Real-life performance tests reveal staggering power of M1 Ultra Mac Studio
What you need to know
- Users are beginning to the put the M1 Ultra Mac Studio through its paces.
- A new rendering test shows it can render a 4K Adobe Premiere Pro project in half the time of M1 Max.
- The test time was one-third that of Apple's now irrelevant Mac Pro.
New real life tests of Apple's new Mac Studio are starting to show the incredible power of Apple's new M1 Ultra silicon.
Testing conducted as part of iJustine's Mac Studio unboxing and hands on video reveals that the M1 Ultra delivers the expected doubling in perfomance of the M1 Ultra over Apple's M1 Max, confirming the new device is vastly more powerful than the MacBook Pro (2021) and astonishingly quicker than a $20,000 version of the old Intel Mac Pro of 2019.
Ably assisted by Mondobytes (Armando Ferreira), the pair tested rendering an Adobe Premiere Pro project full of 4K ProRes footage. For reference, the short film of 11:39 renders on the M1 Max MacBook Pro in 6:39, and 24:21 on the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1. Incredibly, the new Mac Studio was able to render the project in just 3 minutes and 31 seconds, despite the fact machine was also running another version of FCP X in the background, as well as Photoshop and some other applications.
That time was also vastly quicker than a 2019 Mac Pro, which clocked in at over 10 minutes for the render despite costing five times the price of the Mac Studio.
The real-life results just about match up with the doubled processing power of the M1 Ultra chip compared to the M1 Max (depending on which version of the Max was used in Ferreira's other test), and also matches up with benchmarks that confirm this is the most-powerful Mac has ever made.
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Stephen Warwick has written about Apple for five years at iMore and previously elsewhere. He covers all of iMore's latest breaking news regarding all of Apple's products and services, both hardware and software. Stephen has interviewed industry experts in a range of fields including finance, litigation, security, and more. He also specializes in curating and reviewing audio hardware and has experience beyond journalism in sound engineering, production, and design. Before becoming a writer Stephen studied Ancient History at University and also worked at Apple for more than two years. Stephen is also a host on the iMore show, a weekly podcast recorded live that discusses the latest in breaking Apple news, as well as featuring fun trivia about all things Apple. Follow him on Twitter @stephenwarwick9