I Decided to Test the Power of Apple Silicon: My Experience with M1 Mac Mini and Planet Coaster

One of my favorite games is Planet Coaster, and I decided to download and install Steam along with it. The process of installing was quick and seamless, and firing up Planet Coaster, I loaded one of my more complex save games with lots of roller coasters. We did some virtual rollercoaster rides, and I found that running at 1080p on low graphics settings was a breeze, very playable. When I ramped it up to medium settings, it was just as good, but notching the settings up to the high preset I found frame rates were dropping somewhat. It was still playable, but not the best experience.

For reference, within the game there are two more presets beyond high, so we're not really doing anything particularly taxing from a discrete GPU point of view. Clearly, there would be no point in trying those higher settings on this particular machine of course. The M1 Mac Mini is not a gaming machine and hasn't been advertised as one. I won't be gaming on it, but I just wanted to see what was possible with that M1 GPU. Frankly, I was very impressed, particularly when you consider that this was running thanks to Rosetta, most apps probably work fine with Rosetta, but I did find one app that didn't, and that's One Photo Raw. There is a newer version, so maybe that does work, and your mileage may vary.

When it comes to video editing, I'm not doing any detailed tests yet, but I have had a quick try with both DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro. It should be said that the Apple Silicon version of DaVinci Resolve 17.1 isn't out of beta yet, so I was using version 16 running through Rosetta. I found Resolve to be very quick on the M1 Mac Mini with H.264 4k footage very smooth timeline performance, but it was dropping a lot of frames with Blackmagic Raw three-to-one 4K footage. What I did was run the Blackmagic Raw speed test and again, I don't believe this app is Apple Silicon optimized. It does what it does, which is testing the frames per second for playing 8K Blackmagic Raw, and the M1 scored 17 FPS with CPU and 56 FPS with Metal.

So, I actually expect that this computer will have no problem with Blackmagic Raw 4K and 6K, and possibly even 8K once Resolve has been optimized. Moving on to Final Cut Pro, my initial tests indicate that well, this is simply the fastest computer I've tested in Final Cut. Apple has clearly optimized the M1 for ProRes footage and also H.264 based on all the render times that I've seen, but we need to dig into that in a bit more detail and will do that in a dedicated episode soon.

EGPU Support: A Question Marked with an X

I'm a big fan of eGPU, so the question naturally occurs what happens if you plug an eGPU into the M1 Mac Mini. I've got a Razer Core X Chroma enclosure equipped with an RX 5700 XT. It would be rude not to try it out, so I plugged it in and yeah, nothing happens. No surprise really because it's widely known that the M1 wouldn't support eGPU, however, you don't get an error message. When I went to the System Report, I can see that the eGPU enclosure itself is discovered correctly and works fine. The USB ports on the enclosure are working fine as well.

This led me to do a bit more research, and I don't think this is a hardware limitation with the M1, but rather a driver issue. So, is it possible that Apple will introduce support for eGPU in a future update? Some people say that support was originally planned and was removed prior to launch, so who knows, we can certainly hope because an M1 Mac with an eGPU would be a powerhouse in every area.

