While the new Mac Studio is just an under-the-hood spec bump, the M2 generation shows promising results in new benchmarks by YouTuber Luke Miani. Apple has made some key changes that show off the prowess and flexibility of Apple Silicon compared to Intel.
While the M1 Max and M1 Ultra are blazing fast, the difference between the two wasn’t as notable as some expected. In many tasks, the much cheaper M1 Max wasn’t too far off from the top-end M1 Ultra variant, especially in video editing, photo editing, and 3D rendering. Despite the M1 Ultra literally being 2 M1 Max’s fused, the performance was never doubled.
For the M2 series, Apple has made some significant changes under the hood, especially in GPU scaling. In Luke’s testing, he found that in some GPU heavy applications, like Blender 3D and 3DMark, the M2 Ultra was sometimes precisely twice the performance of M2 Max – perfect GPU scaling! In Final Cut Pro exports, it nearly doubled again. He also found that the M2 Ultra doubled the GPU performance of the M1 Ultra in these same benchmarks – a genuinely remarkable year-over-year upgrade.
The reason for the massive performance improvement is that Apple added a memory controller chip to the M2 generation that balances the load between all of M2 Ultra’s cores – M1 Ultra required the ram to be maxed out before using all cores.
M1 Ultra was very good at doing many tasks simultaneously but struggled to do one task, such as benchmarking or rendering, faster than the M1 Max. With M2 Ultra, because of this new memory controller, Apple can now achieve the same incredible performance without the memory buffer needing to be maxed out. It’s important to note that some applications cannot take advantage of the M2 Ultra fully, and in non-optimized applications, you should not expect double the performance.
Despite this incredible efficiency and performance, the better deal might be the M2 Max. In Luke’s testing, the M2 Max performed very similarly or outperformed last year’s M1 Ultra. In Blender, Final Cut Pro, 3DMark, and Rise of the Tomb Raider, the M2 Max consistently performed the same or better than the M1 Ultra. Instead of finding an M1 Ultra on eBay, it might be best to save money and get the M2 Max if you’re planning on doing tasks that heavily utilize the GPU. While the GPU performance is similar, the M1 Ultra still has the advantage of far more CPU cores, and will outperform the M2 Max in CPU heavy workloads.
The Mac Studio was quiet and never overheated throughout all of these benchmarks, a sharp decline from Apple’s previous attempts at small form factor computers – *cough* – 2013 Mac Pro.
It is exciting to see this much generational improvement from Apple, and while M2 Ultra is still not enough to satisfy my 3D scenes, in a few years, I do not doubt that I could finally switch to a Mac.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Comments