The way I am viewing this is I think I will go for the M4 Max Studio with 128 28 gigs of RAM and the 40 core GPU.
I do photo editing and video editing, but also AI creation.
My Mac Mini M1 was plenty good enough for all the photo editing. In fact, I upgraded to the M4 Pro, and I don't see any significant, if any improvement in my photo editing speeds. I have an M1 Mac Studio. I do all my 4K video editing on. That's never been a problem either.
But for the AI creation, things are definitely a lot slower than Nvidia systems.
My M1 was just way too slow and my M4 Pro, I am able to use it and I'm creating AI images now basically every day, sometimes up to a thousand of them or more a day.
the M4 for studio with the more GPUs and higher amount of RAM than my M4 Pro, I should see somewhat of an increase in speed. I'm hoping 50%, but maybe only 40%.
But to get the real faster speeds, I would have to be spending around $12,000 on the Ultra, which is ridiculous. ridiculous when I could build a system for much less using a Nvidia board and computer, which I have one as well with one of the lower end boards.
If you go online and look at the cost of renting GPU space, kind of adding it up for what it would cost you to buy like a $12,000 M3 Ultra, you can probably rent GPU space for eight hours a day, for five or six days a week, for over seven years or more for that same cost. and it would be two to three times if not faster And as new boards come out and the rental places upgrade to newer systems, you will always be able to then rent even faster systems to use.
So you would get a lot more work done. So in reality, you probably wouldn't need eight hours a day worth of it because you're getting stuff done much faster, so then you could extend that time possibly out to even 14 years of renting GPU space online.
So develop things on the Mac M4 Max studio and run some basic things as needed local or for small jobs., but on larger jobs where you need to run lots and lots of images and run harder models And things like flux, that takes a lot more power, use the online services because it will save you so much more money than paying a fortune for a Mac system that's still much, much slower than most of the NVIDIA run systems.
Using SDXL models on my M4 Mini Pro for my current use, I can knock out images in around 25 to 28 seconds on average. and then do upsizing and extra editing afterwards in another program like Photomator.
I'm hoping the Mac M4 Mac Studio with the 40 gigs of GPU will at least knock my time down to 10 to 12 seconds. That would be acceptable. but on larger jobs, then I can go online and knock that down to a few seconds each.
But one of the problems that I've learned is a lot of the AI nodes and things for doing this are not optimized for the Mac core ML. And that's one of the things holding it back for speed that prevents a lot of it from even using the GPUs to the full extent.
I do photo editing and video editing, but also AI creation.
My Mac Mini M1 was plenty good enough for all the photo editing. In fact, I upgraded to the M4 Pro, and I don't see any significant, if any improvement in my photo editing speeds. I have an M1 Mac Studio. I do all my 4K video editing on. That's never been a problem either.
But for the AI creation, things are definitely a lot slower than Nvidia systems.
My M1 was just way too slow and my M4 Pro, I am able to use it and I'm creating AI images now basically every day, sometimes up to a thousand of them or more a day.
the M4 for studio with the more GPUs and higher amount of RAM than my M4 Pro, I should see somewhat of an increase in speed. I'm hoping 50%, but maybe only 40%.
But to get the real faster speeds, I would have to be spending around $12,000 on the Ultra, which is ridiculous. ridiculous when I could build a system for much less using a Nvidia board and computer, which I have one as well with one of the lower end boards.
If you go online and look at the cost of renting GPU space, kind of adding it up for what it would cost you to buy like a $12,000 M3 Ultra, you can probably rent GPU space for eight hours a day, for five or six days a week, for over seven years or more for that same cost. and it would be two to three times if not faster And as new boards come out and the rental places upgrade to newer systems, you will always be able to then rent even faster systems to use.
So you would get a lot more work done. So in reality, you probably wouldn't need eight hours a day worth of it because you're getting stuff done much faster, so then you could extend that time possibly out to even 14 years of renting GPU space online.
So develop things on the Mac M4 Max studio and run some basic things as needed local or for small jobs., but on larger jobs where you need to run lots and lots of images and run harder models And things like flux, that takes a lot more power, use the online services because it will save you so much more money than paying a fortune for a Mac system that's still much, much slower than most of the NVIDIA run systems.
Using SDXL models on my M4 Mini Pro for my current use, I can knock out images in around 25 to 28 seconds on average. and then do upsizing and extra editing afterwards in another program like Photomator.
I'm hoping the Mac M4 Mac Studio with the 40 gigs of GPU will at least knock my time down to 10 to 12 seconds. That would be acceptable. but on larger jobs, then I can go online and knock that down to a few seconds each.
But one of the problems that I've learned is a lot of the AI nodes and things for doing this are not optimized for the Mac core ML. And that's one of the things holding it back for speed that prevents a lot of it from even using the GPUs to the full extent.
