9 ms·

The M1 Max is the fastest GPU we have ever measured in Affinity Photo benchmark

118 points by djrogers 5y ago

chupchap 5y ago
All I got from this was that Affinity is not optimised to make full use of a PC GPU
rasz 5y ago
All I read is "We made bad assumptions and architected our program around copying buffers back and forth"
jb1991 5y ago
I'm curious, and this is a side question, but on the topic of energy use, is it more likely that maxing out a GPU or maxing out a CPU will have the biggest power draw, and therefore affect energy bills more or run battery lower?
- neogodless 5y ago
  For some examples, in my laptop the CPU is officially a 45W part though it can be configured to draw up to 70W. On the other hand, my GPU can be set to draw 115W. In my desktop, it's a 65W (AMD) CPU and 230W GPU. For an AMD consumer desktop, you wouldn't expect much higher than 125W power consumption from a CPU. But the new Alder Lake Core i9 advertises power draw as high as 241W. So you can end up with a more demanding CPU than GPU if you try.
  - jb1991 5y ago
    I was thinking specifically in the context of the M1, which this article is about.
    - neogodless 5y ago
      Yup, and you won't get those specific numbers, so it may be helpful to use numbers that are available in other systems. Additionally, if you look at a chip diagram, you can see how much more of the transistor budget is used for the GPU cores than the CPU. https://images.anandtech.com/doci/17019/M1MAX.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/17019/M1MAX.jpg From https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
tmellon2 5y ago
Does anyone know how fast does M1 Max perform on Deep Learning training tasks compared to NVIDIA 3080Ti ?
- threeseed 5y ago
  There was this comment on Reddit: a) ML Compute doesnt (today) use the neural engine. It uses Accelerate.framework's BNNS module and Metal on GPU - meaning its CPU and GPU only. b) The Apple Neural Engine (ANE) is a private inference accelerator which has no programmable API. Its only accessible via CoreML ML Program or ML Model format, and the CoreML runtime May, or May Not™ decide to run your model on the ANE depending on system load, other tasks, battery / power, and the phase of the moon. See my post on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58437789/coreml-mlmodelconfig-preferredmetaldevice-understanding-device-placement-heu https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58437789/coreml-mlmodelc...
  - threeseed 5y ago
    Someone has benchmarked Tensorflow using this code: https://github.com/apple/tensorflow_macos/issues/25 https://github.com/apple/tensorflow_macos/issues/25 https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-silicon-deep-learning-performance.2319673/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-silicon-deep-lear... It is expected that the M1 Max should have similar performance to a RTX-2080 or Titan X for that task at least.
    - jjcon 5y ago
      That is on a extremely small network (from a 1998 paper) running on an extremely small dataset of small images (28px by 28px grayscale images) and they are comparing the ms per step which is going to vary dramatically. Not only that they do not bother to run the m1max and simply say it, "should run twice as fast as the M1 Pro" In other words that benchmark is completely useless. They should run a standard network from the past decade at least (say VGG16) on useful image sizes and should give the 10 epoch training time if they want anything stable that may approximate hobbyist workloads.
  - 5y ago
cosmotic 5y ago
This is so hard to follow on twitter; I might recommend a blog post for this sort of thing.
- gennarro 5y ago
  As soon as a tweet thread appears, I’m out. Especially when potentially interesting tweet starts with “let’s go back to 2009…”
  - leetbulb 5y ago
    That was my first thought. Instantly closed the tab.
    - Zandikar 5y ago
      Agreed. if its like 2-5 posts maybe, but a multi-page thread that bouncing around in time frame? Nah. Just wrote a blog and tweat a highlight from it and link to the blog post.
- underyx 5y ago
  I normally am fine with Twitter threads, but this one was just impossible to follow, I also dropped off after the first page.
- klodolph 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, what makes this hard to follow? When I click on the link, I get taken to a page on twitter.com that shows me a post, in normal linear order. It reads to me like ordinary English text, in the order you ordinarily read or write it in. The text is not interrupted, except by the little "replies / retweets / likes / share" bar that appears after every tweet.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    I’m just not used to reading multiple paragraphs of text with large gaps populated with junk between each sentence.
smoldesu 5y ago
In case you were wondering, the highest-end computer they're comparing it to is a $6000 W6900X in a 12-core Mac Pro. It's just about the best GPU you can equip a Mac Pro with, but also admittedly a ways off from the fastest consumer hardware.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  It will be interesting to see what these tests look like when Apple updates the Mac Pro with Apple Silicon. The rumors have the GPU having 2x and 4x more than the top end M1 Max SOC.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    All I'll say is that it would be genuinely unprecedented if they could make that work. The M1 is impressive, but it's family of CPUs were a technical inevitability. ARM has notorious scaling issues, so I'm greatly interested to see if they bruteforce it or go a more tactical route.
    - defaultname 5y ago
      The GPU designs in Apple chips has nothing to do with ARM, so even if we accepted that "ARM has notorious scaling issues" (a confusing claim, but even if we took the most generous route and assumed it meant "vendors using ARM have scaling issues" -- also not true) it is orthogonal.
    - floatboth 5y ago
      What? The ISA is basically completely orthogonal to multicore scaling.
