$4,000 M1 Ultra 48 Core Mac Studio - Does it deliver IN DEPTH Benchmark and Testing

The Mac Studio 2 has been put through a series of benchmarks to determine its performance capabilities. The GPU scores are significantly better, and it seems to scale very evenly with other systems, such as the M1 Max and M1 Pro. In particular, it demolishes the Vega 64 in Octane X and Teapot Render tests, which take advantage of the GPU cores.

Moving on to 3D modeling, starting with Octane X and the Teapot render test, it is clear that the Mac Studio 2 takes full advantage of its GPU cores. The M1 Pro model takes over 13.5 minutes, while the M1 Ultra version takes less than five minutes. This demonstrates the potential power of Apple Silicon in tasks like 3D modeling.

The BMW GPU Render test shows how the Mac Studio 2 flexes its strength. When Metal for GPU rendering is enabled, the times decrease significantly. Every additional GPU core doubles the time, but with each doubling, the time cuts in half - from 8 to 16 to 32 to 48 GPU cores. This highlights the scalability of Apple Silicon.

The Classroom Render test reveals that the M1 Ultra can actually beat the iMac Pro in CPU-based Blender tests. The iMac Pro was not considered in this test due to its limitations, but this demonstrates the potential of the Mac Studio 2 in certain applications.

The full suite of benchmarks has yet to be run, with additional tests planned to compare the 48 and 64-core M1 Max models against each other. Additionally, a PC build will be used for comparison purposes.

Some key observations can be made from these early tests. The Mac Studio 2 is a mixed bag, with varying levels of performance depending on the task at hand. In media encoding tasks like Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve, the system's performance is impressive but not revolutionary. However, in CPU-based applications like Blender, Apple Silicon struggles to compete with dedicated GPU solutions.

One observation that stands out is the comparative cost-effectiveness of the Mac Studio 2 versus other systems. The M1 Max MacBook Pro, for example, costs around $4,000 and offers performance similar to the Mac Studio 2's top-end model. This raises questions about what Apple considers "faster" in certain applications.

The article concludes by acknowledging that this is a complex picture and that there are no clear-cut conclusions. The author encourages readers to share their thoughts on the subject, and emphasizes the importance of continued benchmarking to better understand the capabilities of the Mac Studio 2.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday is a big day because in front of me is the base model m1 ultra mac studio now i'm calling this a base model because the way i see it there are two distinct mac studios there's the two thousand dollar one with m1 max and the four thousand dollar one with m1 ultra with a two thousand dollar price jump in between i think it's fair to split them up into distinct pricing brackets and that's the way that i'm going to review it so we're starting here with the 48 core version of the m1 ultra tomorrow i'll be bringing you guys coverage of the cheapest mac studio with the 24 core m1 max so make sure to get subscribed for that but in today's video we are going to be putting this thing through its paces no unboxing and first impressions here let's just get straight into it so make sure to like and subscribe turn on notifications so you don't miss any of my coverage and let's get into it today's video is sponsored by masterworks an innovative investing platform founded in 2017 by tech entrepreneurs and a top 100 art collector masterworks lets you invest in contemporary art for just a fraction of what they would cost to purchase with 1.7 trillion dollars of wealth held in artwork and expected 900 billion in growth by 2026 contemporary art prices outpaced the s p 500 total return by 164 percent from 1995 to 2021 an astonishing result historically art is an asset class limited to the fabulously wealthy that can spend 20 million dollars on a single piece but with just a few clicks masterworks gives you access to all of that potential at a fraction of the cost so far they have sold three offerings with each returning over 30 percent to investors with so much uncertainty in the market and top equity firm morningstar even predicting negative growth in traditional stocks now is a smart time to try something new with masterworks to skip the wait list and join over 350 000 investors already diversifying their portfolios head over to the link in the description below and now back to the video now i have to admit i was a little bit worried when the mac studio got here that uh the studio display wasn't going to get here in time but fortunately that wasn't a problem because here it is the studio display so uh looks a little different than i imagined it did but let's get all of this set up and get into some benchmarks all right so first things first um a lot of people were asking me on