Apple’s M1 Max chipset shows its teeth in PugetBench for Premiere Pro

[ad_1]

Why it matters: Adobe Premiere Pro may not be the go-to software for most Mac video editors because it doesn’t have the level of optimization that Apple’s Final Cut Pro suite offers. However, Apple’s latest M1 Max chipset appears to be fast enough for both, given the improvements in the CPU, GPU, and media engine performance.

Back in June, Adobe said its Creative Cloud suite of apps runs more than 80% faster on Macs equipped with the M1 chipset than on equivalent systems with an Intel CPU. To prove its point, the company commissioned a study by Pfeiffer Consulting that looked at the original Arm versions of Illustrator, InDesign, and Lightroom Classic. Premiere Pro, which was still in beta at the time, showed an average performance improvement of 77 percent.

Now that Apple has launched the long-awaited MacBook Pro M1 Pro and M1 Max, everyone is curious to see the company’s performance claims put to the test. Despite the fact that shipping dates for new systems are dropping towards the second half of November, someone managed to get a 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chipset (thanks, Tom’s Hardware) and ran PugetBench for Premiere Pro 0.95.1 (which uses Premiere Pro version 15.4.1), which gives us our first look at how the new Apple chips compare to the x86 processors paired with discrete GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.

Apple’s latest 16-inch MacBook Pro already appears to be noticeably faster than its predecessor, as well as gaming laptops like Dell’s Alienware x17 R1 and Asus ROG Zephyrus M16 pairing Intel’s 11th-generation Tiger Lake CPUs with Nvidia RTX 3000 mobile GPUs. The new Apple device managed a standard 1168 overall score and 1,000 extended overall score in PugetBench for Premiere Pro 0.95.1, which is higher than these two high-end laptops.

Apple said during its “Unleashed” event that the CPUs in the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips are faster than eight-core laptop processors while using much less power. However, a more interesting claim was made on the GPU side, with the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips being described as more powerful than most discrete mobile GPUs while using 70 percent less power.

PugetBench’s results lend some credence to this idea, as the GPU on the M1 Max chipset scored 66 points, which is close to 68 points achieved by Nvidia’s RTX 3080 mobile GPU and well above the 20.6 points achieved with the AMD Radeon Pro 5500M On the previous MacBook Pro 16, which is a bit outdated at this point. A similar story is told by the standard and extended Direct Play scores, thanks to the improved media engine on Apple’s new chipset.

If those results are worthwhile, Apple may already have created mobile chips that give Intel, Nvidia, and AMD a run for their money. This matters because just a few days ago, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said his company hopes Apple will one day reclaim as a customer by making better chips that can compete with everything that comes out of the giant Cupertino lab. Gelsinger is also convinced that the demand for Intel Alchemist GPUs will be high, but we’ll have to wait and see.

[ad_2]