- wmf 5y ago
  The W6900X/6900XT is basically tied with the 3090 as the fastest consumer GPU. A $10,000 A100 is faster but I don't think it even has any monitor outputs.
  - 5y ago
recursivedoubts 5y ago
unrolled for normal human consumption: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451859111843356676.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451859111843356676.html
- ojbyrne 5y ago
  I don’t have an adblocker on my phone, so maybe I’m to blame but holy crap, the number of ads on that page are the opposite of “normal human consumption.”
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    a) Just out of interest, why no adblocker? b) I just checked with everything disabled, I got 2 small ads over the whole thread, what did you get?
    - stavros 5y ago
      He probably got a whole bunch of ads spanning the entire page, talking about Affinity Photo.
    - wodenokoto 5y ago
      > a) Just out of interest, why no adblocker? they cost money on iPhone.
      - 1_player 5y ago
        Downloading and running ad code costs more money than just paying and installing an ad blocker, especially since they're incredibly cheap if not free.
      - billyruffian 5y ago
        BlockBear is free
      - Koiwai 5y ago
        AdGuard is quite usable without subscription.
notadoc 5y ago
What are the odds that crypto miners will start picking up M1 Max MacBook Pro's? Not cost effective, presumably.
- neogodless 5y ago
  There are forks that my mine ETH on Apple Silicon, but the M1 Max only does about 10 Mh/s which works out to like $0.70 / day. So no, not cost effective. Perhaps if better software is written specially for the hardware / Metal?
  - dev_tty01 5y ago
    I'm not knowledgeable on mining, but I thought I read that ETH performance was largely dependent upon memory bandwidth. If that is true, it should be possible to create performant ETH code with a 400 GByte/sec memory system. Of course, maybe I completely misunderstood something. Please correct me.
    - lostmsu 5y ago
      It is not that much bandwidth bound. You sill need compute. The goal of ethash is to require a lot of memory.
      - 15155 5y ago
        With an FPGA attached for faster SHA3 that 400GB/s could be used to great effect.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    $0.70/day is still substantially more than the electricity cost if you need a mac for work but aren't using it 24x7. $200/yr is a good top-up to the beer money fund.
mickjagger 5y ago
Presumably nvidia will be somehow integrating arm CPUs into their graphics cores and making some sort of high end machine out of it.
terafo 5y ago
This benchmark makes no sense. I was looking for some reference points and found forum topic[1] with few PC benchmark results and they are `strange`. Only RTX 3090 benchmark result is around 12k in raster, while RTX 3080's result is 13k. And there are 2060's that run like 1050Ti(both giving result around 5k). And 1660 Super that outputs 10k with 3070 and 2070 giving similar results. There's something seriously wrong with this benchmark. [1] https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/124022-benchmark-1900-results/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/124022-ben...
- klodolph 5y ago
  Isn’t it possible that this is an unusual workload? That’s what the thread seems to be claiming.
  - terafo 5y ago
    Performance doesn't scale with memory bandwidth, SM count or any other spec that is known to me. RTX 3090 and 3080 are not just similar cards from the same generation. They are the same GA102 die with some configuration differences : 3090 does have 24gb VRAM while 3080 has only 10. On 3090 82 SMs of initial 84 are active and on 3080 it's 68 SMs. And they both perform only marginally better than 1660 Super, while usually the difference between this cards is in 3x range. It's likely just poorly written software.
    - klodolph 5y ago
      “It’s likely just poorly written software” sounds completely glib to me, it sounds like an intuitive leap rather than a reasoned-out conclusion. Again, it sounds like an unusual workload. I don’t see why performance must scale with some spec in any particular straightforward way—I think we all remembered seeing workloads that would get faster once you added more CPU cores, then slower once you kept adding CPU cores—because back in the day, most of us didn’t have experience with systems that had lots of CPUs. GPUs are optimized to suit common workloads and, quite predictably, aren’t optimized to suit uncommon workloads. Modern graphics uses a mix of CPU and GPU work. The back-and-forth, especially returning results from the GPU to the CPU, has historically caused all sorts performance problems. We don’t have the explanation for why here, but I see no reason to conclude that it must be poorly written software just because the performance characteristics are unintuitive.
huih333 5y ago
The upcoming I9-12900HK will beat M1 easily. It has higher single core performance and multicore performance than M1 Max: https://www.hardwaretimes.com/intel-alder-lake-mobile-flagship-core-i9-12900hk-beats-apple-m1-max-destroys-amds-ryzen-9-5900hx/ https://www.hardwaretimes.com/intel-alder-lake-mobile-flagsh... It's a mobile CPU with TDP of 35-45 watt. M1 has TDP of 30 watt. Single Core: M1 Max: 1785 12900HK: 1851 Multi Core: M1 Max: 12753 12900HK: 13256
shmerl 5y ago
Is it useful to anyone? Or it's some super edge workload? Very doubtful that it's a general enough benchmark to be useful.
- MobiusHorizons 5y ago
  Affinity photo is a photoshop alternative. It is supposed to be quite good, and is exactly the type of workload I would expect to see running on a MacBook Pro. It’s only indicative of the performance of that one workload, but that is still quite useful IMO.
  - shmerl 5y ago
    As for a Linux user that's probably not of big use for me. But it would be great to have more professional graphics tools with Linux support for sure.
  - Snoozus 5y ago
    I can't remember the last time I had to wait for affinity or Photoshop to compute. Maybe if you have 100MP images from a Hasselblad?