twitter to test out the internal speaker so before we jump into performance and benchmarks which i know you guys want to see um well now in the last video i was able to get these three piles of macbooks working they all have ram they all have hard drives it's not terrible it's just it's sort of a backup is the way i would put it now this is the m1 ultra which means 20 cpu cores and 48 gpu cords and the first thing that i'm noticing is just how small this thing is given what apple said it was on par with also i just put my hand by the vent and the air coming out of this thing is actively cooler than the air in this room it's actually air conditioning my studio right now that's pretty cool but with so much power in such a tiny package it begs the question when you're actually pushing the system what are the thermals like so let's find out just how well it copes i'm going to run the 10 minute loop of cinebench and while we have that going on i've got tg pro open here in the background so that we can see what the temperatures look like now we've already completed a few cinebench runs this thing is going insanely fast and the air coming out of the back is not warm yet okay we're on the final run here we're about to get our score the temperatures according to tg pro for most of the system are still around 40 degrees celsius though it is worth pointing out that tg pro doesn't yet support the m1 ultra so we don't have the exact readings for the cpu cores themselves the air coming out the back has just crested above room temperature it's slightly warm and here comes our score now 24 000. that is an insanely high score now granted it's not as high as a core i9 12900k but rest assured we will be doing a lot more in-depth testing in fact i'm building a pc with the specs that apple compared the m1 ultra ii the 30 90 and a 12 900 k so if you want to see some comparisons between the mac studio and a custom built pc make sure to get subscribed you'll also want to get subscribed if you want to see how the 48 core mac studio compares to the 64 core but now i think what we need to do is get some more benchmarks on this thing and put it through its paces comparing it to all the other apple silicon my ten thousand dollar imac pro let's get into it all right so to start off let's go through some synthetic benchmarks with geekbench 5 multicore here we can see a 24 000 score for the m1 ultra is vastly higher than all the other macs and even some high end intel chips however as we saw with cinebench r23 it's not the best for simulating the actual performance with a maxed cpu so moving on to some other cpu tests we have nova bench this is running in rosetta 2 so i wanted to see how it would perform when it's not as optimized similarly here we have a v-ray cpu test in both of these tests we can see that the m1 ultra isn't quite keeping up with the 18 core imac pro which gives you an idea of the impact rosetta 2 has next up in graphics we have geekbench 5 compute where we can clearly see that the m1 ultra 48 core outpaces the m1 max significantly it's even pretty much on par with a vega 2 duo but an rtx 3090 even when running in opencl while the max are running in metal just absolutely crushes it but over in shadow of the tomb raider which by the way is running through rosetta we see a very respectable result with the m1 ultra scoring 115 fps which is significantly higher even than the vega 64 in my imac pro that doesn't have to do a translation layer but now let's take a look at some real world applications starting with video editing in final cut pro now this was a bit of a weird test because in the final cut pro render where i stacked two 30-minute 10-bit 4k 60fps clips on top of each other applied color correction and waited for that to render we saw just a few minutes difference between the m1 max in the 16 inch macbook pro and the m1 ultra 48 core now all of these were dramatically faster than the imac pro and the same thing applies in the export time for that same project but here even we can see that barely any time was saved going from the m1 max to the m1 ultra and this continues over in davinci resolve where i took a 30 minute 10 bit 4k 60fps clip color corrected and did a pro res export of that and it took exactly the same time on the m1 ultra as the m1 max literally down to the second the same time moving over to puget bench premiere pro the overall score on the m1 ultra is just slightly higher than the m1 max but the gpu score is significantly better and what's more it seems to be scaling very evenly when you look at the m1 max and the m1 pro it's also demolishing the vega 64 my imac pro let's move on to 3d modeling starting with octane x and the teapot render which is pretty stressy and clearly takes advantage of the gpu cores because we can see a very clear scaling going from the m1 pro taking more than 13 and a half minutes down to the m1 ultra which took less than five moving over to blender the bmw gpu render shows how apple silicon is able to flex its strength and if