Speed up Mac M1 Ultra – Davinci Resolve

Hi,
on work I got a new machine.
Mac Studio mit Apple M1 Ultra
128 GB of shared RAM.
A Monster with 20 Cores.

It seems that BMD is not really fast in comparison to my old 2017 iMac I can not see really a perfomance upgrade. It is a bit quicker in export but realtime editing with fusion is as slow as on my iMac.
I used proxy media and tried to do anything to get a better playback performance.

Any suggestion on best preferences for M1 Macs or how to configure Davinci Resolve for M1 Macs?
Thanks for help

Where is your media located? If you see no significant increase in performance, it might be that your storage is your bottleneck (NAS, USB disks etc). Proxy media will help a little bit, but not a lot, and won't be different between devices.

My Media is stored on a TB3 drive connected directly to my mac.

[Peter Chamberlain]

Could be codec Or maybe the grades you have applied are not demanding.

but realtime editing with fusion is as slow as on my iMac.

fusion is just slow, has some caching issues, some nodes are gpu accelerated, some not. it really depends on what effects you are using in fusion, but in most cases things will get laggy, no matter what monster machine you have.

True...

Fusion is not a realtime software. Period.

With demanding functions in Resolve itself, I can see about 2x faster calculation times with my decent M1 laptop (see below) over my former iMac 2017, which even had an eGPU. Your monster should fly with things like NR or SpeedWarp.

Fusion really needs an overhaul, no two ways about that.

The UI needs to be partially reverted to the Fusion 9 interface and the performance is currently rather poor.

Various tools from the Color page should really be added as nodes both in Resolve and in the standalone Fusion Studio.

There is SO MUCH potential wrapped up in Fusion that it is extremely sad how much it currently seems to be neglected.

That there is room for performance improvement can easily be seen in that far more complex algorithms are carried out on the color page with drastically better performance than much more simplistic ones are used within Fusion in spite of the tools on the Fusion page generally being more targeted.

There is SO MUCH potential wrapped up in Fusion that it is extremely sad how much it currently seems to be neglected.

Super mega true

I Just bought a Mac Studio Max, base model, but my usual nodes set on DVR Studio 18.1 is 50% slower than my 5 years old DELL PC (32Gb RAM + 4xXeon@3.8GHz + nVidia P4000 + SSD). I checked the performance monitor and the CPU performance cores are doing nothing in render time, all seems to be carried on the GPU cores.
What seems to "kill" the Mac are motion blur + optical flow retiming.
My set up is rendering a simple 1080p sequence (25FPS@8bit H.265 both source and output) at 2FPS, while my old PC would do at least 4FPS.
Anyone with similar experience?
Am I doing something wrong or is that the "normal" performance to be expected from the Mac Studio Max?
I wonder if anyone managed to optimise the DVR workflow for Apple Silicon?

Screenshot 2022-12-05 at 00.41.05.png (631.94 KiB) Viewed 1159 times

My MacBook generally runs circles around my PC - see my signature for the specs - I also have a P4000 on my PC. For me, one of the advantages of the MacBook is its hardware decoding of my Canon 422 10-bit footage -so that is probably why I see such a huge difference. I haven't benchmarked the optical flow retiming and motion blur - perhaps those are much slower on the MacBook - I will have to give that a try.

Add - I tested with motion blur (from color page) and optical flow with standard motion estimation settings and my UHD timeline with UHD source (Canon 4:2:2 10-bit) played realtime. As soon as I added a more complex motion estimation (Enhance, Better), it dropped frames. It's worth noting that SpeedWarp killed the machine. I never use SpeedWarp and it seems with the M1 Max, it's not a very friendly option. I did a render-in-place and was getting about 1 fps render speed, lol.

Hi Steve,

thanks for you reply. It was indeed the speed-warp setting that killed the Mac.
Switched that off and got around 55FPS in rendering without any noticeable difference in the output file.

Great! That speed warp may be useful in some scenarios but it really is a killer. I'd be interested to know how the same test would perform with the latest nVidia 40xx series. Just for fun, lol.

Btw - I also noticed that my fans on the MacBook really kicked-in with the speed warp enabled - I'm not used to hearing them at all - it was a bit unsettling, lol.

Don't worry. Get TG Pro and it'll show you that even at full load Apple silicon stays much cooler than Apple's Intel machines.
This may give you some insights too:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/l6znbhmtjc3mm ... 0.pdf?dl=0