118 points by djrogers 5y ago

chupchap 5y ago

All I got from this was that Affinity is not optimised to make full use of a PC GPU

rasz 5y ago

All I read is "We made bad assumptions and architected our program around copying buffers back and forth"

jb1991 5y ago

I'm curious, and this is a side question, but on the topic of energy use, is it more likely that maxing out a GPU or maxing out a CPU will have the biggest power draw, and therefore affect energy bills more or run battery lower?

neogodless 5y ago
For some examples, in my laptop the CPU is officially a 45W part though it can be configured to draw up to 70W. On the other hand, my GPU can be set to draw 115W. In my desktop, it's a 65W (AMD) CPU and 230W GPU. For an AMD consumer desktop, you wouldn't expect much higher than 125W power consumption from a CPU. But the new Alder Lake Core i9 advertises power draw as high as 241W. So you can end up with a more demanding CPU than GPU if you try.
- jb1991 5y ago
  I was thinking specifically in the context of the M1, which this article is about.
  - neogodless 5y ago
    Yup, and you won't get those specific numbers, so it may be helpful to use numbers that are available in other systems. Additionally, if you look at a chip diagram, you can see how much more of the transistor budget is used for the GPU cores than the CPU. https://images.anandtech.com/doci/17019/M1MAX.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/17019/M1MAX.jpg From https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

tmellon2 5y ago

Does anyone know how fast does M1 Max perform on Deep Learning training tasks compared to NVIDIA 3080Ti ?

threeseed 5y ago
There was this comment on Reddit: a) ML Compute doesnt (today) use the neural engine. It uses Accelerate.framework's BNNS module and Metal on GPU - meaning its CPU and GPU only. b) The Apple Neural Engine (ANE) is a private inference accelerator which has no programmable API. Its only accessible via CoreML ML Program or ML Model format, and the CoreML runtime May, or May Not™ decide to run your model on the ANE depending on system load, other tasks, battery / power, and the phase of the moon. See my post on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58437789/coreml-mlmodelconfig-preferredmetaldevice-understanding-device-placement-heu https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58437789/coreml-mlmodelc...
- threeseed 5y ago
  Someone has benchmarked Tensorflow using this code: https://github.com/apple/tensorflow_macos/issues/25 https://github.com/apple/tensorflow_macos/issues/25 https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-silicon-deep-learning-performance.2319673/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-silicon-deep-lear... It is expected that the M1 Max should have similar performance to a RTX-2080 or Titan X for that task at least.
  - jjcon 5y ago
    That is on a extremely small network (from a 1998 paper) running on an extremely small dataset of small images (28px by 28px grayscale images) and they are comparing the ms per step which is going to vary dramatically. Not only that they do not bother to run the m1max and simply say it, "should run twice as fast as the M1 Pro" In other words that benchmark is completely useless. They should run a standard network from the past decade at least (say VGG16) on useful image sizes and should give the 10 epoch training time if they want anything stable that may approximate hobbyist workloads.
- 5y ago

cosmotic 5y ago

This is so hard to follow on twitter; I might recommend a blog post for this sort of thing.

