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M3 Max First Impressions

avkills

avkills

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 14, 2002
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Well today was a good day; as my M3 Max 16" MacBook Pro arrived (128G/2TB/40-core GPU). Almost done getting everything setup. Currently I have not run any synthetic benchmarks. But have done some basic real world quick testing in After Effects...

Well I am going to eat crow today; from the basic initial testing in After Effects this laptop seems to be faster than my 16-core 2019 Mac Pro with 240GB RAM and a W6800x Duo GPU. And this has been observed by loading a very recent AE project that was a animation for a large LED wall live show. (Although I kind of knew this was going to be the case researching Puget AE benchmarks, the M3 Max is pretty much killing it.). Element 3D (AE Plugin) is also very fast; although I have not really done a real project test with it yet.

I have yet to mess around in Premiere, but will be doing that later today. One good thing though is some 10bit H.264 files that I could not preview on my old 2019 Mac Book Pro or the 2019 Mac Pro preview just fine on the M3.

Hopefully Lightwave 3D 2023 for the Mac gets released soon; which promises native Apple Silicon support.

So I am very happy and very annoyed at the same time. Simply amazing that in 3-4 years we have a laptop kit performing on par with a true workstation class machine. It is going to be very nice now being able to actually work on "heavy" AE projects no matter where I am.

Getting setup was pretty much painless with iCloud storing passwords and browser info and the fact that most of my stuff is on dropbox.

Looks as though my work machine is now going to be my primary; with my personal Mac Pro taking a back seat and being more dedicated to my stuff.

What a world we live in...🤣.

(I am truly hoping Apple does a M3 Ultra, and gives the AS Mac Pro the true love it needs with proper PCIe expansion bandwidth.)
 
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Screenshot 2023-12-19 at 2.56.08 AM.png
Screenshot 2023-12-19 at 2.56.16 AM.png


These are not my benchmarks; but you can see overall the M3 Max beating a desktop Windows system with a i9 14900K and a RTX 4090. That certainly can't make the Puget guys happy. Although if the Windows system also had 128GB of RAM then it probably would score higher. I can attest from personal experience that having low system RAM with high VRAM GPUs does not work well in a non-unified RAM scenario on any computer system, at least with regards to After Effects.
 
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Sounds like a great machine for your workflow. When I got the M1 Max I was equally impressed with some software that finished processing image files in 10 seconds. My 2017 Intel MBP took 2 minutes for the same file. The GPU with 30 cores makes a big difference for me.
 
Congrats, still waiting for my 16core M3 Max!

Have you experienced any fan noise yet?
 
Just starting racking in some Premiere time. For the most part it feels better than the Mac Pro. Generating waveforms seems to be a lot faster, probably due to the hardware encoders/decoders (although I am not sure if they handle the audio portions, I would assume they do since the video and audio is multiplexed.)

Very happy with the machine thus far.
 
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avkills said:
Lightwave 3D 2023 for the Mac gets released soon; which promises native Apple Silicon support.
Click to expand...
Why are you waiting for Lightwave? there are already many production ready options that runs natively on AS
 
sirio76 said:
Why are you waiting for Lightwave? there are already many production ready options that runs natively on AS
Click to expand...
Been using Lightwave since the Video Toaster days; however 3D isn't my main job. It is a every once and a while thing and to be honest, most other 3D programs annoy me on how they work.

Was actually very surprised and happy that someone acquired LW from Virtz and is actually developing it again.
 
So I am in the process of getting Sonoma on my Mac Pro (fresh install.). Figured that would make comparisons better since who knows what Metal 3 and other GPU optimizations might be present for the W6800.

I will say that there did not seem to be any install weirdness like I experienced with Ventura.
 
