Blackmagic Forum

Well surely now we have machine now capable of running Davinchi Resolve the way it was intended to be used. I for one have just bought the M1Pro 16gb version just because it arrives on Tuesday. Hopefully now I’ll be able to complete a project that I couldn’t do on my 2012 MacBook Pro. Who else is upgrading?

I am. My Mac mini was just intended to be a stopgap during lockdown. Now that I will travel more again, I'm happy to get a powerful laptop (didn't have one in years). I went for the 16" (for my ageing eyes), but limited myself to M1 Pro and 32 GB because of the prices out side of the US. I'm sure it'll outperform my iMac plus eGPU, which died recently and was always good enough for me.

And I envy you for the delivery date! I went to the store as soon as it was up again and the ordering crashed again and again. Now I finally got a delivery date between November 3rd and 8th. Sigh.

I'm planning on getting one as well, but don't have enough $$$ to get all the features I want.
So, I'm stuck trying to decide which one of these two configurations that I can afford would yield better results in Resolve, at least in theory since reviews/testing aren't out yet.

A - The M1 Max 10-core CPU / 32-core GPU with 32GB of RAM
or
B - The M1 Max 10-core CPU / 24-core GPU with 64GB of RAM

Any pros and cons to each configuration?

Thanks in advance for your input!

I think that simply depend on your timeline resolution vs complex effects. If things like an 8K timeline are lurking in your future, and/or massive Fusion work, get 64 GB.

For lots of grading and effects in Resolve, which have been slow on your current GPU but didn't trigger video memory warnings, go GPU.

That said, with the insane speed of those internal SSDs, some swapping may not matter too much anyway.

Thanks for the response.
I forgot to include in my original post what I will be working with:

The max resolution of my source footage, timeline will be 4K in ProRes HQ or BRAW with moderate to heavy color correction/grading. Most exports will be in 4K in h.265 and I'll start experimenting with HDR since the screen will be able to support that format.

Get the Max.

Marc Wielage wrote:Get the Max.

I'm getting the Max. I'm just trying to figure out if more GPU cores or RAM would be beneficial for my workflow.

Wonder when we will see the Mac Mini versions. For me Windows user a Mini may be a better solution than waiting for an upgrade to RTX 3080Ti for my PC.

ksilva wrote:

Marc Wielage wrote:Get the Max.

I'm getting the Max. I'm just trying to figure out if more GPU cores or RAM would be beneficial for my workflow.

The cost difference between the 24 and the 32 cores and memory is about $400. Go with the 32 core 64Gb M1 Max so there won't be any regrets down the road.

SkierEvans wrote:Wonder when we will see the Mac Mini versions. For me Windows user a Mini may be a better solution than waiting for an upgrade to RTX 3080Ti for my PC.

I'm exactly in the same boat as you are. I would prefer a mini. The laptops however have HDR displays which is nice too but I already have a set of displays that I'd rather use the extra money for the laptop somewhere else. Unfortunately, we can never know if a Mac Mini version is in Apple's horizon.

In the absence of test data from the new M1 Pro and Max chips, the chatter on social media is that these chips approach the GPU power of a RTX 3070 -- but Apple's graph, shown in the presentation, is for mobile versions of those GPUs, not the desktop versions.

Those mobile GPU's are only about 60% the strength of the desktop version. e.g. a mobile 3070 is only about 60% of the performance of a desktop 3070.

If so, then these M1 Pro and Max GPU performance, in real life, might be a bit of a letdown, compared to the high expectations.

Maybe it might take 1-2 further iterations of these M chips i.e. 1-2 years, to bring real power that is already achievable on, say, a PC that has a 5950X and 3080.

I'm just speculating.

I presently have a M1. Maybe the best time for me to upgrade will be in about 2 years time as it approaches the end of the 3 year AppleCare+ deadline. Right now, it's not even the 1 year mark for my machine.

Well, since they don't get throttled when off mains, they should still be very attractive if you need to be mobile.

