Anybody going from a M1 Max to M4 Pro who can tell me about the speed of transcoding video using hardware encoders going from the 2 from the M1 Max to the 1 on the M4 Pro? Is it somehow nearly as fast? Thanks.
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Hardware Encoders on M4 Pro v M1 Max
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Take a look at this post, it should shed some light.
M1 Max: 5 minutes 30 seconds
M4: 8 minutes 9 seconds
Hard to say anything about the M4 Pro, but it might be slower than M1 Max.
Funny you should mention. I finally got my new M4 MacBook Pro unbinned Pro chip and here's the results:
M1 Max 32gb RAM 2TB SSD, 32 core GPU v M4 Pro unbinned, 48gb RAM, 2TB SSD, 20 core GPU. Using FFworks FFmpeg GUI tool, hardware accelerated encoding to H.264 from various formats revealed that the M1 Max was between 10-25% faster on the encode. One test was 800fps to 910fps and then another was more in the 25% range. Not bad at all at all at all.
I'd expect it to be nearly 2x faster, are you encoding and decoding with videotoolbox?
Sorry, I glossed over the "from various formats" part. The media engine only supports ProRes, H.264 and H.265/HEVC so when converting from other formats, the decoding will be done on the CPU so clearly M4 will be significantly faster at decoding, but the encoding part should be close to 2x faster as the media engine itself is practically the same and the performance is pretty linear, e.g. 2 media engines = ~2x faster.
What I didn't know about the Max is that it only has 1x hardware decoder so it can't be ~2x fast at both.
Not it is not. The M4 gen encoder is faster than the M1 gen encoder and I have confirmed that from various chips. The M4 Max encoder is indeed faster than the M1 Max encoder and outperforms the M1 Max encoder despite having the same amount of encoders.
A single M1 encoder cannot do 4K 120fps HEVC encoding at all but a single M4 encoder can. They are NOT practically the same.
Relatively, hardware encoding performance hasn't changed much from M1. Yes, the M4 encoder is quicker but not even close to matching two M1 encoders.
It is about 30% faster from my benchmarks and yes it is not as fast as two encoder engine, but it is significantly enough to have a close fps on a single video encoding session because a single encoding job does not scale with the number of engines in a very ideal factor and is sitting between 160%-170% on the Max chips for single encoding job. If you run a lot of encoding jobs at the same time and sum up the total fps, it would be closer to 2x if the decoder itself is not overloaded. So for the benchmark presented, it is more like 130% vs 160% which is close to the observed results.