Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “M3 Max MacBook Pro Benchmark Madness”.
Hey everyone Travis here and following up my M3 Max MacBook Pro review, I wanted to go deep on benchmarks, so, let’s get into it all right here we are in Benchmark land and, like I said, I went completely crazy with these even benchmarking. Some machines that are no longer relevant anymore, but I just wanted to see how, over the years these Macs have evolved. So I have five computers in the standings right now it is the 2015 retina MacBook Pro a 2019 core I9 16-in MacBook Pro, which was the top-of-the-line last Intel MacBook available, and then we have the M1 Max M2 Max and M3 Max MacBook Pros. The only thing I did want to point out ahead of time is the fact that the M2 Max is a 14in and all of the other machines are either 15 or 16in. I picked a range of applications and creative and real world settings and obviously some of these are synthetic benchmarks and don’t really align with real world usage, but some of these are real world and something that I would use these machines for. First up, I got a final cut project with a 6-minute multicam video. This is xavc all inra fx6 footage and the second angle is a74 hvc, 422 10bit footage.
Both angles are graded and this video was completely finished and, of course, this is a lighter project. It’S an interview, Style video, but the thing I wanted to see here was the fact that I’m mixing two different codecs and in terms of exporting this project from Final Cut, I wanted to test three different codecs prores, HC and h264 for two different reasons: one. These are all widely used, codecs and all different kinds of applications, and two both of these are accelerated on the M3 Max. So the one thing to point out with all of these results is the fact that the 15in from 2015, of course, is struggling quite a bit, and I can’t really say that I was going to expect anything high of this machine.
It is 7 years old. It’S no longer running the latest operating system. This machine also was the base configuration at the time and didn’t even have dedicated graphics, but if you needed to you still could edit a video like this on a computer like this 2015 MacBook Pro, but your export times and the heat on this thing are going To be lengthy, and one last thing to point out with Final Cut, Is the fact that Apple did announce a new update to Final Cut coming out. That will utilize the media engines even further, and I think that that’s going to help the 3 M series Max. The M1 M2 and M3 get even higher level scores than what they have here.
Editor Travis here and apple did release the 10.7 Final Cut update alongside a new version of compressor and iMovie, and we already had a project that was being worked on in the M2. Max MacBook Pro, so I decided to export that again and see what the test results were. It was a 13-minute video in Final Cut that took about 7 minutes to export an unrendered timeline to hvvc 8bit and, with the new Final Cut update 10.7.
It took 6 minutes, so it’s about a 15 % performance boost just from an update, and so you guys are aware. This goes all the way back to M1 Max as far as support goes so any of the M1 M2 or M3 Max chips or Ultra chip chips. If there is one available like M1 or M2, you are going to see performance gains in Final Cut, compressor or iMovie when exporting your videos, because it will utilize all the available media engines now and as you guys can see, even if you have an M1 still, That’S going to perform very much in the same range as one of these M3 machines in Final Cut, and the reason for this is the fact that there is Hardware level acceleration happening for this. Export Final Cut is using the media engine on these M series. Macbook Pros – and it’s also using Intel’s quicksync video on the Intel machines on Intel’s Quicks, sync, that is only going to be h264 and 8bit hvc and we’re going to see where that comes in later. When I go over handbrake and next up is photo editing with the new version of Lightroom, we have 572 Raw photos shot on the a74 at 33 megapixels all with an edit applied and exported to 100 % full resolution jpegs.
Now. The one thing to note here is that the 15in from 2015 took 47 minutes to export these, and that’s because Lightroom in the last few years has become very GPU dependent and this machine has integrated graphics and we can see the M3 Max with its GPU Flex. Hard as it is clearly the fastest out of the bunch performing almost 2 minutes faster than the M2 and M1 counterparts.
So if you do a lot of photo editing and you batch export a lot of your photos from events or weddings or anything like that, the new machines are going to export those significantly faster than any of those Intel machines. And it’s going to be a little bit faster than that M1. Max next up is browser bench and, of course, this is a synthetic Benchmark that I ran in Safari on all of the machines running the latest version of safari that they all could run, which even that 2015 could still run the latest version.
This just gives an idea on how fast your computer can render websites and how that experience is going to be for you and looking at the results, your new M3 Max compared to that 2015 or 2019 MacBook is going to be about two to three times better And it is going to be a little little better, coming from M1 or M2 next up is handbrake and I downloaded a high resolution High bit rate 10bit hvvc movie trailer for Oppenheimer, and I wanted to convert that to a h264 1080p video file. Now, because I’m exporting to h264, all of these machines that I tested have video acceleration, and I was honestly surprised how fast the old 2015 MacBook held up. You can see incremental upgrades over the years on how fast the video acceleration has gotten and the M3 Max is about 1 minute faster at doing this same task. Now next up is blender and I have no level of expertise to be able to make anything in blender, but they have a benchmark that you can use to be able to see how well your machine can handle 3D modeling performance. There is both a CPU and a GPU test and I went ahead and did both, of course, using CPU alone.