you enable metal for gpu rendering not only do the times decrease significantly but you can basically see that every time the gpu cores double the time basically cuts in half going from 8 to 16 to 32 to 48 gpu cores and then if we look at the classroom render we can see finally here the m1 ultra is actually beating the imac pro now this is in the cpu version of blender and there's a lot more in-depth blender testing to come in future videos so make sure to get subscribed for all of those so that was a lot of benchmarks and i didn't even get to run through my full suite i have more that i want to compare this mac studio 2 i'm going to be comparing the 48 and the 64 core i'm going to compare the m1 max version i've also got a pc that i'm building over there that i'm going to be comparing so there's a lot more tests to run that you're not going to want to miss but initially what we can take from some very in-depth tests is that the max studio is a bit of a mixed bag it depends on what you're doing apple silicon is in a kind of a weird spot right now where in in many respects it's astonishingly fast i mean when you look at the final cut pro render times graph that we had from earlier everything just completely dunked on my 10 000 imac but that also includes the much less expensive and much less powerful m1 pro this which has double the cpu cores and three times the gpu cores only got you like three extra minutes on a really beefy render so we're starting to approach the limits of you know these media encoders are doing a great job but you only really need so many of them before the diminishing returns starts to set in we saw that in davinci resolve as well but then on the flip side we had stuff like octane and blender which clearly takes advantage of the extra power particularly the gpu power in octane and in blender we could basically see linear scaling every additional gpu core contributed to additional speed and that is great so if you are doing stuff like 3d modeling this is the right direction however it's not quite there yet because as you'll see when i compare this thing to a pc and especially blender running optics the mac has a long way to go so what does that leave us with well it's a bit weird right because this is a four thousand dollar machine which wasn't any faster than my m1 max macbook pro at exporting a clip now you could look at that and say well my m1 max macbook pro was also four thousand dollars so this gives you more performance in a lot of other areas for the same price if you exclude peripheries or if you already have peripheries like i do but then that means you could also look at it in the opposite way which is that for about half the price twenty two hundred dollars you can get this mac studio with the 32 core m1 max and theoretically at least when you're exporting your final cut project at least with 4k footage it's exactly the same so it's very difficult to make generalizations like apple does when they say we are as fast as an rtx 3090 with less power or saying we are as fast as a 12 900 k because it's not the same in different areas i mean when you look at video editing i'm sure this is faster in many ways than a pc setup but when you look at 3d modeling apple just cannot compete with optics which is exclusive to nvidia in blender so it is definitely not a black and white situation which is why i try to have as many benchmarks as possible i'm curious to know what you guys think in the comments down below personally i'm gonna need to see more we're gonna need to get more of these mac studios and test more things just to get an idea of where it is so if you're looking forward to seeing that let me know in the comments below and you can also let me know by liking and by subscribing so go ahead and do that and i will see you guys tomorrow in the next videotoday is a big day because in front of me is the base model m1 ultra mac studio now i'm calling this a base model because the way i see it there are two distinct mac studios there's the two thousand dollar one with m1 max and the four thousand dollar one with m1 ultra with a two thousand dollar price jump in between i think it's fair to split them up into distinct pricing brackets and that's the way that i'm going to review it so we're starting here with the 48 core version of the m1 ultra tomorrow i'll be bringing you guys coverage of the cheapest mac studio with the 24 core m1 max so make sure to get subscribed for that but in today's video we are going to be putting this thing through its paces no unboxing and first impressions here let's just get straight into it so make sure to like and subscribe turn on notifications so you don't miss any of my coverage and let's get into it today's video is sponsored by masterworks an innovative investing platform founded in 2017 by tech entrepreneurs and a top 100 art collector masterworks lets you invest in contemporary art for just a fraction of what they would cost to purchase with 1.7 trillion dollars of wealth held in artwork and expected 