MacBook Pro 16 Performance i9 vs i7

[clarencek]

I just took him the base i9 version 16/1TB/4GB VRAM - the stock model.
I had a 2019 13" i7 - 2.8GHz quad core 16/1TB.

I do some video work and programming and felt with the new 16" I could take advantage of the larger screen... and to be honest, never really warmed up to the flat / stiff keyboards.

I'm frankly blown away by the performance. I don't know if it's the GPU or the i9, but on my 13" transcoding video I would average around 60 - 90 fps in handbrake.
On the 16" I'm getting 225 fps (sometimes climbing to 290) with the exact same settings on the same files.
I'm pretty stunned by this difference as I had some reservations about moving to a larger machine... a lot of the stuff online doesn't show a significant difference between an i7 and i9.

Anyway, I'm a happy customer and now wondering if I should have spent the extra money on the faster i9, more ram or more vram.

 

[faust]

Yeah, opting to leave the computer a tad "bulkier" for the sake of performance not being throttled seems to have turned out well for Apple. I just got the i9/16 GB/1 TB SSD/5500M 4 GB from Best Buy for a seriously great price, so I've been enjoying it very much. Doesn't surprise me that your computer is performing better now that you no longer have a system that isn't being cooled enough with a beefier dGPU to boot.

 

[littlepud]

I've found that the difference between the i7 and i9 aren't that evident in daily use (web, office, media consumption, moderate gaming, light video editing, light VM work). Where the i9's extra cores come in handy is with sustained workloads that peg the CPU at 100%, such as for video transcoding. Even though the T2 chip can handle HEVC encoding, its output looks like ass compared to x265 with proper settings in software.