That's fair. I see that in software encoding to x264, in OBS (though admittedly the M1 is running under Rosetta still). The iMac Pro can reliably stream at 'slo

That's fair. I see that in software encoding to x264, in OBS (though admittedly the M1 is running under Rosetta still). The iMac Pro can reliably stream at 'slow' quality level, but the M1 can barely go above 'ultrafast' without choking. You've nailed it as far as the reason: if you can come up with a task that legitimately needs parallelism that heavy, that's where the Xeon comes into its own. Anything lighter, and the M1 starts to zip ahead.