900 billion in growth by 2026 contemporary art prices outpaced the s p 500 total return by 164 percent from 1995 to 2021 an astonishing result historically art is an asset class limited to the fabulously wealthy that can spend 20 million dollars on a single piece but with just a few clicks masterworks gives you access to all of that potential at a fraction of the cost so far they have sold three offerings with each returning over 30 percent to investors with so much uncertainty in the market and top equity firm morningstar even predicting negative growth in traditional stocks now is a smart time to try something new with masterworks to skip the wait list and join over 350 000 investors already diversifying their portfolios head over to the link in the description below and now back to the video now i have to admit i was a little bit worried when the mac studio got here that uh the studio display wasn't going to get here in time but fortunately that wasn't a problem because here it is the studio display so uh looks a little different than i imagined it did but let's get all of this set up and get into some benchmarks all right so first things first um a lot of people were asking me on twitter to test out the internal speaker so before we jump into performance and benchmarks which i know you guys want to see um well now in the last video i was able to get these three piles of macbooks working they all have ram they all have hard drives it's not terrible it's just it's sort of a backup is the way i would put it now this is the m1 ultra which means 20 cpu cores and 48 gpu cords and the first thing that i'm noticing is just how small this thing is given what apple said it was on par with also i just put my hand by the vent and the air coming out of this thing is actively cooler than the air in this room it's actually air conditioning my studio right now that's pretty cool but with so much power in such a tiny package it begs the question when you're actually pushing the system what are the thermals like so let's find out just how well it copes i'm going to run the 10 minute loop of cinebench and while we have that going on i've got tg pro open here in the background so that we can see what the temperatures look like now we've already completed a few cinebench runs this thing is going insanely fast and the air coming out of the back is not warm yet okay we're on the final run here we're about to get our score the temperatures according to tg pro for most of the system are still around 40 degrees celsius though it is worth pointing out that tg pro doesn't yet support the m1 ultra so we don't have the exact readings for the cpu cores themselves the air coming out the back has just crested above room temperature it's slightly warm and here comes our score now 24 000. that is an insanely high score now granted it's not as high as a core i9 12900k but rest assured we will be doing a lot more in-depth testing in fact i'm building a pc with the specs that apple compared the m1 ultra ii the 30 90 and a 12 900 k so if you want to see some comparisons between the mac studio and a custom built pc make sure to get subscribed you'll also want to get subscribed if you want to see how the 48 core mac studio compares to the 64 core but now i think what we need to do is get some more benchmarks on this thing and put it through its paces comparing it to all the other apple silicon my ten thousand dollar imac pro let's get into it all right so to start off let's go through some synthetic benchmarks with geekbench 5 multicore here we can see a 24 000 score for the m1 ultra is vastly higher than all the other macs and even some high end intel chips however as we saw with cinebench r23 it's not the best for simulating the actual performance with a maxed cpu so moving on to some other cpu tests we have nova bench this is running in rosetta 2 so i wanted to see how it would perform when it's not as optimized similarly here we have a v-ray cpu test in both of these tests we can see that the m1 ultra isn't quite keeping up with the 18 core imac pro which gives you an idea of the impact rosetta 2 has next up in graphics we have geekbench 5 compute where we can clearly see that the m1 ultra 48 core outpaces the m1 max significantly it's even pretty much on par with a vega 2 duo but an rtx 3090 even when running in opencl while the max are running in metal just absolutely crushes it but over in shadow of the tomb raider which by the way is running through rosetta we see a very respectable result with the m1 ultra scoring 115 fps which is significantly higher even than the vega 64 in my imac pro that doesn't have to do a translation layer but now let's take a look at some real world applications starting with video editing in final cut pro now this was a bit of a weird test because in the final cut pro render where i stacked two 30-minute 10-bit 4k 60fps clips on top of each other applied color correction and waited for that to render we saw just a few minutes difference between the m1 max in the 