DAW benchmarks on new Mac M4 chip

[revvy]

Mac is never gonna blow away PC for cost and performance nor excel in terms of gaming. If that’s what you’re after then stick to PC.

I think the point is this is a music software forum, nobody really cares about games etc. If you do then bring it up on a different forum. We all know by now that Macs are more expensive as they charge OTT for RAM etc, so let's keep this real and civil and not the decades old us v them debate, its as boring as hell.
It certainly looks like according to these tests that the M4 smokes all previous other M chips in terms of performance for most DAWs. I think the discussion should be why are the ones at the bottom of the list so bad.

I’m a Mac user, very real, super civil and not a gamer (as I said, I’m a Mac user)

Price AND performance will never go hand in hand on a Mac, especially if you move above base models. And that’s fine by me, I get enough of cheap Windows laptops at work all day.

No us and then with me, mate.

[pekbro]

Mac is never gonna blow away PC for cost and performance nor excel in terms of gaming. If that’s what you’re after then stick to PC.

i dunno the mac graphics in the mac studio seem pretty good.

Thx for the advice, but i know what im doing
pretty well.

[revvy]

Mac is never gonna blow away PC for cost and performance nor excel in terms of gaming. If that’s what you’re after then stick to PC.

i dunno the mac graphics in the mac studio seem pretty good.

Thx for the advice, but i know what im doing
pretty well.

I like Macs! The post wasn’t directed at you, actually, although I realise it came right under yours.

[woodsdenis]

Mac is never gonna blow away PC for cost and performance nor excel in terms of gaming. If that’s what you’re after then stick to PC.

I think the point is this is a music software forum, nobody really cares about games etc. If you do then bring it up on a different forum. We all know by now that Macs are more expensive as they charge OTT for RAM etc, so let's keep this real and civil and not the decades old us v them debate, its as boring as hell.
It certainly looks like according to these tests that the M4 smokes all previous other M chips in terms of performance for most DAWs. I think the discussion should be why are the ones at the bottom of the list so bad.

I’m a Mac user, very real, super civil and not a gamer (as I said, I’m a Mac user)

Price AND performance will never go hand in hand on a Mac, especially if you move above base models. And that’s fine by me, I get enough of cheap Windows laptops at work all day.

No us and then with me, mate.

Sorry comment was directed at tone of convo earlier in the thread. Badly formatted response

[pekbro]

Mac is never gonna blow away PC for cost and performance nor excel in terms of gaming. If that’s what you’re after then stick to PC.

i dunno the mac graphics in the mac studio seem pretty good.

Thx for the advice, but i know what im doing
pretty well.

I like Macs! The post wasn’t directed at you, actually, although I realise it came right under yours.

No worries, i just started out as a computer graphics engineer, which is why i like games.
Its about the tech, more than anything.

[PAK]

If you look at the benchmarks I posted

I did. It’s for Passmark. The Cinebench 24 score, which I linked, shows the opposite. Thus the issue with synthetic benchmarks. Intel themselves say “Some benchmarks, like PassMark, PerformanceTest, and Cinebench, run the risk of giving you an incomplete or unrealistic picture of how PCs would perform for your users.”

Why do you think the Passmark one will better inform you of likely audio performance? Cinebench isn’t ideal either, but at least they did a bunch of work to properly optimise v24 for Apple Silicon. Prior to this Cinebench 23 would lead to rather different conclusions..

Overall CPU mark score is i9: 62,429, M4 Pro: 38,411.

Ok. Why are you comparing a $630 processor, which requires serious cooling, to an ultra compact Thunderbolt 5 system which costs $1399 total? (You can already get it for less at Costco btw). They’re two fairly different things. If you want a closer equivalent, intended to beat the 14900, that would be the M4 Ultra, not these current processors.

Again you're looking at life through Apple colored glasses. I have been on beta teams where all work on new plugins had to stop in order to bring older plugins up to the latest Mac OS specs.

How many years ago was that and how much of it was about the AU format or the transition to Apple Silicon? VST 2.4’s, from 2008, ran fine in Cubase, via 32 Lives, right up until 32 bit support was removed from Mac OS. I have no reason to lie about this, and if you don’t want to believe me then that's your issue. I haven’t had any real problems on Apple Silicon either, though I did mostly wait out the first 2 years of the transition to avoid problems.

Anyway I know it's pointless to engage zealots in discussion because of their near religious fervor

Err, ok. You’re making kinda strange comparisons between a powerful small form factor computer and a 14900k, and seem to be drawing a lot of conclusions based on Passmark, which is not the wisest logic IMO. But I genuinely don’t care what anybody uses..

