After Effects performance one decade later: Mac Pro 8c vs M1 Max

[ed.]

Today I had the task to dig out an old After Effects project and re-render it. The last time I touched it was in early 2009, with my then six-months-old Mac Pro (Early 2008, 8-core).
The original render took 1h 41mins.
The same exact project, opened in AE today (the beta version optimised for Apple Silicon), on my Macbook Pro M1 Max, took 7 minutes to render.

The adjusted multi Geekbench scores for the two machines are roughly 2200 for the Mac Pro and 12000 for the Macbook M1, so a 5x increase. The render time improvement is more around 14x. Interestingly enough, the fans on the Macbook Pro started spinning right away and went on for the first half of the render or so, then slowed down. Temps below 100C throughout.

 

[vladi]

4 cores out of those 8 you had in your old MBP didn't do nothing in AE unfortunately back then. Also today's AE workflow has GPU acceleration boost on most tasks and utilizes all the CPU cores available. You didn't have to go all the way back to 2009 cause just a year ago AE was limited to 8 cores only. Crazy how Adobe doesn't give a rat's azz.

 

[ed.]

4 cores out of those 8 you had in your old MBP didn't do nothing in AE unfortunately back then. Also today's AE workflow has GPU acceleration boost on most tasks and utilizes all the CPU cores available. You didn't have to go all the way back to 2009 cause just a year ago AE was limited to 8 cores only. Crazy how Adobe doesn't give a rat's azz.

Yeah, also back then RAM was a bottleneck at multicore render time: for an HD project they recommended something like 3GB for each core you wanted to use. Still, I also remember a decade earlier then 2009 when I used to launch the renders in the evening and let them run overnight : )