Richard sent me a question last week asking me to compare the speed of complex projects in Apple Motion when running on Apple Silicon vs. Intel.
Easy, I thought. Except these results were NOT what I expected!
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
I created two 4K projects containing 3D shapes, 4K media, cameras, lights and filters. I exported each project twice and timed the duration of each export.
In every test, the 2017 27″ iMac was significantly faster than a 2021 16″ MacBook Pro!
Wow!
THE SYSTEMS
These are the specs for the 2017 iMac: Intel-based, latest version of macOS.
These are the specs for the 2021 16″ MacBook Pro: Apple Silicon, latest version of macOS. This uses the M1 Pro CPU. Based on data provided by Activity Monitor, I would not expect much difference if this computer used the M1 Max CPU instead.
MOTION PROJECTS
Both projects were set to UHD (4K) 60 fps with 20 second duration. I exported and timed each project twice, just in case there was a significant speed difference due to cacheing.
There wasn’t.
The first project took a 3D object, applied rotation in 3D space, added custom lights and colors, plus a moving camera shooting with depth of field enabled.
Though this project was designed to run at 60 fps neither system achieved that speed:
No external media was used for this project, just library elements.
In this test, the Intel iMac was 48% faster than the M1 MacBook Pro! (Though both exported the project slightly faster the second time through.)
The second project was more complex:
Though this project was designed to run at 60 fps neither system achieved that speed:
Yup, the older Intel-based iMac was about 4 times faster during playback than the newer M1 MacBook Pro!!
NOTE: I purposefully did not render either project, as I wanted to see what the native playback speed would be.
That speed differential also applied to exports – the Intel iMac was faster by 176%!
NOTE: I discovered, as I was writing this article, that the first time I ran these performance tests, the MacBook Pro was running on battery. So I ran them again with the laptop plugged in and discovered that Motion was about 20% faster on the MacBook Pro when running on battery!
CPUS ARE NOT WORKING VERY HARD
When I looked at Activity Monitor for the MacBook Pro, it quickly became apparent that the CPUs and GPUs were not running anywhere close to maximum speed. In fact, most of the project was running on the slower performance Efficiency CPUs. None of the high-performance cores were working very hard and the last two were not used at all.
As well, the GPUs were not maxed out. This is why I would expect these speeds to be essentially the same whether running on an M1 Pro or M1 Max.
SUMMARY
Though all these results are surprising, I was really struck by the extremely slow playback speed of the M1 MacBook Pro for the complex Motion project.
I don’t have an explanation for this speed difference, but I do have a thought. While the raw performance numbers of the new Silicon Macs are stunning, applications need to be optimized to take full advantage of this speed potential.
Apple has spent time optimizing at least some of Final Cut Pro. But they have not yet had time to optimize Motion. Yes, Motion runs on the new chips, but nowhere near as fast as it did when running on Intel.
Clearly, it is impossible to design a single test, or even a test suite, that fully measures performance in an application as flexible and complex as Motion. But these tests offer a caution that simply supporting Apple Silicon is not a guarantee of blazing speed.
For those interested, you can download (5KB) my first Motion project – which doesn’t require any external media – and run some tests yourself. As always, I’m interested in your comments.
36 Responses to Apple Motion Speed Test – Intel vs. Apple Silicon
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Kurt Friis Hansen says:
November 10, 2022 at 2:16 am
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Larry says:
November 10, 2022 at 1:30 pm
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Waleed says:
November 8, 2023 at 9:00 am
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Larry says:
November 8, 2023 at 10:13 am
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Waleed says:
November 12, 2023 at 4:19 am
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Larry Jordan says:
November 12, 2023 at 5:59 am
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Waleed says:
November 12, 2023 at 11:58 pm
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Larry Jordan says:
November 13, 2023 at 5:28 am
← Older CommentsI decided to try your testfile: “Motion 3D Lighting Test.motn” with a few variations in settings on the same machine:
Machine: MacBook Pro 14 M1 Pro 10CPU/16GPU, 16GB/1TB
Motion 5.6.3
Render ProRes 4444, Color + Alpa etc. Entire Project, Action Save Only
Quanlity: Normal
Fields: Off
Motion Blur: Off
Render time (hand stopped): 10.5 sec
Quanlity: Normal
Fields: Off
Motion Blur: On
Render time (hand stopped): 36.5 sec
Quanlity: Normal
Fields: On
Motion Blur: On
Render time (hand stopped): 35.1 sec
Quanlity: Best
Fields: On
Motion Blur: On
Render time (hand stopped): 35.1 sec
– – –
I then repeated the project above, but with Fields and Motion Blur turned off, leading to a rendering time of 29.9 sec instead of 3m40s – in round figures, seven times faster! Same ProRes 4444 Color+Alpha, Best quality, UHD 25fps etc.
Now, I know what to avoid – BIIIG smile!!!
My take on this:
It’s not really a ProRes problem. In this case, it is quite obviously that the Motion Blur setting exhibits these huge side effects. That’s in a way quite understandable.
Regards
Kelly:
Thanks for your detailed analysis. We have long known that motion blur slows things down. Thanks to you we have a much better understanding of how much impact that really has.
Larry
Hi Larry, I know it’s a lot of work but if you get the chance I’d love updated benchmarks using M2 or M3 chips and a newer Motion release. Thank you.
Waleed:
Hmmm… I don’t own an M3 system, but M1 and M2 I do. What, more specifically, would you like to see?
Larry
Hey Larry, I was wondering about speed improvement working with somewhat complex (5,000+ point) replicators/emitters in 3d space. My current loaded i9 iMac doesn’t like them very much, even when Activity Monitor shows Motion not using much beyond a single CPU thread or two and very little GPU.
More specifically, the Motion 5.6.4 update last May helped a bit with me so was wondering if the update had a bigger impact (via newer AS optimizations and such) for some of your tests above.
Waleed
Waleed:
This is a good question. Position changes, such as emitters, are CPU- and RAM-based. But, multiple CPUs won’t do any good unless the emitter software is multi-threaded, which means it can run across multiple CPUs.
If it can’t, then CPU clock speed will be the only thing that speeds things up. If it does, then the new Apple silicon systems – with faster data bandwidth, unified memory and more CPU cores – should be faster.
Remember, you can always render – which provides the highest quality and most accurate movement – but takes time.
Larry
You’re right. I’m not a programmer so it’s probably much harder than I hope, but I still find it surprising Motion doesn’t multithread emitters in this day and age. Anyway, thanks for your feedback.
Waleed:
Your questions intrigued me. So, I ran an experiment to see how well Motion performed using particles and replicators on an M2 Max Mac Studio. Surprisingly, even with thousands of particles, the system was always running in real-time.
Read more here: https://larryjordan.com/articles/apple-motion-particle-effects-performance/
Larry