Performance Difference 16-core, 24-core and 32-core GPU (MacBook Pro 2021)

[cs_20]

I am about to buy a MacBook Pro and wanted to know whether it is worth upgrading the chip to a 24/32-core GPU. 

 

I will be using all 3 affinity programmes on the laptop. Most commonly publisher and designer, I only really use affinity photo for making mockups or small edits on pictures like removing backgrounds or depixilating images. 

[Guest]

I'm currently running a late 2021 14" MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro (16 cores) and 32 GB RAM and while I've noticed a big difference in performance upgrading from a 2019 13" Intel MacBook Pro it's mostly been with GPU heavy apps; video editing and 3D rendering, as well as with the Adobe apps — no more jet engine fan. If those use cases aren't important, I'd strongly suggest going with the M1 Pro 16 core, as the M1 Max is really designed for heavy GPU intensive workflows such as 3D, video editing and machine learning. I kept going back and forth between ordering the M1 Pro and the M1 Max, and what finally swung it for me towards the Pro version was the better battery life. If you never plan to use your MacBook Pro off mains power then that's probably not an issue, but if portability is a factor you might want to stick with the 16 cores in the M1 Pro version.

I would however strongly recommend upgrading to 32GB and RAM, and maybe going for a larger (2TB+) hard drive, as neither can be upgraded later—and many apps these days are taking up multiple GBs of drive space, often because of providing universal Intel/Apple Silicon binary support.

My experience running the Affinity suite along with Final Cut Pro, Motion, Blender, etc. on the 16 core M1 Pro has been absolutely fantastic.

[cs_20]

Thank you, thats good to know. The decision was made for me as apple has some very misleading advertising. While it is only £180 to upgrade to 24-core GPU, you must also upgrade the RAM to 32GB which is another £360!! 

[Guest]

Yeah @cs_20 those little changes to a machine configuration that have unexpected dependencies really app up quickly.

[v_kyr]

Some quotes from magazine tests related to M1 chips and APh ...

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Affinity Photo, on the other hand, calculated noticeably faster on the M1 Max than on Mac Mini and Windows PCs. Whether the work was done by an M1 Studio Max with 10 processor cores or an M1 Studio Ultra with 20 cores was not reflected on the stopwatch.

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Serif proves the potential of the hardware: Processing a raw file took over ten seconds with Affinity Photo 1.8, which was released in 2020, even with 16 cores; with four cores it was even over 30 seconds. So the program produced long waiting times. On all test devices, the new version 1.10 completed the same task with the identical raw file in one and a half to two and a half seconds. The program distributed the load to all available processor cores and the GPU. One can clearly observe the simultaneous use of all cores when calling up the "Tonemapping Persona", which reduces HDR images from 32-bit floating-point numbers per color channel to 16 or 8 bits.

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Affinity Photo benefits from GPU support for Direct3D 12 when using live filters for blur, sharpness, noise and distortion. In all the programs mentioned, the brush engine uses GPU acceleration. This not only affects the paint brush, but also spot healing, eraser, dodge, burn, and other tools. As expected, the Mac Studio M1 Max and Ultra as well as the x86 PCs showed a lot of activity from the GPU and many CPU cores during these operations.

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Processing large projects on an old cucumber is no fun. However, just as important as a computer with many processor cores is an application that can handle them. Affinity Photo and Lightroom in particular benefited from the Mac Studio with M1 Max compared to the Mac Mini M1 in the test, but not so much from an M1 Max Ultra. That can change once the software manufacturers have zeroed in on the new processors. Investing in a Mac Ultra doesn't bring big leaps right now. It is better to invest the money in a larger SSD or more memory.
...

Affinity Photo calculates much faster than two years ago.

 

[Entrepreneur]

Hi!

I have M1 max and I use Designer a lot. Lately it has been seriously slow. Like unusable with basic use. It just stops all the time to load smthing... Really annoying, and making me want to start using Adobe more than ever... 

I thought that when I upgrade my Mac I wouldnt Get beach balling but seems to me that this software is not optimized with M1 at all.

I have re-installed it but no luck. 

I attached a file that it struggles with but I don't think there's nothing there because its really slow on almost every project I work with.

 

PKBEAUTY-LOGO2.afdesign

[v_kyr]

46 minutes ago, Entrepreneur said:

I have M1 max and I use Designer a lot. Lately it has been seriously slow. Like unusable with basic use. It just stops all the time to load smthing... Really annoying, and making me want to start using Adobe more than ever... 

See related topics and possible solutions here ...

• Stalling & Lagging in Affinity Photo with M1 MacBook Pro / Apple Silicon? Check this fix out...

[Alex de Kyburg]

Thanks for the useful hints 🤗

• Photo: As mentionned in other topics, it's commands got tremendously slower on my M1 Max.

This one problem is fixed by unchecking the automatic brightness in preferences. THANKS FOR THE TUTO!

• Yet, it doesn't solve the other painfull thing: Inverse Selection when used with Photo, from inside Publisher, shows a displacement, causing a bad disfonction: impossible to use. The only turnaround I found is to work with selections and inverse sélections by opening Photo separately.

 

[walt.farrell]

14 minutes ago, Alex de Kyburg said:

Yet, it doesn't solve the other painfull thing: Inverse Selection when used with Photo, from inside Publisher, shows a displacement

The fix for that is to set the document Bleed to 0, if it's the problem I think it is. Non-zero Bleed values cause pixel selections to be offset by the Bleed value.

[Alex de Kyburg]

Great!
Thanks for this precision!
I guess Bleed can be added once the file is ready for printing export.
B.R.

[MikeTO]

On 6/8/2022 at 12:42 PM, cs_20 said:

I am about to buy a MacBook Pro and wanted to know whether it is worth upgrading the chip to a 24/32-core GPU. 

 

I will be using all 3 affinity programmes on the laptop. Most commonly publisher and designer, I only really use affinity photo for making mockups or small edits on pictures like removing backgrounds or depixilating images. 

There's a thread in the Windows Photo Beta forum that also has Mac hardware benchmarks for Affinity. Check out my post from September 11 in this thread where I've compiled the benchmarks that others have shared.