M1 Ultra Mac Studio performance is NOT what we expected....

All right, let's dive in here

We got Jeff Drew and any LG 5K displays at a good price on eBay now

Oh, dude, I'm seeing them all over the place. I saw a guy selling two LG 5K ultrafine displays

He wanted $1,500 for two of them. He had two of them

And they were like brand new condition. So if you're looking for a 5K display and you don't want to toss down the money for the Apple

Studio display, which if you're paying $1,600 for it, I don't think that I would do

that, then I think you could get a great deal on an LG UltraFine because a lot of those guys

who bought the LG UltraFine, they're selling them now to buy the Apple Studio Display

That's what it seems like to me. So I see them on Craigslist. I see them on Facebook Marketplace

I would probably defer to one of those two places rather than eBay, but they're also on eBay

So if you don't want to spend full price for the studio display, that's the way to go, I think

And we can talk about the studio display more, but yeah, we will. We'll. We'll, we'll. We'll, we'll

talk about it later because I'm about to get ahead of myself here again again you like lap yourself

hey there I am so let's talk about the M1 ultramac studio performance so I'm not here to bag on the M1

ultra mac studio okay I ordered one it's just been charged my credit card I am genuinely excited for

it okay I'm not here to just bag on it but the truth of the matter is is there have been a lot of

benchmarks that have come out this week a lot. People comparing the M1 Ultra to the M1

Max is a popular test. And there's one video in particular that I watched from Max Tech, the channel

Max Tech, which I don't know if you ever watch Max Tech. He does a lot of benchmark stuff. And

honestly, just to give some kudos to Max Tech, Max and Vadim, I don't think there's anyone that

does better benchmarks than them right now. They really go in deep and they benchmark the hell

of everything. And if you can see this frame from this video, you see his reaction to the M1

ultra benchmarks. This kind of summarizes the sentiment at this current moment. And for those of you

listening, Max Tech is sitting there with his hand on his face and his face is like pointed downward

Some of these benchmarks have been confusing because they're just not as good as you would expect

them to be. And Renee Ritchie did a video this morning talking

about the same thing. How the benchmarks aren't as good as we were hoping they were going

to be. And then basically he spends the first like 10 seconds of the video

telling you that the benchmarks aren't great. They're not looking good. And then he literally spends like eight minutes

doing some doing doing some mental judo to basically say well you know the benchmarks no one cares about benchmarks come on who cares

about benchmarks they're not important people don't even understand them i don't even understand them

so don't worry about those benchmarks you'll be happy as long as you just ignore those those darn

benchmarks it's going to be fun now look i i'm just poking a little bit fun here but i was i was watching

the video i was like i was like if i were in front of rene having this conversation i'd be like

Renee. Really? Is that really how you feel? Do you really think that benchmarks don't matter

I mean, they aren't the whole story. I will agree with him on that point. They are not the whole story

There's a lot of real-world tests that are hard to measure because they are things that you do within

your Final Cup pro workflow or something. And there's no real good benchmarks to measure those

specific things. But they do matter. They definitely matter. And they are a good indication

of overall performance. And I think the confusing thing is, is there are benchmarks

and I'll go through some of these here and just a sec. Sorry for the preamble here. There are some benchmarks where the M1 Ultra does really well

but there's a lot of benchmarks where it doesn't. And my point is that you're spending $2,000 extra dollars on an M1 Ultra

The advantages should be obvious. They should be jumping off the page and slapping you around like that

You know they shouldn be hard to find You shouldn have to be nitpicking and looking through and trying to find the one place where the ultra is better Like it a addition The benchmark should be obvious

The real world test should be crystal clear on how this is performing better than an M1 max

And right now, the truth is they're not. In a lot of instances, the M1 Ultra is performing as good as the M1 Max

And in some cases, a little bit worse. How can that be? I know

Well, that's the question. That's the question. And that's what we're going to talk about here in a second. So I'll point you to this great benchmark and thermal video that Max Tech did

And I'm pulling out some of the observations that they had and some of my own observations looking or watching their video

And we'll just talk about benchmarks here just at a high level. Okay, I'm not going to go too and deep here

I'll let you go watch the video yourself. But this is the sentiment that you need to keep in mind