There’S significant gains, especially when we get to the M1 territory and then, when you step up from M1 to M2 to M3, there’s even more significant gains. But the biggest was the GPU, obviously that 2015 MacBook Pro doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card, so it wouldn’t even run the 2019 for whatever reason, even though that had the highest radi on Graphics at the time performed worse than the CPU test, which I thought was Kind of weird editor Travis here from the 16-in MacBook Pro Camera and microphones, because that was the fastest thing for me to do. I did think of something I used to do back in the day and I used an app called gfx card status to force the dedicated GPU on the 2019 MacBook Pro and it got the proper score score. So it got a score of 257 compared to before it wasn’t working properly. So this makes a lot more sense. But if you look at the GPU on the M series MacBooks, it is crazy. You literally go from 462 to 825 all the way up to 1442.
On the M3 Max and the M3 Max GPU is insanely fast next up. Another GPU test is a gaming test and I used shadow of the Tomb Raider and one caveat here is this is an Intel application, so there is a translation layer happening to make this run on Apple silicon. So if there was a native version of this application, I’m sure it would run even better now, similar to the blender Benchmark. Obviously, there is no dedicated graphics on that old 2015, so this game wouldn’t even run. The 2019 ran at 60 frames per second, the 2021 M1 Max at 96, for whatever reason the M2 Max at 91 and then our M3 Max hit that 120 FPS and then one last thing to mention about the Tomb Raider Benchmark is. I ran this at 1200p.
At high settings next up is Blackmagic disc speed test, and I will say that this is going to be all over the place and not really an accurate representation, because ssds perform differently depending on their size. But the one thing to note here going from 2015 to 2019 to the 2021, there is significant, read, write performance gains here. It was almost double from the 2015 to the 2019 and then almost double again going from the 2019 to the 2021.
Next up is pixel meter Pro, which is honestly one of my favorite Mac apps. It’S $ 25 for a one-time purchase, it’s similar to photoshop, but has some features that photoshop doesn’t, and one of my favorite features is super resolution. It can utilize the neural engine and the newer Max to be able to upscale a photo and honestly the results are really wild.
I took a 4K version of the Windows, XP wallpaper and used super resolution to get it to 12K and it’s crazy. How fast or how slow these results were, because that 2015 MacBook Pro does not have a dedicated GPU and it obviously does not have a neural engine. This task took way longer than I thought it was going to take.
It was just over 4 minutes on the 2015 MacBook Pro and 5 seconds on the M3 Max next up is logic pro and I am not a music producer by any means. So I use one of the built-in demo sessions. I Ed the Lil Naz X, Atmos demo track and I exported it to a ADM file, which is a full resolution.
Dolby Atmos export that you would use to send to a music streaming service. Even to this day, a lot of audio processing is done on your fastest single core possible, and that’s why you can still see that even on the oldest MacBook, it’s not that much slower than the new ones. The 2015 MacBook Pro did this in 5 minutes and 49 seconds versus the M3 Max MacBook Pro did this in 2 minutes and 58 seconds. So the new machine is about 3 minutes faster and it’s not nearly as significant of a difference as it was in Lightroom or pixel meter.
Next up is catalyst brows and if you shoot on a Sony camera that records metadata from your lens, this is an essential application. The cool thing about this app is: it allows you to add stabilization to your footage after it’s been shot because the Sony lenses paired with a Sony camera have a gyroscope built in that records that gyro metadata, while you’re recording. In this case, I recorded a 1 minute clip on the fx6 that needed stabilized, ran it through Catalyst, brows stabilization and then exported that to a Full Resolution. Xavc all intra file – and in this case I can tell Sony – is utilizing the GPU in the machine because we went from a 10-minute export on the 2015 to about a 1 minute export on the 2023 M3 Max next up is Da Vinci resolve studio and, of Course I use Final Cut, as my main editor, but Da Vinci also features a lot of cool repair tools to fix your footage. So I shot a clip on the a74 in slog 3 422 10bit, and then I took that into D Vinci resolve added a grade. A D Flicker and a dhaz and then exported that to prores 422 HQ the 2015 MacBook was crying for help, and it said it was going to take 1 hour to export this clip. So I completely canceled it. So I’m just going to to say that machine did not finish the 2019 MacBook Pro did better than I would have expected about only 30 seconds slower than the brand new M3 Max and then last up with a synthetic Benchmark.
Geekbench 6, both in a metal GPU score and a single and multi-core CPU score. Now, of course, the gains from 2015 to 2019 were significant, because that 2015, like I’ve, said before didn’t, have a dedicated GPU. But the gains from the 2019 MacBook Pro, which had the highest GPU of the time to the 2021 M1 Max, was more than double and and then going from M1 Max to M2 Max. There was a decent bump and then from M2 Max to M3 Max another decent bump.
Now the last part here is CPU test in geekbench, and this is both multicore and single core. On the multi-core score. Of course, we went from a quad core to an 8 core and then to the new performance and efficiency cores on the Apple silicon chips. On that 2015 we got a score of about 3700 and then it doubled because we doubled our core count to about 7,100.
And then we got significant gains going from that to the Max a decent bump from M1 Max to M2 and then a larger than I would have expected bump from M2 to M3. As far as single core score goes, it really wasn’t that huge of a gap between the 2015 and the 2019, but when we get to Apple silicon, it was a significant jump with the highest score, of course, being the M3 Max at over 3,000. All right, so that was my M3 Max MacBook Pro Benchmark Madness, going all the way back to that 2015. Macbook Pro comment Down Below on what you thought was the craziest jump up to the M3 Max chip.
Thank you so much for watching and have a good night. .