$4,000 M1 Ultra 48 Core Mac Studio: Does it deliver? IN DEPTH Benchmark and Testing

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In today’s video I’ll be putting the new Mac Studio with 48 core GPU M1 Ultra through it’s paces with benchmarks, real world tests, comparisons, and performance analysis. We’ll see how M1 Ultra performs for video editing, 3D Modeling, some M1 Ultra games, and synthetic benchmarks

Gear:
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[lukemiani]

All 3 Mac Studios are in the... studio... so buckle up! This is gonna be some insane coverage!

[rolfbause]

I see it this way: As long as you don‘t *really* know what you will need all this power for, the M1 Max Studio will be more than enough for most use cases… But it‘s great of course that machines like this are now possible.

[technetium_tech]

9:10 Luke, the reason why the M1 Pro and M1 Max render at the same speed is because metal isn’t enabled, so it is falling back onto the CPU to render. The subsequent test shows what the GPUs are actually capable of doing.

[CraigCruden]

If you 'upgrade' the M1 Max version to match the memory and SSD storage... it is only $1400 difference. So the processor and graphics core base works out to a difference of $1400.

[thefilmpoets]

Hey Luke, I'm interested in live playback instead of export times when comparing the m1 max vs the ultra. How many HEVC mutlicam streams can each play without playback stuttering? Arguably that's more important than saving two minutes on an export.

[Bucketofpancakes]

Wow they went a different direction with that Studio Display than I thought they would

[DragonsinGenesisPodcast]

I want to see that PC build vs M1 Ultra in video editing tests. Dropping in clips, scrubbing the timeline, adding transitions, etc. All the stuff benchmarks don’t show that matter more than export times.

[CuevadelRaton]

As a professional on videogames, i should remind everyone that Optix should not be use for final rendering jobs, only for previews and low sample rates, due to optix denoiser often leaves visible "smudges" on the final render.
Still optix is a time saver between previews and samples.
What is most important just for me and in my opinion is the viewport performance.

[melomaniakjm]

Thanks for the honesty regarding the 3D performance. Could you include AE performance in the next video? And not just Puget overall score but actual RAM preview speed?

[fshyvshy]

Was waiting for your coverage, finally here!

[sharonb.]

Great video. A tech reviewer said the Mini will ALWAYS have a speaker to guide the sight impaired through all the processes. I believe there’s a braille keyboard as well. Please be careful about the benchmarks you choose, many are incapable of accurately testing the SOC’s task distribution.

[geoffstrickler]

Pretty incredible that both CPU and GPU scaling is nearly linear on parallel tasks. Performance per watt is still amazing.

[alphaandliarize]

Your videos motivated me to finally get a mac. I bought me a Macbook Air M1 last year :) Thanks Luke! I love every bits of this laptop so much.

[robertgingg]

I’m glad I got the Max chip now in my Mac Studio. It doesn’t look like the Ultra chip is worth the extra money for video editing. Great job Luke!

[MadamLava]

caught this as soon as it went up, whew. Big Mac time!

[doctorkj]

Good, clever and down-to-earth review. I compared M1Ultra numbers you put on with my Ryzen PC (5900X / RTX A4000/ 64GB RAM) and the results are as follows:
Classroom CPU render - 248 seconds (so just in the middle between M1 Ultra and iMac Pro, with Ryzen 5900x being almost two years old chip)
BMW GPU render - 22 seconds (so 50% faster than M1 Ultra)

I agree Macs have a long way to go for serious VFX / 3D modelling work, but most importantly these little boxes will never be a substitute for an open PC box with all the parts easily accessible and replaceable like putting in third party NVME SSD. Maybe the next Mac Pro, but I doubt that also.

[jeffg]

Apple really pushed the notion of being on par with high-end PC hardware, while using far less power. Curious to see just how little (or much) power the Mac Studio is pulling during benchmarks.

[geminibodyshop]

im very happy with my m1 MacBook Air just upped the storage and went for the 8 and 8 core I do everything on it great video

[luckyduck]

Really curious how the M1 Max Mac Studio holds up to the same specs on the MacBook Pro. Does the increased thermal chassis lead to better performance?

[drsmith]

I’m wondering if the final cut time that was the same as the M1 Max is due to not being able to light up all of the encoders? Which could be a software issue. Looking forward to more tests.