Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

Anthony at Linus Tech Tips has finally reviewed the M1 Ultra, so let’s see what they think.

Gaming

Starting with console game emulation, there are a few issues with the Studio as most games are either non-native or worse use Open GL – and even Total War – Warhammer III which requires Apple silicon for some reason still runs through Rosetta.

The Ultra managed about 80% of the performance of an RTX 3090 in World of Warcraft, and seemed to perform well even with multiple, like 25 players in the area.

Benchmarking

In Cinebench, the M1 Ultra was pretty close to the Core i9 12900K from intel, impressing Anthony, and in Geekbench it annihilated the Intel chip in multicore performance, though the GPU test seemed unoptimised for the Ultra.

Blender rendering goes handily to the Intel and Nvidia setup, though now Apple is working with the Blender consortium, expect rapid improvements here.

Compiling and programming

The M1 Ultra shines here, shaving 8 mins off the 12900k’s 44 minute compile time on a Chromium compile. 20% faster. A Massacre.

Video editing

Rendering video from Da Vinci Resolve – Raw timeline to 4k h264 was 25% faster than the PC rig too. Encoding however found some issues with the aspect ratios of some clips, but when in the correct dimensions again beat the PC rig, if only by a little.

Even in Adobe Creative Cloud, the PugetBench scores beat the i9 12900K and RTX3090 easily, for the highest scores Anthony had ever seen in Premiere and After Effects.

Thermals and power

Even at full load, the M1 Ultra equipped Mac Studio only used around ⅓ of the energy, explaining why the Mac Studio never needed to ramp its fans above 2500 RPM too – that’s not really far above idle, and when the Studio was idling, around 10W is all it takes.

Of course, LTT are upset about the lack of upgradability, but honestly, we’re aware of it and it’s not something that many Mac users actually care about. We’re fine with it.