appealing option.
So yeah guys, some pretty interesting results here.
And I think the question that people are asking now
when deciding between the two,
is why choose a super hot and loud machine
when for the same price and performance,
depending on workflow of course?
You can get one that produces zero noise or heat
and needs four times less power to run.
Anyway, I hope you found this video interesting.
I was definitely surprised by the results.
But apart from that guys,
I will catch you in the next video.