Going from 2019 Mac Pro to Mac Studio M2Ultra

[chfilm]

How do you guys feel, is there anybody else in the same boat as me, debating if it's worth going from a 2019 16c Mac Pro with dual Vega II to a new Mac Studio?
I do have a Sonnet 4x4 Raid Card with 4x2TB SSDs, I would have to put those in an external enclosure and would lose a ton of speed but... 2,5gb/s is still sufficient I guess.
Not really worth paying 3000 € extra just for the mac pro enclosure.

Even though it's really kinda infuriating to be forced to get rid of the this amazing machine, I really want the better single core performance for after effects mostly. I'm torn because of the GPU though.. what are your thoughts?

Of course one could just stick with the mac pro till early 2025 and wait for the m3 version.

 

[Adult80HD]

I can't speak to your use of After Effects as I don't use it, but I will say that I have personally also abandoned the Mac Pro, at least for this round. Actually I effectively did so last year when the first Studios came out. I was intrigued by the Studio announcement and order an Ultra at launch and I was just blown away with how fast it was. It literally runs circles around my 2019 Mac Pro for most the graphics work I do in Photoshop and Lightroom, and the AI-based image editing tools from Topaz and others. As a result within days I moved the 2019 Mac Pro into a role as a secondary computer.

I was hoping for Apple to announce an "Extreme" version of the M2 or M3 or add-in compute (neural engine) cards for the Mac Pro and that would have made it worth it to me, but they didn't. I have no need for other PCIe slots at this point outside of that, as I can now easily get bus-powered 8TB NVMe SSD drives to connect to my Mac Studios.

Adobe seems to be putting huge effort into optimizing their software for Apple Silicon. There are new features that leverage the neural engines, and performance in PS and LR is amazing. The huge amounts of memory available to the GPU are no doubt very helpful for this. Honestly I think you would be very happy with a Studio Ultra.

 

[handheldgames]

How do you guys feel, is there anybody else in the same boat as me, debating if it's worth going from a 2019 16c Mac Pro with dual Vega II to a new Mac Studio?
I do have a Sonnet 4x4 Raid Card with 4x2TB SSDs, I would have to put those in an external enclosure and would lose a ton of speed but... 2,5gb/s is still sufficient I guess.
Not really worth paying 3000 € extra just for the mac pro enclosure.

Even though it's really kinda infuriating to be forced to get rid of the this amazing machine, I really want the better single core performance for after effects mostly. I'm torn because of the GPU though.. what are your thoughts?

Of course one could just stick with the mac pro till early 2025 and wait for the m3 version.

If you go with the M2 Ultra...

For your Sonnet... The Node Titan PCIe enclosure is going for $279 new everywhere or $249 new on ebay. It contains the JHL7440 Thunderbolt 3 interface and would be a perfect new home for your Sonnet Raid Card. It can achieve 3000MB I have 3 external PCIe enclosures: A Sonnet Breakoutbox 550(Highpoint SSD7101a) & 750(Blackmagic 4k Quad HDMI) as well as a node Titan(Highpoint SSD7101A) I just picked up. I also run 2 Sonnet Thunderbay 4's for up to 8 external HDD's for archival storage.

About the Ultra GPU. The M1 Ultra GPU is lackluster and couldn't compete with a 5700XT in a hackintosh for my live video production stream with OBS - the app is the best but mac performance is baaaad. The M2 should be better, although once benchmarks come out, you should know. You could always get the ultra to kick the tires and if it works, keep it otherwise, send it back.

Good Luck

 

[dawnrazor]

How do you guys feel, is there anybody else in the same boat as me, debating if it's worth going from a 2019 16c Mac Pro with dual Vega II to a new Mac Studio?
I do have a Sonnet 4x4 Raid Card with 4x2TB SSDs, I would have to put those in an external enclosure and would lose a ton of speed but... 2,5gb/s is still sufficient I guess.
Not really worth paying 3000 € extra just for the mac pro enclosure.

Even though it's really kinda infuriating to be forced to get rid of the this amazing machine, I really want the better single core performance for after effects mostly. I'm torn because of the GPU though.. what are your thoughts?

Of course one could just stick with the mac pro till early 2025 and wait for the m3 version.

you got to be realistic about M3 man… If you think you’ll see it in 2024 I’d be surprised… I reckon you wouldn’t be disappointed if you said that M3 Ultra would make an appearance at WWDC2025… now it might come out before that, but it might not… as for a M3 Extreme… that’s anyone’s guess.

I held off buying a M1 Ultra and limped along with my 2020 iMac and it’s been painful, but I wanted to see what Apple did with the Mac Pro… and now I know at least for now and it’s no longer a machine I need, if there was a M2 extreme chip, it would be a different discussion… but I don’t need PCIe expandability coming from the iMac all my storage and video is external and I have too much invested in that to replace it with PCIe alternatives… You’re in the opposite position, do you buy a M2 Mac Pro and use what PCIe stuff you can and sell your 2019 Mac Pro? Consider this, I suspect the secondhand price of 2019 Mac Pros to increase now, there will be a market for these Intel machines, people that held out for a Silicon Mac Pro and for one reason or another the M2MP wouldn’t do it for them… so your Intel MP still has a life and I suspect an increasing value and I’d say you have 12 months to capitalise on that before rumours of a M3 Extreme start to leak, if that happens then all deals are off… it would also be the first time a Mac Pro has had a significant upgrade in under two years… so that’s worth considering too…

 

[handheldgames]

you got to be realistic about M3 man… If you think you’ll see it in 2024 I’d be surprised… I reckon you wouldn’t be disappointed if you said that M3 Ultra would make an appearance at WWDC2025… now it might come out before that, but it might not… as for a M3 Extreme… that’s anyone’s guess.

