Adobe After Effects Updated With Native Apple Silicon Support, Up to 3x Faster Speeds Than High-End iMac Pro

[Zdigital2015]

Apple doesn't sell the iMac Pro anymore, and even when they did its internals were a couple of generations out of date. Apple Silicon doesn't need this kind of cherry-picked stat in order to justify its existence.

When the iMac Pro was released in 2017 it was the first generation Xeon-W (21xx) and used the latest C422 chipset. The second Gen Xeon-W (22xx) suitable as a replacement was introduced in Q4 of 2019, which was around the same timeframe as the 2019 Mac Pro (Xeon-W 32xx) series was introduced. By that time, the iMac Pro had served its purpose as an interim gap between the 2013 and 2019 Mac Pro. At no time during the two years before the 2019 Mac Pro was introduced was the 2017 iMac Pro out of date or had “dated internals that were a couple of generations old.”

The 2017 iMac Pro is an excellent choice for a comparison as the 10-core has the highest single-core score, scores well in multi-core and was a cheap upgrade for those that took the iMac Pro plunge. Users who bought an iMac Pro are about at the point where they are looking for a replacement and this stat will be relevant to them.

 

[Zdigital2015]

There’s a reason why most Adobe software is in desperate need of a rewrite and doesn’t get it and it isn’t money. Suffice it to say, until management changes, expect more of the same band-aids for years to come.

 

[eas]

So, basically this tells us that the promise of the Ultra is unrealized. An Ultra has 2x the CPU and GPU resources of an Max, but the speedups of an Ultra over a Max ranges from 0% to 50%

This is consistent with the Ultra being a disappointment. I'm sure it's worth it to some people who can afford to pay >2x for less than 50% improvement. Those people certainly exist.

I'm sure that there are more gains to be had with more optimization, but for now, the Ultra is not distinguishing itself.

 

[Ethosik]

When the iMac Pro was released in 2017 it was the first generation Xeon-W (21xx) and used the latest C422 chipset. The second Gen Xeon-W (22xx) suitable as a replacement was introduced in Q4 of 2019, which was around the same timeframe as the 2019 Mac Pro (Xeon-W 32xx) series was introduced. By that time, the iMac Pro had served its purpose as an interim gap between the 2013 and 2019 Mac Pro. At no time during the two years before the 2019 Mac Pro was introduced was the 2017 iMac Pro out of date or had “dated internals that were a couple of generations old.”

The 2017 iMac Pro is an excellent choice for a comparison as the 10-core has the highest single-core score, scores well in multi-core and was a cheap upgrade for those that took the iMac Pro plunge. Users who bought an iMac Pro are about at the point where they are looking for a replacement and this stat will be relevant to them.

This is a problem people seem to have. Because it’s X-1 generation Intel means it’s out of date, even if no replacements exist.

 

[Ethosik]

So, basically this tells us that the promise of the Ultra is unrealized. An Ultra has 2x the CPU and GPU resources of an Max, but the speedups of an Ultra over a Max ranges from 0% to 50%

This is consistent with the Ultra being a disappointment. I'm sure it's worth it to some people who can afford to pay >2x for less than 50% improvement. Those people certainly exist.

I'm sure that there are more gains to be had with more optimization, but for now, the Ultra is not distinguishing itself.

At some point there is diminishing returns on everything. An NVIDIA RTX 3090 cost difference between a 3080 doesn’t line up either. Some people will get the 3090 though.

 

[Tagbert]

So, basically this tells us that the promise of the Ultra is unrealized. An Ultra has 2x the CPU and GPU resources of an Max, but the speedups of an Ultra over a Max ranges from 0% to 50%

This is consistent with the Ultra being a disappointment. I'm sure it's worth it to some people who can afford to pay >2x for less than 50% improvement. Those people certainly exist.

I'm sure that there are more gains to be had with more optimization, but for now, the Ultra is not distinguishing itself.

Since it seems to be that AE is not written to use multiple cores, that is is AE that is is the disappointment and is unable to make use of the power that Ultra offers.

 

[tubular]

Since it seems to be that AE is not written to use multiple cores, that is is AE that is is the disappointment and is unable to make use of the power that Ultra offers.

