Mac Studio Dilemma

[handheldgames]

As a total aside, what software are you using to generate these graphs? I have two weeks to see how the MAX is working for me, and I'd like to have this picture of the load on a second monitor as I use it.

Getting my Linux VM up is a little more hassle than it was on the iMac so far. And for the first couple of hours or so, stuff like ejecting disk images was oddly laggy. But that has cleared up. I have about half of my stuff moved over to it and set up and it isn't breaking a sweat so far. Part of me wants to go for the Ultra anyway, but with tax that is almost a $1400 step and there are a lot of different ways I could spend $1400 that would be better uses if I don't need the capacity.

I'm using the Activity Monitor app built into Mac OS to create the graphs. Command-3 and Command-4 display the two charts I shared.

For what it's worth, my Mac Studio is used for the production of a revenue generating live stream that absorbs the cost of the Mac Studio Ultra and the other components I've picked up. When I purchased the Mac Studio, I used the Apple Card to get 0% interest with 12 monthly payments of $366 and will pay it off before the end of the year to reduce tax liability.

If you don't need the extra CPU bandwidth today and don't think you will down the road, you may not need the Ultra. I purchased the Ultra because it was available at a local Apple Store and didn't want to wait for a Max in the configuration you purchased. (there is no way I would get a mac with a 512GB SSD - just too small ) Little did I know that I needed the extra CPU/GPU today more than just getting a future proof system.

And yes - I needed extras for my MacStudio too, like an external Thunderbolt enclosure for Hard disks and a Sonnet eGPU enclosure to house my 4 slot NVME controller. Luckily I was able to pick up these up in 'like new' condition for 40% of the original price from a couple websites.

What's on your list of components to add to your Mac Studio setup?

 

[Pressure]

Unfortunately, the cross platform Live video production apps I use do not leverage media engine's support for the ProRes pipeline and tasks leverage cpu+gpu acceleration. This includes OBS and a chromium browser based system called VDO.Ninja. Hence I would have been screwed with a Studio Max on GPU utilization alone.

Unlike most live streams where they use a cloud based platform system that results in what I consider sub-par video quality, I push the envelope with a peer to peer system that opens up the data pipes for my guests. The livestream feed is encoded at 7,000 KB/s and sent back to each guest(2-4 people) so they receive a high quality feed. I'm also sending 7,000 KB/s to youtube via RTMPS in OBS, for a ultra-low latency broadcast.

I'm also using a i444 color profile vs NV10 to provide a better representation of colors. Unfortunately, this is not an accelerated pipeline so I pay the price for better color quality in CPU overhead.

I need to maintain sub 10ms rendering times to maintain 60FPS. Hence, working with a system that's resource constrained would prevent me from hitting that mark. Memory utilization usually sits around 40GB of ram, with no memory pressure leaving some breathing room before having to leverage VM. Where I like it.

Thank you for taking the time to answer my question in depth.

In a normal live production most of that would be offloaded to other equipment that frankly cost more than the M1 Ultra, unless you only live stream at 1080p60 10-bit 422.

Any reason why you don't use any of the plethora of live production switches available for this?