Video Games Tutorials and News - Is M1 Max Worth $400 Extra. Macbook Pro 14
Intro
maxed out max or maxed out max with m1 max to the max. The answer may surprise you. I know it surprised me, but it's no surprise that today's sponsor is Jackery. Thanks to Jackery for sponsoring this article. They have an Explorer 1500 power station that provides a huge 1500 watt-hour capacity with up to seven devices charging simultaneously, and it only takes four hours to recharge from zero to eighty percent.
M1 max
From the outside, there's very little to distinguish the m1 pro from the m1 max, so we went with space gray for the max books and silver for the pro books to tell them apart. Jonathan Horst over at Mac Address commented that he liked silver better than space gray this time around, and honestly, I kind of agree.
It's not that the space gray looks bad, but there's too little contrast for me, particularly considering the blacked out keyboard that Apple chose for the new generation of MacBooks. But this is a matter of taste, and I'm sure there are plenty of folks who'd like to see this thing totally stealth instead.
There is one major external difference between the M1 Pro and M1 Max, though, and that's in the display support. Where the m1 pro can handle up to two external pro display xdrs via thunderbolt, the m1 max can handle up to three while also using hdmi.
Specs
This 2.0 port for up to 4K output could lead to some impressive battle station setups for professional workloads.
You've got the integrated mini LED display, a span of three big displays' worth of workspace, and a large TV or color-calibrated 4K display for output preview. One question that's been asked a lot is whether the thunderbolt ports could handle an HDMI 2.1 adapter, and, unfortunately, hours didn't arrive in time for testing these laptops.
I'll test them all when we review the 16-inch model, so make sure you get subscribed for that; it's coming soon. How about on the inside? With these machines being otherwise so similar, could Apple also have given them the exact same cooling setup? Remember, the m1 pro caps out at 16 GPU cores while the m1 max can double that number and double the memory bandwidth, which together are sure to increase the heat output.
Let's pop the hood and compare the two. The apple's color matched the screws. How thoughtful, and they're the same picture.
Comparison
If I hadn't told you that the space gray was the m1 max, you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference just by looking at them. Unless you looked really closely at that heat spreader, it's just a little bit wider on the m1 max to cover that chip's larger footprint. Given how hot the m1 pro got, this makes me worry that we'll see some significant throttling with the m1 max.
First we'll see if anything changed for the CPU cores on the m1 max, and predictably , it absolutely did not.
Benchmarks
None of the m1 max's CPU scores are appreciably different in Cinebench r23, and this translates over to Geekbench, where we're effectively looking at run to run variants. The same deal with Blender, where we're stuck with CPU rendering until Blender 3.1 releases with metal GPU rendering support sometime in 2022.
You don't have to wait that long for our new shirt designs and a new water bottle from {889}, though they're available right now. You may be surprised by these results, though, given how much faster the system memory is. I mean, Ryzen would sure love to have a memory that fast. But it seems Apple's CPU cores just aren't taking full advantage of it, and based on these results alone, you might not be too impressed by the m1 max at all.
But the CPU is only half the picture. We don't have more CPU cores or even faster CPU cores, but what we do get are more GPU cores and an expanded media engine with double the encoder blocks and double the prores blocks. For this to be more apparent than in Final Cut Pro, we set up a 5x5 grid of 4k plus prores raw files and set them to appear one by one in the timeline.
Then we set the final cut to stop when it detects a drop frame. With the original m1 macbook pro stalled out at just four streams and the m1 pro dropped at seven, the m1 maxes out at 10 and 12, suggesting that the cut down model either has a slightly less capable prores engine or the extra GPU cores on the high end model are picking up the slack.
Whatever the case, this is a truly ridiculous number of pixels being processed all at once with no stuttering whatsoever. Four or seven simultaneous streams is already a lot, but let's say you don't run Final Cut, you're a resolve shop Well, good news for you too.
Davinci resolve
When rendering the prores 422 hq to take advantage of the pro res blocks, the higher end model gets scary close to a sub 10 minute mark on a timeline that is stacked with denoising, chroma keying, and filtering. Not a bad result, and our timeline's frame rate keeps up too, where we observed as high as 16 fps for the high-end model scaled by about 2 fps for each step down you take from there.
The Zephyrus, meanwhile, can only roughly match the lower-end M1 pro. That's a great result, but what if you need to render some 3D assets right now? The best solution on the Mac is Cinema 4D with the Redshift renderer. Surprisingly, the jump in performance from the m1 pro to the lower-end m1 max is substantial.
Cinema4d redshift
Thanks to the doubled memory bandwidth to go along with the extra GPU cores, the higher end max gives us nearly a 10 minute render, which seems impressive, up until the zephyrus comes along and smacks it down with a 539. Of course, that is a 16-inch PC laptop, but spoiler for the 16-inch review: the 16 m1 max doesn't do that much better.
We were told that the m1 max could outperform the rtx 3060 or even match the rtx 3080, and Apple calls out Redshift on their product page. M1, gotta take the l on this one. Geekbench 2 shows the Zephyrus and its rtx 3060 absolutely pummeling the m1 max in both render modes, which places the m1 max's GPU horsepower further behind than Apple had led us to believe.
Maybe there are more optimizations that still need to be done for non-article tasks on these GPU cores, or maybe it's just the media engine that was doing all the heavy lifting in our article editing tests. To be clear, it is scaling relative to the m1 and m1 pro, but it's just not reaching those dedicated GPU levels of performance we kept hearing about.
Maybe they meant games. Yeah, not again. We're seeing mostly linear performance improvements across the lineup in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, where feral interactive's port makes use of Apple's metal api, but it's not enough to catch up to the zephyrus, at least not at 14 inches.
Gaming benchmarks
A few other games use metal, so it's all downhill from here when we switch over to CS Go, where there's no difference whatsoever between the m1 pro and max, ironically, this time not because it's using OpenGL but because we've hit a CPU bottleneck at 100fps thanks to Rosetta.
