Apple Mac Studio is blazingly fast

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Reviewers have been benchmarking all the things on the Apple Mac Studio, and one thing is clear. It’s a beast, chewing through professional tasks with ease. The only downside? It can’t game as well as modern Windows desktops.

Check out this video from Dave2D. The M1 Ultra in the Mac Studio destroyed everything in Geekbench 5, with a 24038 score. The closest CPU to that was the $700 Intel 12900K, with a score of 18711. The M1 Ultra is nearly a third faster!

Video rendering is one of the most common professional tasks, and the Mac Studio chews through 4K footage like nobody’s business.

It took 9min and 20 seconds to render 10 minutes of 6K BRAW footage on the Studio, compared to 12min 11sec on an Intel 12900K paired with an RTX3090. Over multiple renders, that’s a huge time saving for any video professional.

Tom’s Guide found similar benchmark scores and even had time to test some games. The Mac Studio didn’t fare as well as the Windows machines here. Then again, nobody buys a Mac to game on, do they?

The odd thing with their testing is that Civilization VI ran better on last year’s 16-inch MacBook Pro with the older M1 Max chip in.

The M1 Ultra is two M1 Max chips fused together, so you’d think it would run better, not worse. Maybe this is an outlier, or maybe Apple can fix things in a future software update.

Anyway, nobody buys a Mac to game on. It’s nice to know that your professional powerhouse can play some games though, to wind down after a long day.

Or you know, you could buy a console and sprawl out on the couch in comfort. Your choice.

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Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. It’s one of the ways we keep the lights on here. Click here for more.

Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.