[revvy]

He comes onto the thread and expresses an interest in being blown away by Macs (I paraphrase) just to give him the opportunity to say that Mac users are wankers. Transparent AF.

I’ve got money in Apple and MS amongst others. I wish them both well. And Linux. Vive la difference!

New M4s look great but my M1 ain’t broke so I’ll stick with that and it’s comparatively weak ass performance.

[Scotty]

What I would like to see is a sample library stress test so we can see the impact of CPU and RAM configurations with Kontakt, East West Play and Vienna .

[keyman_sam]

So weird seeing intel battles on this thread. Guys listen, no one cares (well except you ofc).
Former intel/amd user here. Been there done that. Current apple user with both intel and M1 chips. Don’t care if intel is faster than AS and I’m happy to pay the apple tax. Let’s keep the discussion towards Mx perf please.

[jens]

I'm a Windows user and have nothing but disdain for Apple, but the new Minis are absolutely tremendous VFM and that even without taking into consideration that Logic costs less than many plugins do.

One would basically need to have their own head permanently fixated with screws far up in their own arsw in order to not realize this.

[Lerian]

So weird seeing intel battles on this thread.

Sorry about that, I was just trying to debunk some disinformation targeted at AMD, and also warn whoever wants to go intel about the current issues - do your own research, don't listen to fanboys.

Other than that, the new macs are cool, I use a M1 Max MBP, maybe I will upgrade to M4 Max this Christmas. Or maybe not, since the M1 is still as powerful as it can be for my needs.

But as a desktop computer I prefer to have a PC, for not being closed in one system, but also because a custom made PC is beating the mac for half the price. Even with a 4090 GPU, is still around 50-60% of the price of the mac studio, so doesn't really makes sense as long as I have the laptop.

[carrieres]

Google "intel 13th and 14th gen issues" and you will see what we are talking about, it is not about a dumb Youtuber
The fix has been released 1 month ago but Intel is in a very bad situation financially.
About the benchmark AMD is the leader for years now.
Yes, the multicore score is important too because audio softwares has been multithreaded for years

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/desktop.html
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/fr/cpu_bench ... multi_core
Desktop PassMark :

desktop passmark.jpg

Desktop Cinebench R23 :

desktop cinebench.jpg

Laptop PassMark :

laptop passmark.jpg

Laptop Cinebench R23 :

laptop cinebench.jpg

Conclusion, both benchmark show the same result, AMD rules !
Last, the price of a Mini M4 Pro 12 core is 1649€ and his PassMark score is 32668, instead, I chosen the Lenovo Legion Pro 5 16" with the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX for 1599€ and his PassMark score is 54668

[Kypresso]

But as a desktop computer I prefer to have a PC, for not being closed in one system, but also because a custom made PC is beating the mac for half the price. Even with a 4090 GPU, is still around 50-60% of the price of the mac studio, so doesn't really makes sense as long as I have the laptop.

Where i live an rtx 4090 is nearly as expensive, on its own, as a mac studio.
Rtx 4090 about £1900,mac studio is 2099.

I've been using nvidia cards for many years and currently have an rtx 3060.Each iteration of cards have gotten louder with the latest getting loud enough to be annoying even when the computer is just idling.
I bought an mac mini m1 when they came out and found it to be absolutely silent even at full use.
It was also about half the cost of my pc while doing everything the pc could do.

I've just got a mac mini m4 pro and it is also silent in use so far.
The mac mini also only cost me £1600, so cheaper than an rtx 4090 without the noise.

Please note, i am not a apple fanboy, i've been using pc's since the first days of msdos and made a good living from programming and network admin with microsoft.
However i do like good technology and the apple arm computers are a joy to use.

[Lerian]

But as a desktop computer I prefer to have a PC, for not being closed in one system, but also because a custom made PC is beating the mac for half the price. Even with a 4090 GPU, is still around 50-60% of the price of the mac studio, so doesn't really makes sense as long as I have the laptop.

Where i live an rtx 4090 is nearly as expensive, on its own, as a mac studio.

My fault. I was talking about the current top spec mac studio, and the PC equivalent - 4Tb SSD, 128Gb RAM, and top CPU and GPU. The Mac Studio price is $6800 while the PC (with 4090) is $4000.

[carrieres]

Thanks for your interesting point of view, I am curious about the benchmark between Nvidia GPU and Apple GPU
There is no magic in engineering cpu, the advantage of AMD over Apple is due to the high consumption to deliver so much power but with much heat, Apple computer are more silent because their TDP is lower.
But I prefer a powerful laptop than a Mini, it allows me to teach Ableton or do a live performance