Hello friend and how did it go?
I think we are similar users
I have been very busy, and have not had enough time with my new Mac to make a final decision, but based off of everything I have done so far, I have been mostly impressed with the performance of the 12c M2 Pro MM over the 8c M1 MM. Although, I have discovered an issue that I was not counting on with one of my most used apps (Handbrake).
While it isn't that noticeable, the overall "snappiness" of the 12c M2 Pro Mac Mini has improved over the M1 Mac Mini.
WoW - I have only tested Dragon Flight areas so far, but with the graphic settings set to "10" on both the M1 and M2 Pro Mac Minis, the fps has more than tripled on the 19c GPU of the M2 Pro MM over the 8c GPU M1 MM. The downside, the M2 Pro MM gets hotter more quickly when the graphic settings were set to the max, while the M1 MM did get hotter, but at a much slower rate. It is also important to note that while I was experiencing was above 100C on the M2 Pro, neither Macs' fans went above idle.
I did have something strange happen though, when I set both Macs to graphical setting "5" (default for the M2 Pro), the fps gain dropped from 200%-300% higher on the M2 Pro, to about only 50% higher. It didn't make any sense. Maybe it was because I had V-Sync turned on.
I am planning on doing more graphical settings testing between the two Macs, and next time with V-Sync turned off.
Another thing I noticed when comparing WoW on the two Macs, was that the load screen duration was about 25% slower on the older Mac Mini.
Warcraft III: Reforged - This game is a x86 app, not optimized for AS, and I didn't expect much improvement, but there was a huge improvement in performance on my new Mac Mini. On the 12c M2 Pro MM, I was able to turn all the graphical settings to the max, and the game runs great. While still playable, the M1 Mac Mini runs at a low frame rate, even with lower graphic settings. I am unsure of the actual fps, there is a new tool built into the macOS to see frame rates, but I don't think it works for x86 apps.
Handbrake - Most of my testing have been with Handbrake. I am comparing the performance between four different Macs, with the following: 3rd Gen i7, 4th Gen i7, M1, and 12c M2. I am testing two different codec settings (H.264, H.265), at two different video preset level (Medium, Placebo). I am using two different sources to compare, one is a movie from a DVD and the other is a movie from a Bluray. I am almost done with the DVD movie.
The outcome so far have been both good and kind of disappointing. For H.264, the new M2 pro has a decent improvement over the M1 and older Intel Macs. For H.265, I noticed that not all the cores are being utilized to 100% on the M2 Pro. It is still faster than the M1, but the performance improvement has decreased a lot. I am unsure if this is a limitation or bug of Handbrake, or a limitation of H.265.
I do not use H.265 currently, but was considering using it in the future to reduce the file size of my encodes, but based off of the performance (or lack of) of the M2 Pro, I will continue using H.264 for now.
After seeing the issue on H.265, I started doing some research, and it appears that Handbrake can fully utilize up to 6-cores, and each additional core has reduced performance. This isn't really noticeable on the 8c M1, but with the 12 cores on the M2 Pro using iStat Menus, you can see the cores randomly dropping with H.265.
For H.264, all the cores are almost fully used. So again, not sure if this is a Handbrake issue or a H.265 issue.
If your primary workload is using SW Encoding on Handbrake, and you are using the H.265 codec, it may not be worth it to pay for the extra two performance cores.
Some people ask about HW encoding on Handbrake, so maybe I might add that to my testing on all Macs as well.
Other than the above, I haven't done much else on my new Mac, yet.
