MP 7,1 What tests would you like to see vs 2019 Mac Pro and M2 Ultra?

[chfilm]

This lines up perfectly with what I experienced last year when I compared the Mac Studio v1 to my 2019 Mac Pro. It beat the Mac Pro in almost every test that I ran, except when it came to r3d debayering in Resolve. the Mac Pro always was so much faster.. Have you tried using redcineX? I don't quite remember what I got there.. but overall my takeaway was that the dual GPUs in the Mac pro were just SO much faster than the Mac Studio. It can't be that they didn't optimize Resolve in the meantime, since they optimized so crazy for M1 hardware in general..

 

[impulse462]

I’d be interested in finding out the deep-learning capabilities. I have doubts the M2 could compete against 2x 6800XT’s, or even 2x RTX3090’s (running windows or Linux, but wouldn’t be directly comparable obviously).

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I doubt the M2 ultra would come close to top the line nvidia gpus for any realistic training workload.

 

[h9826790]

Can someone give some insight as to what might be going on here? I tested numerous times with no background rendering, clean library in Final Cut Pro. Davinci Resolve gave similar results.

The Mac Pro for this task, R3D raw to H.264 consistently does around 3 min 16 sec, while the M2 Ultra is 7 min 18 sec.

4k R3d raw on a 4k timeline, no background render on either, and cleared everything.

Or something else possibly wrong?

Exporting it to ProRes 422 HQ gave the same result, so maybe it's nothing to do with the H264.

Other similar tests I ran either have them closer, or the M2 ultra can even win sometimes - like if test 6K r3d raw I get different results.

Why would the W6800x duo be this much faster with H264 or pro res as the final export?



10 min 4k red raw on 4k 24p timeline, export to to h.264 (Similar results when exported to 422 HQ)

Mac Pro W6800W Duo 3 min 16 sec
Mac Studio M2 Ultra : 7 min 18 sec
MacBook Pro M2 max 8 min 36

And then different 4k file, but now 60p - and the M2 Ultra is faster below, but same H264 export.

10 min 4k60p red file on 4k timeline to h.264

Mac Pro W6800W Duo 3 min 9 sec
Mac Studio M2 Ultra : 2 min 45 sec

Any ideas?

Since you said the test files are from different cameras.

Therefore, from the tests results. It looks like

1) No matter from which camera. the 7,1 use its raw computer power to do the job. Therefore, always finish in about 3min.

2) Mac Studio's media can hardware decode the video from one camera but not the other one. Therefore, it shows a huge speed difference between the two tests.

Anyway, this is a very typical case of how Apple makes the new computer looks very powerful. The newer chip has a specific hardware to perform a specific task, which can outperform any exsiting computer, inlucding the very powerful Mac Pro. Then they claim how fast the new computer is.

But the realiaty is that only true for that specific task, when the codec change a bit, the media engine on the new chip cannot do the job, and must fall back to use software processing, then the older real powerful Mac Pro win.

 

[chfilm]

Since you said the test files are from different cameras.

Therefore, from the tests results. It looks like

1) No matter from which camera. the 7,1 use its raw computer power to do the job. Therefore, always finish in about 3min.

2) Mac Studio's media can hardware decode the video from one camera but not the other one. Therefore, it shows a huge speed difference between the two tests.

Anyway, this is a very typical case of how Apple makes the new computer looks very powerful. The newer chip has a specific hardware to perform a specific task, which can outperform any exsiting computer, inlucding the very powerful Mac Pro. Then they claim how fast the new computer is.

But the realiaty is that only true for that specific task, when the codec change a bit, the media engine on the new chip cannot do the job, and must fall back to use software processing, then the older real powerful Mac Pro win.

Was he saying different red cameras gave different results? M2 has no acceleration for red cameras afaik?

 

[h9826790]

Was he saying different red cameras gave different results?

He said that in post #22

M2 has no acceleration for red cameras afaik?

No idea what's the actual codec he tested. But the test result looks like software vs hardware decoding.

 

[chfilm]

I even tried it with both decompression and debayer settings mixed around in Resolve, but same results

He said he played with those- those are the settings in resolve where you tell it to use the GPU / CPU for different tasks, right?

 

[Yebubbleman]

I kinda had a feeling that W6800X/W6900X Duo and other combinations of multiple W6900X GPUs would still beat out M2 Ultra.