The New MacBook Pros with M4 - Ultimate Review Part 2 (Graphics & Creative Tasks)
November 18, 2024
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Ultimate Review Part 2
Summary
We're picking up right where we left off in Part 1, so go check out that one if you haven't already. Part 2 covers graphics, creative tasks, and other updates.
Table of contents:
Graphics Performance: Super Competitive
Wildlife Extreme
In Wildlife Extreme, which is a cross-platform gaming benchmark, we see the M4 Max nearly tie with an Nvidia RTX 4090. This is an awesome result for Apple and a 19% improvement from the same 40-core GPU in their M3 version. The lower end 14-core M4 Max chip with its 32-core GPU outperforms the RTX 4080 in our Legion, which is also a great result.
The most interesting finding here, though, is that the M4 Pro only has 20 GPU cores and performs just as well as the 38 cores of the M2 Max of 2 years ago. A lot of progress has clearly been made on Apple’s GPU cores.
The Base M4 chip's performance may look poor compared to the powerful laptops we have on our graphs, but it’s actually really good. Its score of almost 10,000 smashes the integrated graphics in even the most powerful Windows laptops. It’s around a 31% lift over the Zenbook S 14 with Intel’s Lunar Lake which gets 7,443.
By the way, we do recognize that Wildlife uses Vulkan for Windows laptops and Metal for Macs. Windows laptops may perform better using Direct X 12, but right now we don’t have a cross-platform benchmark that supports this. Regardless, Macs are now clearly ready for gaming, too bad their selection is so limited.
Blender
In Blender we further tested the GPU by rendering the default splash screen on each laptop and these are the results for how long it took to do so. The M4 Macs perform even better than what we saw in Wildlife. We see both M4 Max chips beat out the 4090. The M4 Pro we have beats out the 4080 by a hair as well, which is impressive given how small this laptop is versus a 4080 one.
Video Editing: Huge Improvements
Premiere Pro
For video editors we are going to start by looking at Puget’s Premiere Pro benchmark. We see a modest improvement from the prior generation when it comes to the Max chips. The lower end M4 Max chip in our MacBook Pro 14 now matches the performance of the highest end M3 Max chip in our older MacBook Pro 16.
The next thing you’ll notice is that this is one of the only areas where Windows laptops do well. Premiere Pro performs very well on Intel hardware. You can even see the ProArt with an RTX 4070 and an AMD Zen 5 chip is almost beaten by the Yoga Pro 9i that has an RTX 4060 but an Intel chip instead. This matches what we experience here at this YouTube channel. Josh's MacBook Pro 16s with Max chips always stutter and drop frames whereas Taylor and Colin’s high-end Windows laptops do not.
What’s most interesting to us is once again the M4 Pro MacBook Pro 14 sees a huge performance boost. It is a significantly better laptop for video editing than the M3 Pro 12-core was that it replaces.
Warp Stabilizer Test
Since Josh video edits off MacBooks using Premier Pro and a lot of buyers of these laptops do, we dived in deeper. First, we ran a Warp Stabilization test, which is a common effect that stabilizes jolty footage.
The M4 Max and Pro chips saw a slight improvement vs the highest end M3 Max. This is likely due to improved Single core performance. Vs the M3 Pro chip, the faster memory bandwidth of these new M4 processors is likely also coming into play. Overall, this may not seem like that much of a difference as you’re saving a couple of seconds, but keep in mind, most editors do this many many times.
Export Test
One of the most time intensive tasks as a video editor is exporting. That’s where we have to sit around and wait. So, for this custom test, we exported one of our videos on each of these laptops.
The M4 Max MacBook Pro 16 was an absolute beast. We talked about this specific operation extensively in our MacBook Pro M3 “You’ve Been Misled” video, which we will link here. Exporting a video is highly dependent on the Media Engines. It’s all about how fast you can decode and encode footage, and how fast you can feed those Media Engines with data. The M3 Max 16 core chip had the same number of media engines and the 400 Gigabytes per second memory bandwidth as the M2 Max 12-core chip before it. So, it didn’t perform that much better. This year’s 16-core M4 Max has 546 Gigabytes of memory bandwidth and now the gap is wider.
But, the real star of the show is once again the M4 Pro 14-core. It way exceeded our expectations. So much so that we ran it twice. Up until now, Pro chips were about twice as slow for video exporting as Max chips, which I believed was because they only had 1 Media Engine not 2. This indicates there were other bottlenecks at play that have been alleviated.
DaVinci Resolve
If you are video editing in DaVinci not Premiere the story is similar. Solid improvements for these new Macs, and again a surprisingly good result for the MacBook Pro 14 with the M4 Pro chip. Where the DaVinci results differ from Premier Pro though, is MacOS vs Windows. Here the M4 Max equipped MacBook Pros now outperform the most powerful Windows laptops.
Photoshop: Top Notch Performance
For creators using Photoshop here are our Puget Benchmark scores. You can see more modest improvements compared to the other applications we’ve shown you. One interesting note for is that all these Macs, dating back to the M2 series, significantly outperform Windows laptops.
SSD Speeds: A Mixed Bag
Using Amorphous Disk Mark for MacOS and Crystal Disk Mark for Windows, we measured storage read and write speeds. The first takeaway here is that the M4s do about as well as their M3 predecessors in sequential speeds, which is good. By the way, our base M4 and Air with M3 are about half as fast, this is likely because our configs of these only have smaller 512GB drives not 1 TB.
The second takeaway is that some of the M4s are bit slower in random reads than their predecessors, but still perform way better than Windows competitors. When it comes to random writes, their scores have improved over last generation, but here they do worse than Windows laptops.
AI Capabilities: An Interesting Prospect
One thing we do want to call out is how uniquely suited these laptops are for AI and ML tasks. Normally data scientists want high powered GPUs for large matrix operations combined with lots of memory. In a regular computer, you often have limited GPU memory. So, you link multiple GPUs together in nodes. These Macs are unique in that they combine high powered GPUs with up to 128GB of memory. This makes them very compelling for such tasks.
The Nanotexture Display: Possibly Unnecessary
Now when it comes to the Nanotexture display, this sounded pretty cool, but ordering it would be a custom build. We couldn’t get one in time for this review. We feel that MacBooks already have bright screens that do a good job of combating reflections. Josh has used a MacBook Pro 14 consistently since it was launched in coffee stores all over the world. He's noted glare issues maybe three times. So, we don’t think it's needed. Also, with adaptive brightness on, these displays can get to nearly 1000 nits for SD content now, improving from their previous 600 nits. This makes it even less likely that you'll need this upgrade.
Conclusions
As we went over in Part 1 of our Ultimate Review, we liked this release for a lot of reasons. If nothing else, it's a huge improvement over M4 in the base specs they are offering, such as 16GB memory. One thing we don't love is how their storage upgrades are still so expensive and they are starting you as low as 512GB on some of these very expensive laptops. That is almost unusable unless you utilize a lot of cloud storage for larger projects. In general, we don't recommend buying custom builds from Apple since you can save so much buying from retailers.
Go check out our first review for more in-depth thoughts on this, each of the chips themselves, our benchmarks and resulting conclusions about CPU performance, efficiency, and battery life.