Yes I am sure that a Threadripper system with RTX3090 etc will be more powerful. The value I think is hardware decode and encode for editing on timeline. It may well be that high quality software encoding will still favour the high core count PC. Having video files and project on external drive would be easy to just use the more powerful PC for the final encode anyway. That is what I have in mind. Will have to see what the real performance comparison is when and if we see a Mini. I am not really interested in the laptops.

ksilva wrote:I'm getting the Max. I'm just trying to figure out if more GPU cores or RAM would be beneficial for my workflow.

Ya know.. with Resolve, "more" is usually better. I went with maximum cores and 32GB of RAM, and I think that's enough to use the laptop as a secondary system. Maybe I'll throw in the towel in the next couple of weeks and change it to 64GB just to go crazy. For now, I think we're fine.

Would I get this if it was our only machine? Tough question. I'd say at the moment, we don't know. We'll have to wait until people test it with standard Resolve candle tests under real-world conditions. Since Rohit Gupta was in the video, I'd say you can be assured that BMD has tested the new MacBook Pros and they're very aware of the need to assure good performance. From the demos, it looks excellent.

rsf123 wrote:the chatter on social media is that these chips approach the GPU power of a RTX 3070 -- but Apple's graph, shown in the presentation, is for mobile versions of those GPUs, not the desktop versions.

Need to be careful with these generalizations. Is the "chatter" evaluating the GPU on the basis of 3D rendering (as in Blender), 3D gaming, bitcoin mining, or video processing (as would be the case for Resolve/Fusion)?

These have severely distinct requirements and which GPU performs better may be completely different depending on the task.

For example, mining cryptocurrency generally starts tasks going on the GPU then has relatively little communication back to the CPU. In this case the raw performance of the GPU is a deciding factor, having lots of GPU memory probably won't matter too much, and the speed of transferring data between the GPU and the CPU is largely a moot point. I would expect the RTX chips to have the advantage for this purpose.

For video processing, each frame may be completely different, so to efficiently process the video would mean transferring large amounts of data repeatedly from the CPU to the GPU and back, making the data transfer pipeline between the two critical to the performance of the task. I would expect Apple's solution with a relatively large amount of shared memory to give it a massive boost for this task, and it is likely that the M1 Max in particular will outperform the (mobile) RTX by a handy margin for this purpose.

3D rendering / gaming is likely to fall somewhere in between and which one has the advantage will depend largely on the nature of the scene being rendered.

Of course, we don't have all the details yet, so this is largely speculation until we get some real-world data in, but this would be my guess based on what little we know so far.

One interesting development is the adding of special hardware for very specific jobs like the new prores encode-decode. In general it goes backwards the major trend of last 10 or so years where previously specialized hardware gained more general purpose compute capability. I wonder how far this concept will be stretched.

Hendrik Proosa wrote:One interesting development is the adding of special hardware for very specific jobs like the new prores encode-decode. In general it goes backwards the major trend of last 10 or so years where previously specialized hardware gained more general purpose compute capability. I wonder how far this concept will be stretched.

Not really. The only thing new is prores. Something that supposedly didn't need hardware decoding. The implication being that Apple doesn't think the CPU can keep up. Which seems a little strange.

Intel added a few new decode and encode options to it's CPU last generation. HEVC 4.2.2 12 bit. AV1 decode. I forget what else.

Is Apple comparing the GPU to the latest Nvidia? Or do the AMD cards ?

rsf123 wrote:In the absence of test data from the new M1 Pro and Max chips, the chatter on social media is that these chips approach the GPU power of a RTX 3070 -- but Apple's graph, shown in the presentation, is for mobile versions of those GPUs, not the desktop versions.

Those mobile GPU's are only about 60% the strength of the desktop version. e.g. a mobile 3070 is only about 60% of the performance of a desktop 3070.

Judging from the M1 compute performance en relation to the amount of gpu compute units the M1 MAX will have the estimated compute performance of an Vega II (not the duo)