Conclusion

My initial thoughts are that the M1 is a game-changer. Just imagine if Apple put two of these chips into a computer – it's pretty exciting. I'm excited to see where they go with this next year when they move down to the three-nanometer process. That's all for this video, but there's lots more to come. Please support the channel by clicking the subscribe button, and we'd really like to push the channel to new levels. If you enjoyed this video, please share it with someone else who might like it. Maybe I did enough to get a thumbs up or thumbs down; in any case, I hope to see you next time for some more Apple Silicon geekery.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is an important computer it represents perhaps the biggest change to general purpose computing since the introduction of multi-core processors and apple is banking on its success and apple does like to bet on a sure thing personally i'm very excited about the launch of this new system on chip the m1 it's a custom piece of silicon combining eight cpu cores that's four high efficiency cores and four high performance cores along with eight gpu cores 16 machine learning cores and other custom chips for things like security and video encoding and decoding is something very different to the x86 machines that we've gotten used to this is the m1 mac mini the 16 gigabyte version the best of the lineup so let's see whether it can live up to apple's claims and our expectations in this video i'm going to run some initial benchmarks and give you my first impressions of this system but i'm planning to make quite a few videos about this and also the new apple silicon macbook air comparing them to other apple machines and perhaps a pc or two for various different tasks so if i don't cover what you want to see in this video don't worry there'll be plenty more videos to come so please subscribe to the channel and click the bell to be notified when we release a new video and if there's something you want to see tested please leave a comment we'll do our best to cover the most popular requests so what's the experience been like with this mac mini so far well i found a bug straight away actually in my home office i use a dell 4k monitor and it has the option of a usbc connection so i use this for the initial setup and i found that the mini didn't recognize the screen i had to use hdmi for the setup process and otherwise the setup process was pretty standard by the way but once it completed i tried usbc again and it worked fine but when i reboot the computer it loses the display i found that you have to unplug and re-plug the usb-c cable before the monitor is recognized however this is an issue that's peculiar to my monitor i don't know but i do have another monitor arriving today that has usb-c so i'm going to test it a little further the mac mini itself comes in a box with a power cord and that's it you need to bring your own monitor keyboard and mouse the first thing i wanted to do once i had this computer set up is to run my own benchmarks and i've been deliberately trying not to watch other benchmarking videos because i wanted to experience this for myself and test it for myself before we start though i just want to be clear that benchmarks well they can be a useful metric for comparing similar systems but we're not doing that apple silicon is different in so many ways to x86 and that's why i feel that we need to do more videos with real world testing in order to properly assess the performance of this computer that said it doesn't mean that the benchmarks are wrong they probably do give a fair representation of the performance of this computer under most circumstances geekbench 5 is a good place to start remember this is the 16 gigabyte m1 mac mini other benchmarks you've seen might have been the eight gigabyte model so this could be different it's scored on single core 1735 and that is the fastest single core score that i've ever seen on a regular desktop machine it's faster than intel's consumer chips and some of their enthusiasts and pro chips as well it's faster than the latest ryzen cpus i mean frankly it's incredible performance so is this just an anomaly is geekbench 5 biased towards apple silicon in some way many people say that i don't personally think that's the case but i did also do a 10 minute run in cinebench r23 and in that 10 minutes the mac mini did just over one pass and scored 1518. that was for the single core test and by way of comparison the ryzen 9 5950x scores 1588 in the same test and this is why we need to do more than just benchmarking in a single app because what you find is that different chips perform differently for different tasks going back to geekbench 5 the multi-core score was 7583 and this is pretty huge my 2013 mac pro with the 12 core xeon only just beats that score and it's not actually that far behind the 27-inch imac with the 8-core 9900k cpu for fairness i also did a 10-minute multi-core run in cinebench r23 and it managed almost 7 passes and scored 7753 but it's difficult to get context for that without testing other machines so we're going to be doing that with all of the relevant apple machines that we can lay our hands on we're going to collate the data and we'll start to introduce charts into the videos as we go and at the end of the process we're going to make all of that testing data available for you to download however i can say that based on these initial results i'm fairly confident that the m1 mac mini has got enough performance to embarrass machines that cost considerably more and bear in mind that the 8 gigabyte model of this starts at 699 it's incredible performance for that price point let's move on to graphics performance and it's important to remember here that this isn't a discrete gpu it's a system-on-chip so the fairest comparison would perhaps be with amd's apus or intel's integrated graphics rather than with other discrete gpus but as it turns out the m1 is actually punching well above its weight here the latest version of geekbench 5 at least at the time of filming today is optimized for apple silicon but it only includes an opencl test whereas the m1 gpu is optimized for apple's metal framework nonetheless i ran the opencl test and found that it scores 19578 and that is just unbelievable for an integrated gpu and prior to launch i said on the channel that it might be possible for the m1 to offer gpu performance similar to the radeon pro 560x that was found in the top 15 inch macbook pro models just a year ago well i have that laptop so i've tested it and actually it's a little bit behind the m1 for this test