Okay. VM1 Ultra. So, in the, well, one of the first observations I would make is, like, the Mac Studio, I think across the board, everyone's saying, dead quiet. The thing just doesn't turn the fans on ever. Like, you can barely ever hear it, which I think is an important feature because a lot of us don't like having noise when we're doing our editing and having the fans screaming. Also, the other thing, and this kind of goes hand in hand with, the fans not coming on is that they, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the

cores of the M1 Studio or the M1 Ultra don't actually get that hot

Like they hover between like 35 and 50 degrees Celsius, which have you ever built a PC

like an Intel PC, you know, is like, that's like less than idle for an Intel CPU, right

Like an Intel CPU will get to be like a hundred and, you know, 20 degrees Celsius under load

and maybe 50 under idle. So that's really good. So let's talk about benchmarks now

So the M1 Ultra was about. 70 to 75% faster than the M1 max in the 3D mark benchmark

Okay. So that's good. That's really good. That's probably about as good as I've seen from a benchmark's perspective

Like you would expect that the M1 Ultra would be twice as fast as the M1 max because it's two M1

maxes fused together. But from what I've seen, that never actually happens

Like the best that I've seen is it might be 70 to 80% better than one M1 max, which is good

But it's not double the performance as you might. expect, okay? And one of the observations that Max Tech had was that it kind of seemed like

throughout all these different tests, the M1 Ultra never really got, it never really was being

maxed out, right? It always seemed like something was being held back. It wasn't getting as much

wattage as it could have handled. And so it wasn't being utilized as much as much as you would

think that it would be, which could be a reason, one of the reasons why the performance isn't as

good as you would think it would be. So, let's move on to CineBench. And the CineBench test

it performed very well. And actually, it did beat a 3080 GPU by about 10% in that test. And it

barely lost to the 3090, which I think is really impressive. So it's a super powerful GPU

it was also, you know, not very hot the entire time. The fans didn't come on while this test was happening

So that's impressive. In the blender test, this is where things kind of got weird

And there are all the tests that I could talk about, which we don't have time to go into today

where these results are kind of similar. So in the blender test, the M1 MacBook Pro

they were doing a GPU test, and it did the test in about 1 minute, 52 seconds

And the Mac Studio did that same test. in one minute and 18 seconds

So, one minute and 52 seconds for the MacBook Pro with a

let's see here, what did it have, the M1 Max, and then one minute in 18 seconds

for the Macs studio. Now, Lewis, that seems like not a really big improvement to me

Wouldn't you agree? It's like, you know, I mean, it's faster. What is it? Like maybe a fourth faster or something like that

That's like 34 seconds faster. So I mean that not nothing But you would expect it to be a lot better for what the M1 Ultra is right It should be you would think that it would be closer to like half the time But it not that much faster

That's troubling. I think that's troubling. Let's move on to Final Cut Pro

In the Final Cut Pro export test, the M1 or the M1 Max in the MacBook Pro did the export in about

a minute in 22 seconds and the M1 Ultra in the Mac Studio did the test

in a minute in 17 seconds. So you got a five second improvement there

Now that's just straight up weird, right? Add all those five seconds together, pretty soon you got a minute

Yeah, right. Over the... There you go. That's some optimism. Over the

course of the year, you're going to save yourself six minutes, solid six minutes

You know, if you're doing video work every single day. Now, it is worth noting that, and this could be part of the mystery of what's going on here

that not all the apps that are out there have been updated to take advantage of the M1 Ultra, right

That's a common sentiment that I have heard. And that initially makes sense until you think about the fact that, well, wait a second

the M1 Ultra was designed to be recognized as a single SOC, right

by applications. And the whole point of fusing the two M1 Maxes together in this way was that you wouldn't

need to optimize. I thought you wouldn't need to optimize your application to take advantage of the

extra horsepower because the system does that for you, right? It's like it's built into the M1

Ultra. It's just one chip to your system. And so for me, I'm confused. Why aren't all apps

immediately able to take advantage of the power of the M1 Ultra? I don't understand that. Maybe

there's someone out there that does. It doesn't make sense to me. It seems like we should be

seeing really clear and obvious results from the M1 Ultra right off the bat. And then they should get

even better if apps somehow optimize for the M1 Ultra. The other thing I would say is

there is apparently a newer version of Final Cut Pro that Apple has been using for their benchmarks

and they include those benchmark scores on Apple.com, but they haven't released it. So the current version

is 10.6.1, which is like four or five months old. and Apple is using 10.6.2, which is a reversion that's not even out yet

So people are saying, oh, well, the reason we're not seeing crazy good Final Cup pro

performance is because 10.6.2 is not out. Maybe. Maybe. But again, I go back to my original point

Wasn't the whole point of the M1 Ultra that that system saw that as one single SOC

