News MacBook Pro 2021 benchmarks — how fast are M1 Pro and M1 Max?

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Oct 26, 2021
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The author has made a rookie mistake or is being intellectual dishonest with his readers. The author fails to mention that "Sid Meier’s Civilization VI" is a NON-NATIVE application written for the INTEL x86 Mac and has to be emulated on the M1 Mac in Rosetta 2's translation layer, which invalidates his claim that M1 Macs are not good for gaming. Try comparing two NATIVE games or applications and you'll see that it easily matches the best high-end mobile graphics chips, if not beating them with far lower power consumption.

Also, in performance per/watt, which is what matters in a laptop. The M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max destroy the INTEL and AMD chips.
 
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McD

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What's with those Geekbench scores for the original M1s? The Geekbench Browser site puts them at 7600 not under 6000! It's hard to trust the other scores after that.

Also, whilst the x86 vendor PugetBench is as biased as Intel AVX2 CPU renderer Cinebench, where are these figures on their site? Why are there only Premiere figures posted? I also see that screen refresh impacts the score so can TG disclose they had the MBP screen set to 120Hz?

Can also TG disclose if they were using the VideoToolbox when encoding in Handbrake as you can't really show off a SoC if you ignore the fast bits.
 
Oct 26, 2021
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Do you have any suggestion for native games that the author can use?


The point is that these tests were run using Mac x86 games being emulated in Rosetta, something the author fails to mention. Without telling his readers this, many will conclude that the M1 not good for gaming with native software instead of in emulation. I’ve seen articles like this repeated several times and people unfamiliar with Macs and the often poor x86 ports are simply coming to the wrong conclusions.

There are at this point few native games for the M1 on sale because many developers are still transitioning from x86 Mac to M1 Mac.

But one thing is different now that was not in the Mac market before, the plethora of Native iOS games for iPhone and iPad that already run native on the M1, like Civilization IV. The problem is that the Mac version in the AppStore is x86 but the iPad/iPhone version is native M1 ARM. The iPhone/iPad native versions will run on the M1 but developers have not allowed it yet, probably because the interface is designed for touch.

The bottom line is that these gaming tests prove nothing about the capabilities of the GPU for gaming. Once the native versions come along we will see very different results.
 

McD

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Do you have any suggestion for native games that the author can use?

Whilst only a few are M1 native (though I think Baldur's Gate has just converted), it's odd that so many already support the Metal API (where the graphics work is done) but haven't been recompiled for ARM. I would say ARM is an inevitability in the PC world. Maybe the M1 Pro/Max is the excuse they need whilst getting even a minimal return on their investment.
 
Oct 26, 2021
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Whilst only a few are M1 native (though I think Baldur's Gate has just converted), it's odd that so many already support the Metal API (where the graphics work is done) but haven't been recompiled for ARM. I would say ARM is an inevitability in the PC world. Maybe the M1 Pro/Max is the excuse they need whilst getting even a minimal return on their investment.

The iOS games market is huge and we will definitely see many of those native games scaled up to the desktop and the economy of scale the Mac didn’t have before will now com into play. The very game they tested here already has a native iOS version, so it won’t be long before these misguided benchmarks are history.
 
Oct 27, 2021
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This review is, alas, meaningless. First, as mentioned by the commenters above, his gaming benchmark used a game that can't run natively on the Mac ( and he did this without informing the reader).

Second, more generally, none of his benchmarks of the Macs vs. other mfrs. tell us anything, because we have no idea what he's comparing the Macs against.

Take, for instance, the HP ZBook Fury 17 G8. That's a highly customizable workstation. Specifically, it can range from a low-end Core i5-11500H (6 cores) with Intel UHD integrated graphics, to an ultra-high-end* Xeon W-11955M (8 cores) with NVIDIA RTX A5000 GPU (16 GB DDR). Without knowing which configuration of ZBook he's using (the only spec we're given is that it has 64 GB RAM), all his comparisons relative to the ZBook tell us nothing.

*With this CPU-GPU combo, 64 GB RAM, 2 TB HD, and a 4K display, it's $7,050, which is $2,750 more than an M1 Max with the same RAM and TB size ($4,300).
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/Confi...yId=3074457345620032820&urlLangId=&quantity=1

And it's the exact same problem with the Asus ProArt StudioBook 16 and the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio. All he gives us is the RAM. It's so frustrating when reviews lack the basic information needed to make them meaningful.
 
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vekspec

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I mostly do Adobe CC (Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, etc) and after reading some of the reviews on Adobe for the new M1s, I decided to bench my desktop and got a PS score of 1220. guess I'll just transition from my 2019 MBP 16 to my PC desktop ;)
 
Oct 26, 2021
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I mostly do Adobe CC (Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, etc) and after reading some of the reviews on Adobe for the new M1s, I decided to bench my desktop and got a PS score of 1220. guess I'll just transition from my 2019 MBP 16 to my PC desktop ;)

What reviews? What are you even saying?
 
Oct 27, 2021
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I mostly do Adobe CC (Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, etc) and after reading some of the reviews on Adobe for the new M1s, I decided to bench my desktop and got a PS score of 1220. guess I'll just transition from my 2019 MBP 16 to my PC desktop ;)

Something seems fishy here. If a desktop PC works for you for Adobe, that means (a) you don't need mobility for that work; and (b) you're happy working in Windows. But if that's the case, it doesn't make sense you'd be moving from your MBP to your PC desktop based on reviews of the M1 since, logically, you should have been using your PC desktop for Adobe all along (if it's got a PS score of 1220, it's roughly twice as fast as your i9 MBP).

Conversely, if you do need mobility for your Adobe work, then your desktop PC's score is irrelevant when it comes to choosing a machine for your mobile work.

I'm wondering if there's some mild trolling going on here...;)
 
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Oct 26, 2021
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I assume this is one of the reviews your talking about with a "clickbait headline", that clear shows the M1 Max meeting and beating the Alienware x17 R1 (RTX 3080 w/16GB GDDR6X) and the Zephyrus M11 (RTX 3060 w/6GB GDDR6).

Apple's M1 Max Benchmarked in Adobe Premiere Pro: A Mixed Bag

Clearly, Apple's claims are correct when it comes to mobile GPUs.

What's surprising is that the M1 Max achieved the same overall score as the desktop RTX 3090 w/24GB GDDR6x. While it was behind on some test by around 33% and ahead on others, these desktop versions consume far more power and are not cheap.

One factor remains, Apple has not enabled the unthrottled mode for the M1 Max, which is promised in the next MacOS point release later this week. We'll have to see how it performs when the laptop is allowed to run in PC "leaf blower" mode without concern for noise or power consumption.

Of course the M1 Max is just a laptop. The iMac will have a larger cooling system and the MacPro will have a whole new chip, likely dubbed the M1 Max Extreme, which will be double or more the current size of the M1 Max.

Clearly Apple is in the lead in performance and performance/per watt when it comes to laptops. We'll likely see the same on the desktop when the M1 MacPro comes online in about 6-9 months.
 
Dec 1, 2021
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Civ is used as a benchmark here because Civ is always used as a gaming benchmark. If it doesn't run natively on an Apple device, that's a problem for the Apple device. Apple fanboys are as cringy as it gets.
 
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