and i think the m1 might actually perform even better under apple's metal framework but that's difficult to test at the moment i did try running some tests in gfx bench but what that did was just show the great difference between different gpu architectures the m1 performs way ahead of expectation in some of the tests and it falls way behind in others and again this is why real world testing will be important you can't simply look at a single score from a geekbench benchmark and make sweeping assumptions about the performance of the machine a key factor in the performance of any computer of course is the storage so i've tested the internal ssd using blackmagic disk speed test and it scored 2 368 megabytes per second on right 2 833 megabytes per second on read the performance varies with every test but that's the kind of average that i found and that is really fast uh sure there are faster ssds available but the average user is never going to be able to tell the difference between them in the real world there's just simply no need for it to be any quicker than it already is the system when it's in use is very fast and i've never seen apps open so quick on mac os opening safari is almost instant but what about other apps particularly those that don't have universal binaries yet and need to be translated with rosetta well i use office 365 a lot so i was keen to install that and it hasn't yet been optimized for apple silicon so it would be running through rosetta and i wanted to try out a couple of my complex spreadsheets the install process went fine and it seems that rosetta kicks in when you first launch the app but none of them took longer than 20 seconds to do that translation and once it's done then the app loads up really quickly i found everything so far to be working perfectly and i found it to be very responsive and excel had no issues at all with my business management spreadsheet which contains huge amounts of financial data and graphs excel is a good example of an app that needs fast single core performance if i load the same spreadsheet on my old mac pro whilst it's perfectly usable it's just nowhere near as smooth again the m1 mac mini is very impressive for single core performance you might also be wondering about printer and device support are there drivers available yet for apple silicon i haven't done extensive testing yet but i can tell you that when adding a printer it discovered both of the hp printers on my home network and set them up without any issues at all i thought it would be interesting to try a more taxing rosetta test so i downloaded and installed steam along with the game planet coaster one of my favorites and i found the process to install was pretty quick and seamless and firing up planet coaster i loaded one of my more complex save games um with lots of roller coasters and we did some virtual rollercoaster rides and i found running at 1080p on low graphics settings it was a breeze very playable so i ramped it up to the medium settings and that was just as good but notching the settings up to the high preset i found frame rates were dropping somewhat it was still playable but not the best experience now for reference within the game there are two more presets beyond high so we're not really doing anything particularly taxing from discrete gpu point of view and clearly there would be no point in trying those higher settings on this particular machine of course the m1 mac mini is not a gaming machine it hasn't been advertised as a gaming machine and i won't be gaming on it but i just wanted to see what was possible with that m1 gpu and frankly i was very impressed particularly when you consider that this was running thanks to rosetta most apps probably work fine with rosetta but i did find one app that didn't and that's on one photo raw the 2019 edition there is a newer version so maybe that does work and you might find your mileage varies but clearly some apps don't work with rosetta when it comes to video editing i'm not doing any detailed tests yet i have had a quick try with both davinci resolve and final cut pro but it should be said that the apple silicon version of davinci resolve and i think that's going to be 17.1 isn't out of beta yet so i was using version 16 which again is running through rosetta now i found resolve to be very quick on the m1 mac mini with h.264 4k footage very smooth timeline performance but it was dropping a lot of frames with blackmagic raw three to one 4k footage so what i did was run the blackmagic raw speed test and again i don't believe this app is apple silicon optimize what it does is it tests the frames per second for playing 8k blackmagic raw and the m1 scored 17 fps with cpu and 56 fps with metal so i actually expect that this computer will have no problem with blackmagic raw 4k and 6k and possibly even 8k once resolve has been optimized moving over to final cut pro my initial tests indicate that well this is simply the fastest computer i've tested in final cut apple has clearly optimized the m1 for prores footage and also h.264 based on all the render times that i've seen but clearly we need to dig into that in a bit more detail and we'll do that in a dedicated episode soon now i'm a big fan of egpu so the question naturally occurs what happens if you plug an egpu into the m1 mac mini i've got a razer corex chroma enclosure equipped with an rx 5700 xt it'd be rude not to try so i plugged it in and yeah nothing happens no surprise really because it's widely known that the m1 wouldn't support egpu however you don't get an error message and when i went to the system report you can see that the egpu enclosure itself is discovered correctly and works fine the usb ports on the enclosure are working fine as well so this led me to do a bit more research and i don't think this is a hardware limitation with the m1 i suspect it's a driver issue so is it possible that apple will introduce support for egpu in a future update there are some who say that support was originally planned and was removed prior to launch so who knows we can certainly hope because an m1 mac with an egpu would be a powerhouse in every area so those are my initial discoveries my initial thoughts is the m1 a game changer yes i'm pretty sure it is i mean just imagine if apple put two of these chips into a computer it's pretty exciting and i'm excited to see where they go with this next year when they move down to the three nanometer process so that's it for this video but there's lots more to come so please support the channel it only costs you one click of the subscribe button and we'd really like to push the