That is the problem with these comparisons. BUT GAMING PERFORMANCE!!!!! My base M1 Mac mini video editing beats out my custom built gaming PC that costs $2,500 with the advantage of the extra encoders. And my new M1 Max Macbook Pro beats out both of them. And its why I am looking at the M1 Ultra to keep getting my video exports down and all the other work I do on the mac.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Mac Studio M1 Ultra GPU will be beaten by AMD and Nvidia in just 6-7 months.
- Thread starter exoticSpice
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
My 2010 Mac Pro with a ATI Radeon HD 5870 is still up and running. Things just don't die randomly. And its still good at compressing h.264 videos.
Pro tip: You don't need the biggest baddest component. I swear the "RTX 3080 vs RTX 3090 is a 5 FPS average increase that you NEEEEEDDDD!!!" talk is just getting so tiring. I am still rocking a GTX 1080 in one of my gaming PCs. and an AMD 5700XT in another gaming PC. I used someone's 3080 as a test to see if I wanted to spend the $1,200+ for it and it was not worth it. And guess what?! I can play games JUST FINE even on my 1080. Can I play 4K MAXIMUM EVERYTHING? No. Do I need to? No.
That video is EXACTLY the same thing I experienced, even when I used a friend's 3080. Even the M1 Mac mini beat the video export test I did. And I am dealing with sometimes 5, 8 or even 10 hour videos so the difference ends up being HOURS sometimes.
GPU usage is well established, as are several APIs for them.
These new specialist chip cores and their APIs are entirely new.
I’ve had several computers and connected devices in my lifetime that were marketed via promoting new functionality/features which never ended up being utilized before the device was pushed off to the “obsolete” slag heap. The feature was ultimately used only to market the product and not to actually do any real work.
Do you speak for everyone else who plays games? No. Should others like the same things you do? No. Should others value the same things the same way you do? No. Are things like expensive, required, good to have relative? Yes.
To a point. Build quality is good, but the fact that memory and SSDs are not user upgradeable makes tht a bit of an issue.
It becomes more relevant when considering the minimal cost of entry into a platform.
I'd be a lot more interested in the current crop of Macs if I could ditch MacOS entirely and have a fully-supported Linux distribution (not in a VM). UNIX-like workstation capability on MacOS has been disappointing. As it stands, I'd rather have the better software support that Linux provides than battery life.
Not quite end user ready yet but a lot of progress is being made on this front - https://asahilinux.org/
Potential, but not ready to pull the trigger on the hardware yet. Following them, though. Basically, I want the hardware without the Apple crap. Current MacOS is great as a home computer, but I don't find it convenient for much beyond that.
Last edited:
You don’t want the best part? As someone who uses all os regularly, I will never understand the under appreciation of macOS.
It's fine as a home computer (have Big Sur on this MacBook) or if you want MS Office on a non Windows box, but not really optimum as a UNIX workstation. Not in this day and age. Can it be made to work? Sure. It's just not a market Apple cares about anymore.
Admittedly, post 10.0 MacOS is lightyears better than the garbage that was MacOS 9 and earlier. This is coming from an SGI and Sun guy, so not Windows 95.
i genuinely don’t understand what you are saying. Its the ultimate UniX workstation. It’s literally one of the few genuine Unix boxes left. Not that godawful Linux junk. Awful gnu crap which never understood the philosophy behind Unix. Linux is ok for cheap servers but awful for anything else.
Those "cheap servers" running Linux include massive Cray (now HPE, but still good systems) supercomputers. Most of the userland on OS X is some sort of "GNU crap". Although switching to zsh as the default is just annoying.
I "switched" for the promise of a UNIX workstation with commodity software as well and, frankly, Win 11 with WSL2 would probably be better at it now. Maybe.
Linux on that hardware with complete support would be awesome. Current MacOS? Meh. X support is a pitiful afterthought in a way it still isn't on Linux. Not required for "UNIX", but pretty much a big deal for a workstation still....
Last edited:
Wrong. Most of macOS unix command line tools are BSD based. Just lol at the zsh comment. I guess you use crappy bash.
Edit: now the praising of the wholly inadequate wsl 2. My god. If you want poorly thought, out second rate utilities just use cygwin and set fire to your machine.
Edit 2. Now the laughable talk about X. In the year 2022. Just use Motif if your that tied to the past. There is a reason desktop Linux hasn’t progressed this century.
Last edited:
I believe bash used to be the default on Mac OS X. I prefer that or tcsh to zsh. They switched to zsh for reasons other than capability, not that most of their stated user market knows the Terminal exists.
Haven't used WSL2.
You don't like X11. Fine. You're clearly not much of a "Unix guy" or have any experience with "real Unix workstations" to be able to comment.
Why? You've already complained about the apparent "high cost of entry".
You'd be far better served with some of generic platform for your needs.
And what's to stop you from switching back to bash? Good grief if you bothered to spend half as much effort as you do complaining then you'd have far less problems.
That's not the issues I have with working on MacOS these days and why Linux is better for my workflow now.
It seems you know as little about macOS as you do about their market. Tough to believe you started with sgi and sun but now like Linux. I know tons of people from Sun and their opinion of Linux is...low.
Mate I grew up on Irix and Solaris. I don't need a lecture on being a "Unix guy" from someone that thinks X11 and bash is the height of Unix capabilities. macOS is the natural successor to Irix, Solaris for workstations. A solid unix with sophisticated graphical abilities. Able to run command line tools and photoshop etc.
Height? No. Still useful, yes. Never gave a damn about Photoshop. Considering your view of Linux, you have zero experience with current HPC systems. You have fun with your toys.
MacOS had the potential to be that successor. Potential. Now, nothing more.
I'm not in the "makes pretty pictures" market, which is Apple's pro focus. You do know that the post-MIPS SGI systems ran SUSE Linux, right? That and I *like* OpenGL. Lots of my tools use it and I'm not going to spend time to port them to Metal just because Apple wants me to. YMMV and all, but we're clearly in different fields, if you actually ever used "unix" for work. Heck, I go back to the Cray X/MP, HP Apollo, and VMS.