That's the point. The hardware isn't the limitation, it's how it's being employed. If Adobe can't figure out how to use all those cores ... someone else will.

 

[e-coli]

That's not what a review is for. M1's performance on many things was, and still is, not that impressive compared to its x86 counterparts.

This is PURE crazy talk. I work across everything from 3D to animation to image editing and layout design. The M1 MBP annihilates my previous gen Intel MBP. It’s like being beamed to the future comparatively. Night and day difference in speed, battery life, multitasking, responsiveness while rendering. Everything.

 

[orionquest]

That's the point. The hardware isn't the limitation, it's how it's being employed. If Adobe can't figure out how to use all those cores ... someone else will.

I doubt it. Adobe has been at this a long time no one really has stepped up. Like MS owns the Office market Adobe has a hold on graphics.

 

[Ziperix]

So many benchmarks seem to have had the goal of painting the Apple Silicon Macs in a bad light - usually through disingenuous tactics. I have seen many benchmarks optimised for non-apple API's (openGL anyone?) or comparing non-hardware accelerated against hardware accelerated. for example Handbrake encoding on Intel by default uses hardware acceleration, I have seen benchmarks comparing software rendering on M1 against hardware rendering on Intel/Windows. So much murky stuff designed to confirm a conclusion.

If someone uses an app that uses openGL as a part of their workflow then they deserve to know the performance that they will get. Instead of using industry standard APIs Apple focused on their inferior Metal without many basic features and now they are paying a price.

 

[tubular]

Instead of using industry standard APIs Apple focused on their inferior Metal without many basic features and now they are paying a price.

I'd definitely like Apple to support industry-standard APIs, but OpenGL was designed for the one-graphics-core world of the early 1990s. I don't fault Apple for deprecating it -- it had a good run but the basic architecture of graphics rendering changed dramatically in the last thirty years. I wish Apple would officially support OpenGL's successor, Vulkan, rather than leaving that in the hands of third-party developers via MoltenVK.

 

[Powerbooky]

Anyone else wish Adobe just rewrote all their apps from the ground up? Illustrator, Photoshop and Indesign all run as if they've just been running the same code since PowerPC days...

Sometimes I wished that the code was the same. I remember the time when I could run Photoshop directly from my ZIP drive, as it was just one single application without other stuff scattered on the internal disk. Eventually each Photoshop version became less and less efficiently compiled aka slower. Doing an automated batch to crop/resize images often was faster on my PowerPC Mac than on my intel Mac (both with harddisk).

But maybe compilers for M1 type CPU's are more efficient? Years ago I used to do a Delphi coding project in Windows, rewriting a piece of software that was originally made in MS Visual Basic. Because Delphi had way better compilers the binaries were often more than 50% smaller and faster than the equivalent in Visual Basic.

Anyway... the more important thing with AfterEffects, Photoshop, Media Encoder and Premiere Pro... are they consistent with colour again? Just last month I had to downgrade to a 2020/2019 version because the colour output was washed out (again) of AfterEffects.

 

[Tagbert]

Sometimes I wished that the code was the same. I remember the time when I could run Photoshop directly from my ZIP drive, as it was just one single application without other stuff scattered on the internal disk. Eventually each Photoshop version became less and less efficiently compiled aka slower. Doing an automated batch to crop/resize images often was faster on my PowerPC Mac than on my intel Mac (both with harddisk).

But maybe compilers for M1 type CPU's are more efficient? Years ago I used to do a Delphi coding project in Windows, rewriting a piece of software that was originally made in MS Visual Basic. Because Delphi had way better compilers the binaries were often more than 50% smaller and faster than the equivalent in Visual Basic.

Anyway... the more important thing with AfterEffects, Photoshop, Media Encoder and Premiere Pro... are they consistent with colour again? Just last month I had to downgrade to a 2020/2019 version because the colour output was washed out (again) of AfterEffects.

Visual Basic is (was?) an interpreted language; it runs directly using the source code. Delphi is compiled. Besides that Delphi was known for having a very efficient complier that produced very small executables. Same with its ancestor, Turbo Pascal.