16 inch macbook pro and the m1 ultra 48 core now all of these were dramatically faster than the imac pro and the same thing applies in the export time for that same project but here even we can see that barely any time was saved going from the m1 max to the m1 ultra and this continues over in davinci resolve where i took a 30 minute 10 bit 4k 60fps clip color corrected and did a pro res export of that and it took exactly the same time on the m1 ultra as the m1 max literally down to the second the same time moving over to puget bench premiere pro the overall score on the m1 ultra is just slightly higher than the m1 max but the gpu score is significantly better and what's more it seems to be scaling very evenly when you look at the m1 max and the m1 pro it's also demolishing the vega 64 my imac pro let's move on to 3d modeling starting with octane x and the teapot render which is pretty stressy and clearly takes advantage of the gpu cores because we can see a very clear scaling going from the m1 pro taking more than 13 and a half minutes down to the m1 ultra which took less than five moving over to blender the bmw gpu render shows how apple silicon is able to flex its strength and if you enable metal for gpu rendering not only do the times decrease significantly but you can basically see that every time the gpu cores double the time basically cuts in half going from 8 to 16 to 32 to 48 gpu cores and then if we look at the classroom render we can see finally here the m1 ultra is actually beating the imac pro now this is in the cpu version of blender and there's a lot more in-depth blender testing to come in future videos so make sure to get subscribed for all of those so that was a lot of benchmarks and i didn't even get to run through my full suite i have more that i want to compare this mac studio 2 i'm going to be comparing the 48 and the 64 core i'm going to compare the m1 max version i've also got a pc that i'm building over there that i'm going to be comparing so there's a lot more tests to run that you're not going to want to miss but initially what we can take from some very in-depth tests is that the max studio is a bit of a mixed bag it depends on what you're doing apple silicon is in a kind of a weird spot right now where in in many respects it's astonishingly fast i mean when you look at the final cut pro render times graph that we had from earlier everything just completely dunked on my 10 000 imac but that also includes the much less expensive and much less powerful m1 pro this which has double the cpu cores and three times the gpu cores only got you like three extra minutes on a really beefy render so we're starting to approach the limits of you know these media encoders are doing a great job but you only really need so many of them before the diminishing returns starts to set in we saw that in davinci resolve as well but then on the flip side we had stuff like octane and blender which clearly takes advantage of the extra power particularly the gpu power in octane and in blender we could basically see linear scaling every additional gpu core contributed to additional speed and that is great so if you are doing stuff like 3d modeling this is the right direction however it's not quite there yet because as you'll see when i compare this thing to a pc and especially blender running optics the mac has a long way to go so what does that leave us with well it's a bit weird right because this is a four thousand dollar machine which wasn't any faster than my m1 max macbook pro at exporting a clip now you could look at that and say well my m1 max macbook pro was also four thousand dollars so this gives you more performance in a lot of other areas for the same price if you exclude peripheries or if you already have peripheries like i do but then that means you could also look at it in the opposite way which is that for about half the price twenty two hundred dollars you can get this mac studio with the 32 core m1 max and theoretically at least when you're exporting your final cut project at least with 4k footage it's exactly the same so it's very difficult to make generalizations like apple does when they say we are as fast as an rtx 3090 with less power or saying we are as fast as a 12 900 k because it's not the same in different areas i mean when you look at video editing i'm sure this is faster in many ways than a pc setup but when you look at 3d modeling apple just cannot compete with optics which is exclusive to nvidia in blender so it is definitely not a black and white situation which is why i try to have as many benchmarks as possible i'm curious to know what you guys think in the comments down below personally i'm gonna need to see more we're gonna need to get more of these mac studios and test more things just to get an idea of where it is so if you're looking forward to seeing that let me know in the comments below and you can also let me know by liking and by subscribing so go ahead and do that and i will see you guys tomorrow in the next video\n"