I switched over from Adobe creative suite with my recent Adobe cloud annual renewal offer.
I’m now using Final Cut Pro, Motion , affinity and a few other apps that I feel are much better’s natively optimized to complete the same tasks and perform even faster than some of the more cross platform less well optimized apps.
Of course this is all down to personal workflow preference but if you wanted to see an even bigger performance improvement, try using some of the aforementioned apps especially latest update to FCP.
 
tomO2013 said:
I switched over from Adobe creative suite with my recent Adobe cloud annual renewal offer.
I’m now using Final Cut Pro, Motion , affinity and a few other apps that I feel are much better’s natively optimized to complete the same tasks and perform even faster than some of the more cross platform less well optimized apps.
Of course this is all down to personal workflow preference but if you wanted to see an even bigger performance improvement, try using some of the aforementioned apps especially latest update to FCP.
Click to expand...
I have used FCP X before, but it just isn't my cup of tea. I just do not like it. I have been considering Resolve though.
 
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Absolutely your personal workflow is king. Switching software can be a pain in the ass. I totally get it.
 
Cinebench 2024 Results, M3 Max (40 GPU) vs. 16-Core 2019 Mac Pro W6800X Duo. I verified that the benchmark was indeed using both GPU cores on the W6800X Duo; which makes the Mac Pro look even worse....oh well...progress happens whether you like it or not.

M3 Max (16 core, 40 core GPU, 128GB RAM):
Cinebench2024-M3Max.png


Mac Pro (16-core, W6800X Duo, 240GB RAM):
Cinebench2024-16coreMacPro.png


The M3 Ultra should be a beast if it ever comes to light.
 
senttoschool said:
If you have 128GB of RAM, go run some local LLMs:


It's one of few applications that can actually make really good use of that much memory.
Click to expand...
Do you have a recommendation for an appropriate model to use with LM Studio, assuming my computer is M1 Max w/32GB of memory?
 
BeatCrazy said:
Do you have a recommendation for an appropriate model to use with LM Studio, assuming my computer is M1 Max w/32GB of memory?
Click to expand...
I have an M1 Max with 32GB. You should be able to run 7B models easily. I have deepseek-coder 33B Q4 running on it, but its really close on that one.
 
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BeatCrazy said:
Cool. I'm thinking about trying Ollama AI.
Click to expand...
Depends on what you're trying to do, but Mistral OpenOrca is excellent for creative writing. It's what I use:
ollama.ai

mistral-openorca

Mistral OpenOrca is a 7 billion parameter model, fine-tuned on top of the Mistral 7B model using the OpenOrca dataset.
ollama.ai ollama.ai

This UI is also excellent:
github.com

GitHub - open-webui/open-webui: User-friendly AI Interface (Supports Ollama, OpenAI API, ...)

User-friendly AI Interface (Supports Ollama, OpenAI API, ...) - open-webui/open-webui
github.com github.com
 
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avkills said:
Well today was a good day; as my M3 Max 16" MacBook Pro arrived (128G/2TB/40-core GPU). Almost done getting everything setup. Currently I have not run any synthetic benchmarks. But have done some basic real world quick testing in After Effects...

Well I am going to eat crow today; from the basic initial testing in After Effects this laptop seems to be faster than my 16-core 2019 Mac Pro with 240GB RAM and a W6800x Duo GPU. And this has been observed by loading a very recent AE project that was a animation for a large LED wall live show. (Although I kind of knew this was going to be the case researching Puget AE benchmarks, the M3 Max is pretty much killing it.). Element 3D (AE Plugin) is also very fast; although I have not really done a real project test with it yet.

I have yet to mess around in Premiere, but will be doing that later today. One good thing though is some 10bit H.264 files that I could not preview on my old 2019 Mac Book Pro or the 2019 Mac Pro preview just fine on the M3.

Hopefully Lightwave 3D 2023 for the Mac gets released soon; which promises native Apple Silicon support.

So I am very happy and very annoyed at the same time. Simply amazing that in 3-4 years we have a laptop kit performing on par with a true workstation class machine. It is going to be very nice now being able to actually work on "heavy" AE projects no matter where I am.

Getting setup was pretty much painless with iCloud storing passwords and browser info and the fact that most of my stuff is on dropbox.

Looks as though my work machine is now going to be my primary; with my personal Mac Pro taking a back seat and being more dedicated to my stuff.

What a world we live in...🤣.

(I am truly hoping Apple does a M3 Ultra, and gives the AS Mac Pro the true love it needs with proper PCIe expansion bandwidth.)
Click to expand...

Amazing!
 
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