channel to new levels so can you help us we'd like to hit 10 000 subs before the end of the year if you enjoyed this video why not share it with someone else who might like it that's all maybe i did enough to run a thumbs up or a thumbs down if that's your thing but in any case i hope to see you next time for some more apple silicon geekery youthis is an important computer it represents perhaps the biggest change to general purpose computing since the introduction of multi-core processors and apple is banking on its success and apple does like to bet on a sure thing personally i'm very excited about the launch of this new system on chip the m1 it's a custom piece of silicon combining eight cpu cores that's four high efficiency cores and four high performance cores along with eight gpu cores 16 machine learning cores and other custom chips for things like security and video encoding and decoding is something very different to the x86 machines that we've gotten used to this is the m1 mac mini the 16 gigabyte version the best of the lineup so let's see whether it can live up to apple's claims and our expectations in this video i'm going to run some initial benchmarks and give you my first impressions of this system but i'm planning to make quite a few videos about this and also the new apple silicon macbook air comparing them to other apple machines and perhaps a pc or two for various different tasks so if i don't cover what you want to see in this video don't worry there'll be plenty more videos to come so please subscribe to the channel and click the bell to be notified when we release a new video and if there's something you want to see tested please leave a comment we'll do our best to cover the most popular requests so what's the experience been like with this mac mini so far well i found a bug straight away actually in my home office i use a dell 4k monitor and it has the option of a usbc connection so i use this for the initial setup and i found that the mini didn't recognize the screen i had to use hdmi for the setup process and otherwise the setup process was pretty standard by the way but once it completed i tried usbc again and it worked fine but when i reboot the computer it loses the display i found that you have to unplug and re-plug the usb-c cable before the monitor is recognized however this is an issue that's peculiar to my monitor i don't know but i do have another monitor arriving today that has usb-c so i'm going to test it a little further the mac mini itself comes in a box with a power cord and that's it you need to bring your own monitor keyboard and mouse the first thing i wanted to do once i had this computer set up is to run my own benchmarks and i've been deliberately trying not to watch other benchmarking videos because i wanted to experience this for myself and test it for myself before we start though i just want to be clear that benchmarks well they can be a useful metric for comparing similar systems but we're not doing that apple silicon is different in so many ways to x86 and that's why i feel that we need to do more videos with real world testing in order to properly assess the performance of this computer that said it doesn't mean that the benchmarks are wrong they probably do give a fair representation of the performance of this computer under most circumstances geekbench 5 is a good place to start remember this is the 16 gigabyte m1 mac mini other benchmarks you've seen might have been the eight gigabyte model so this could be different it's scored on single core 1735 and that is the fastest single core score that i've ever seen on a regular desktop machine it's faster than intel's consumer chips and some of their enthusiasts and pro chips as well it's faster than the latest ryzen cpus i mean frankly it's incredible performance so is this just an anomaly is geekbench 5 biased towards apple silicon in some way many people say that i don't personally think that's the case but i did also do a 10 minute run in cinebench r23 and in that 10 minutes the mac mini did just over one pass and scored 1518. that was for the single core test and by way of comparison the ryzen 9 5950x scores 1588 in the same test and this is why we need to do more than just benchmarking in a single app because what you find is that different chips perform differently for different tasks going back to geekbench 5 the multi-core score was 7583 and this is pretty huge my 2013 mac pro with the 12 core xeon only just beats that score and it's not actually that far behind the 27-inch imac with the 8-core 9900k cpu for fairness i also did a 10-minute multi-core run in cinebench r23 and it managed almost 7 passes and scored 7753 but it's difficult to get context for that without testing other machines so we're going to be doing that with all of the relevant apple machines that we can lay our hands on we're going to collate the data and we'll start to introduce charts into the videos as we go and at the end of the process we're going to make all of that testing data available for you to download however i can say that based on these initial results i'm fairly confident that the m1 mac mini has got enough performance to embarrass machines that cost considerably more and bear in mind that the 8 gigabyte model of this starts at 699 it's incredible performance for that price point let's move on to graphics performance and it's important to remember here that this isn't a discrete gpu it's a system-on-chip so the fairest comparison would perhaps be with amd's apus or intel's integrated graphics rather than with other discrete gpus but as it turns out the m1 is actually punching well above its weight here the latest version of geekbench 5 at least at the time of filming today is optimized for apple silicon but it only includes an opencl test whereas the m1 gpu is optimized for apple's metal framework nonetheless i ran the opencl test and found that it scores 19578 and that is just unbelievable for an integrated gpu and prior to launch i said on the channel that it might be possible for the m1 to offer gpu performance similar to the radeon pro 560x that was found in the top 15 inch macbook pro models just a year ago well i have that laptop so i've tested it and actually it's a little bit behind the m1 for this test and i think the m1 might actually perform even better under apple's metal framework but that's difficult to test at the moment i did try running some tests in gfx bench but what that did was just show the great difference between different gpu architectures the m1 performs way ahead of expectation in some of the tests and it falls way behind in