You wouldn't have to optimize. So again, I'm confused. and back to Renee Ritchie

I mean he was saying like well the benchmarks are confusing and they're hard to do

and you know people misunderstand them and you really need an expert to interpret them

I think those are all valid points but it shouldn't be this hard to interpret

you know what I mean like the benefits of the M1 ultra should be readily apparent

I think for all to see you shouldn't need some mystic crystal ball reader

to interpret the benchmark results for you. They should be obvious. You're paying an extra $2,000

I think that the benefits should be obvious. Are you with me so far, here, Lewis

Yeah, I mean, my first thought was it must just be that the software isn't quite ready for it

or whatever to take advantage of the full power. But yeah, I don't know

I mean, I watched that whole video too, and honestly, just I couldn't even

I just don't care that much about benchmark. I care. Does the computer work and do what I needed to do

I find shocking. That was kind of René's point. I feel like that was René's point

Exactly. Like, don't worry about those kooky benchmarks. Like, don't worry about those guys

Come on. No one cares about benchmarks. Like, I just thought he was being a, he was being acrobatic in his explanation, right

To justify the, the upsetting benchmark performance that we've seen. so far And by upsetting I don mean it bad I just mean it not as good as we had hoped it would be for the amount of money that you spending Well and they said or you said that some of the things were it actually performed worse on Yes What was that What was that Drop test I mean what was it They

played kickball with it, right? So like they dropped them on their foot, kicked it, and they did

the soccer match. I mean, there were tests. And, and I'm not completely shocked by that because

in single core performance, in some tests, it doesn't do as well as the, you know, it doesn't do as

the M1 Max or they're really close because the M1 Ultra, its power is its extra pro res

encoding engines, it's extra cores, CPU cores, its extra GPU cores. So if you're just doing

something that measures single core performance, then yeah, it's not going to win necessarily

in those benchmarks because you're not taking full advantage of its benefits. And I get that

but there's a lot of those kinds of tests that it seems to not really do a whole lot better

so that begs the question what is the M1 Ultra actually better at right

like what is what is the purpose of all that extra power sapping your wallet

besides enriching Apple yeah you know what I mean and again I ordered one I'm not like

abandoned ship this thing but but I do wonder maybe it seems as though

most of us probably would be better off with the M1 Max

unless you're doing something really specific that takes advantage of the M1 Ultra's power

but that kind of goes back to my question what are those things right

like in what areas would the M1 Ultra actually be completely utilized

if you're doing a lot of 8K content that seems to be one of the areas

but if you're doing 4K content it doesn't seem like you're actually

gaining a whole lot by by switching to the M1 Ultra I don't know I mean that's why I'm buying one

so I can do the test myself but it is surprising right like it should have been in this in this first round of benchmarks we were all like holding our breath

and excited to see what happened and then once we saw the results it was like whoopee cushion you know

it was like it was very deflating it was like wait a second i spent four grand five grand on this

machine the machine that max tech was was using was um almost six grand and it's like wait a second

like this isn't necessarily outperforming my MacBook pro now that is a pickle

because that's a whole lot of extra money and I know you like pickles I do like pickles

I actually pickles are delicious I also love pickles like you know those

those big weird ones the gross or at the gas station the fluorescent ones

like those fluorescent green ones are just floating around in that jar of urine all right let's see here

let me see Samuel Burke is saying I think Apple's playing safe

the Mac Studio is going 60% of power there has not been

a Mac OS update since the Mac Studio. Well, that could be it

I mean, the answer might just be updates, right? We just need updates. But if that's true, then where are those updates

The Macs Studio has been out for a week and there are no updates yet

And going back to what Tim Baker in the chat is saying is the Vergecast was saying that the beauty of the M1 Ultra

was that it didn't require apps to update to support it. Yeah, that's what my understanding is too

The whole point of the M1 Ultra was that your system, sees it as one

SOC so why would apps have to update for it that's the part that troubles me and makes me

think that maybe we're not actually going to see significant performance increases

going forward even with updates so I don't know I'm just giving you guys

the information and this is the stuff that I think about because I'm plurking down my own money

on this and from my perspective I'm like well if I didn't spend

the extra money for the for the M1 Ultra that pays for

the the Apple studio display, which we'll talk about here in a minute. So it's a lot of extra money

You know, two grand for the M1 Ultra is a lot of extra money. And if you're not going to get

that much value out of it, then then it's worth talking about because you might want to save

yourself the extra money. I don't know. This is just all the stuff that I'm thinking about