I held off buying a M1 Ultra and limped along with my 2020 iMac and it’s been painful, but I wanted to see what Apple did with the Mac Pro… and now I know at least for now and it’s no longer a machine I need, if there was a M2 extreme chip, it would be a different discussion… but I don’t need PCIe expandability coming from the iMac all my storage and video is external and I have too much invested in that to replace it with PCIe alternatives… You’re in the opposite position, do you buy a M2 Mac Pro and use what PCIe stuff you can and sell your 2019 Mac Pro? Consider this, I suspect the secondhand price of 2019 Mac Pros to increase now, there will be a market for these Intel machines, people that held out for a Silicon Mac Pro and for one reason or another the M2MP wouldn’t do it for them… so your Intel MP still has a life and I suspect an increasing value and I’d say you have 12 months to capitalise on that before rumours of a M3 Extreme start to leak, if that happens then all deals are off… it would also be the first time a Mac Pro has had a significant upgrade in under two years… so that’s worth considering too…

Hmmm. M2 Ultra shipped a little more than a year after M1 Ultra shipped.

 

[chfilm]

Yea I don’t expect the m3 Mac pro/ Mac Studio before 2025. But it could come during a march event or so…

 

[dawnrazor]

Hmmm. M2 Ultra shipped a little more than a year after M1 Ultra shipped.

March 2022 - M1 Ultra Mac Studio… 454 days later we get the M2 Ultra Mac Studio… thats more than a little bit over a year… agree though that M3 Ultra could be seen March 2025… maybe…

 

[cpnotebook80]

If you go with the M2 Ultra...

For your Sonnet... The Node Titan PCIe enclosure is going for $279 new everywhere or $249 new on ebay. It contains the JHL7440 Thunderbolt 3 interface and would be a perfect new home for your Sonnet Raid Card. It can achieve 3000MB I have 3 external PCIe enclosures: A Sonnet Breakoutbox 550(Highpoint SSD7101a) & 750(Blackmagic 4k Quad HDMI) as well as a node Titan(Highpoint SSD7101A) I just picked up. I also run 2 Sonnet Thunderbay 4's for up to 8 external HDD's for archival storage.

About the Ultra GPU. The M1 Ultra GPU is lackluster and couldn't compete with a 5700XT in a hackintosh for my live video production stream with OBS - the app is the best but mac performance is baaaad. The M2 should be better, although once benchmarks come out, you should know. You could always get the ultra to kick the tires and if it works, keep it otherwise, send it back.

Good Luck

I think the m1 ultra faced some scaling issues from the max chip if i remember. Hoping that is fixed and benchmarks will be able to show it. Also, wondering if software companies like adobe, davinci and FCP will be updated and optimized to take adv of the new m2 ultra chip since we have had enough time to work out the kinks for over 3 years.

 

[cpnotebook80]

I am more curious on using it with topaz video AI as i want to convert a bunch of vhs digital home videos to upscaled versions. My m1 mbp does it, but takes 12 hours to HD or 4k! for an hour clip.

 

[Adult80HD]

I think the m1 ultra faced some scaling issues from the max chip if i remember. Hoping that is fixed and benchmarks will be able to show it. Also, wondering if software companies like adobe, davinci and FCP will be updated and optimized to take adv of the new m2 ultra chip since we have had enough time to work out the kinks for over 3 years.

Over three years? The first M1 machines were only available in late 2020. That's not a ton of time for vendors to work on software transitions, never mind optimizations. The way the system is architected they also shouldn't haven't to do any silicon version-specific optimization, or at most minimal tweaks.

As for the scaling "issue" to me it was never clear there was a real issue. Some people expected tasks to scale linearly with GPU core count, but nothing has ever worked that way, not just on Apple Silicon. There are trade-offs in core count and frequency, and many tasks can't be linearly scaled through parallelization.

 

[rubberducker]

Im so swapping out my Mac Pro for the M2 ultra Studio. The 2019 Intel Mac Pro is a bit of dog for video editing in Premiere. Even a pretty maxed out one.

I upgraded from a maxed 2017 iMac Pro and honestly there wasn't much performance difference for video editing at least.

I cut a TV show last year and the Mac Pro choked - literally would only playback stuttery 1/4 quality timelines that froze and lagged all the time. And this Mac Pro has an afterburner card, a dual W6900X and 192 gb of ram.

And ironically the thing that saved the show was a M1 Max Macbook Pro that could play several streams of Multicam video without any issues. And in a way 18k's worth Mac Pro couldn't. Disappointing was not the word...

It's also pretty awful at any video codec other than ProRes and constantly chugs on H264s etc. This may have more to do with Adobe's optimisation - but either way video editing is going to be much smoother on apple silicon. And with this release the Mac Pro is pretty much DOA. There is no point to it - it has been put together as such an after thought.