others and again this is why real world testing will be important you can't simply look at a single score from a geekbench benchmark and make sweeping assumptions about the performance of the machine a key factor in the performance of any computer of course is the storage so i've tested the internal ssd using blackmagic disk speed test and it scored 2 368 megabytes per second on right 2 833 megabytes per second on read the performance varies with every test but that's the kind of average that i found and that is really fast uh sure there are faster ssds available but the average user is never going to be able to tell the difference between them in the real world there's just simply no need for it to be any quicker than it already is the system when it's in use is very fast and i've never seen apps open so quick on mac os opening safari is almost instant but what about other apps particularly those that don't have universal binaries yet and need to be translated with rosetta well i use office 365 a lot so i was keen to install that and it hasn't yet been optimized for apple silicon so it would be running through rosetta and i wanted to try out a couple of my complex spreadsheets the install process went fine and it seems that rosetta kicks in when you first launch the app but none of them took longer than 20 seconds to do that translation and once it's done then the app loads up really quickly i found everything so far to be working perfectly and i found it to be very responsive and excel had no issues at all with my business management spreadsheet which contains huge amounts of financial data and graphs excel is a good example of an app that needs fast single core performance if i load the same spreadsheet on my old mac pro whilst it's perfectly usable it's just nowhere near as smooth again the m1 mac mini is very impressive for single core performance you might also be wondering about printer and device support are there drivers available yet for apple silicon i haven't done extensive testing yet but i can tell you that when adding a printer it discovered both of the hp printers on my home network and set them up without any issues at all i thought it would be interesting to try a more taxing rosetta test so i downloaded and installed steam along with the game planet coaster one of my favorites and i found the process to install was pretty quick and seamless and firing up planet coaster i loaded one of my more complex save games um with lots of roller coasters and we did some virtual rollercoaster rides and i found running at 1080p on low graphics settings it was a breeze very playable so i ramped it up to the medium settings and that was just as good but notching the settings up to the high preset i found frame rates were dropping somewhat it was still playable but not the best experience now for reference within the game there are two more presets beyond high so we're not really doing anything particularly taxing from discrete gpu point of view and clearly there would be no point in trying those higher settings on this particular machine of course the m1 mac mini is not a gaming machine it hasn't been advertised as a gaming machine and i won't be gaming on it but i just wanted to see what was possible with that m1 gpu and frankly i was very impressed particularly when you consider that this was running thanks to rosetta most apps probably work fine with rosetta but i did find one app that didn't and that's on one photo raw the 2019 edition there is a newer version so maybe that does work and you might find your mileage varies but clearly some apps don't work with rosetta when it comes to video editing i'm not doing any detailed tests yet i have had a quick try with both davinci resolve and final cut pro but it should be said that the apple silicon version of davinci resolve and i think that's going to be 17.1 isn't out of beta yet so i was using version 16 which again is running through rosetta now i found resolve to be very quick on the m1 mac mini with h.264 4k footage very smooth timeline performance but it was dropping a lot of frames with blackmagic raw three to one 4k footage so what i did was run the blackmagic raw speed test and again i don't believe this app is apple silicon optimize what it does is it tests the frames per second for playing 8k blackmagic raw and the m1 scored 17 fps with cpu and 56 fps with metal so i actually expect that this computer will have no problem with blackmagic raw 4k and 6k and possibly even 8k once resolve has been optimized moving over to final cut pro my initial tests indicate that well this is simply the fastest computer i've tested in final cut apple has clearly optimized the m1 for prores footage and also h.264 based on all the render times that i've seen but clearly we need to dig into that in a bit more detail and we'll do that in a dedicated episode soon now i'm a big fan of egpu so the question naturally occurs what happens if you plug an egpu into the m1 mac mini i've got a razer corex chroma enclosure equipped with an rx 5700 xt it'd be rude not to try so i plugged it in and yeah nothing happens no surprise really because it's widely known that the m1 wouldn't support egpu however you don't get an error message and when i went to the system report you can see that the egpu enclosure itself is discovered correctly and works fine the usb ports on the enclosure are working fine as well so this led me to do a bit more research and i don't think this is a hardware limitation with the m1 i suspect it's a driver issue so is it possible that apple will introduce support for egpu in a future update there are some who say that support was originally planned and was removed prior to launch so who knows we can certainly hope because an m1 mac with an egpu would be a powerhouse in every area so those are my initial discoveries my initial thoughts is the m1 a game changer yes i'm pretty sure it is i mean just imagine if apple put two of these chips into a computer it's pretty exciting and i'm excited to see where they go with this next year when they move down to the three nanometer process so that's it for this video but there's lots more to come so please support the channel it only costs you one click of the subscribe button and we'd really like to push the channel to new levels so can you help us we'd like to hit 10 000 subs before the end of the year if you enjoyed this video why not share it with someone else who might like it that's all maybe i did enough to run a thumbs up or a thumbs down if that's your thing but in any case i hope to see you next time for some more apple silicon geekery you\n"