gennarro 5y ago
As soon as a tweet thread appears, I’m out. Especially when potentially interesting tweet starts with “let’s go back to 2009…”
- leetbulb 5y ago
  That was my first thought. Instantly closed the tab.
  - Zandikar 5y ago
    Agreed. if its like 2-5 posts maybe, but a multi-page thread that bouncing around in time frame? Nah. Just wrote a blog and tweat a highlight from it and link to the blog post.
underyx 5y ago
I normally am fine with Twitter threads, but this one was just impossible to follow, I also dropped off after the first page.
klodolph 5y ago
Out of curiosity, what makes this hard to follow? When I click on the link, I get taken to a page on twitter.com that shows me a post, in normal linear order. It reads to me like ordinary English text, in the order you ordinarily read or write it in. The text is not interrupted, except by the little "replies / retweets / likes / share" bar that appears after every tweet.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  I’m just not used to reading multiple paragraphs of text with large gaps populated with junk between each sentence.

smoldesu 5y ago

In case you were wondering, the highest-end computer they're comparing it to is a $6000 W6900X in a 12-core Mac Pro. It's just about the best GPU you can equip a Mac Pro with, but also admittedly a ways off from the fastest consumer hardware.

Tagbert 5y ago
It will be interesting to see what these tests look like when Apple updates the Mac Pro with Apple Silicon. The rumors have the GPU having 2x and 4x more than the top end M1 Max SOC.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  All I'll say is that it would be genuinely unprecedented if they could make that work. The M1 is impressive, but it's family of CPUs were a technical inevitability. ARM has notorious scaling issues, so I'm greatly interested to see if they bruteforce it or go a more tactical route.
  - defaultname 5y ago
    The GPU designs in Apple chips has nothing to do with ARM, so even if we accepted that "ARM has notorious scaling issues" (a confusing claim, but even if we took the most generous route and assumed it meant "vendors using ARM have scaling issues" -- also not true) it is orthogonal.
  - floatboth 5y ago
    What? The ISA is basically completely orthogonal to multicore scaling.
wmf 5y ago
The W6900X/6900XT is basically tied with the 3090 as the fastest consumer GPU. A $10,000 A100 is faster but I don't think it even has any monitor outputs.
- 5y ago

recursivedoubts 5y ago

unrolled for normal human consumption: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451859111843356676.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451859111843356676.html

ojbyrne 5y ago
I don’t have an adblocker on my phone, so maybe I’m to blame but holy crap, the number of ads on that page are the opposite of “normal human consumption.”
- Semaphor 5y ago
  a) Just out of interest, why no adblocker? b) I just checked with everything disabled, I got 2 small ads over the whole thread, what did you get?
  - stavros 5y ago
    He probably got a whole bunch of ads spanning the entire page, talking about Affinity Photo.
  - wodenokoto 5y ago
    > a) Just out of interest, why no adblocker? they cost money on iPhone.
    - 1_player 5y ago
      Downloading and running ad code costs more money than just paying and installing an ad blocker, especially since they're incredibly cheap if not free.
    - billyruffian 5y ago
      BlockBear is free
    - Koiwai 5y ago
      AdGuard is quite usable without subscription.

notadoc 5y ago

What are the odds that crypto miners will start picking up M1 Max MacBook Pro's? Not cost effective, presumably.

neogodless 5y ago
There are forks that my mine ETH on Apple Silicon, but the M1 Max only does about 10 Mh/s which works out to like $0.70 / day. So no, not cost effective. Perhaps if better software is written specially for the hardware / Metal?
- dev_tty01 5y ago
  I'm not knowledgeable on mining, but I thought I read that ETH performance was largely dependent upon memory bandwidth. If that is true, it should be possible to create performant ETH code with a 400 GByte/sec memory system. Of course, maybe I completely misunderstood something. Please correct me.
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    It is not that much bandwidth bound. You sill need compute. The goal of ethash is to require a lot of memory.
    - 15155 5y ago
      With an FPGA attached for faster SHA3 that 400GB/s could be used to great effect.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  $0.70/day is still substantially more than the electricity cost if you need a mac for work but aren't using it 24x7. $200/yr is a good top-up to the beer money fund.

mickjagger 5y ago

Presumably nvidia will be somehow integrating arm CPUs into their graphics cores and making some sort of high end machine out of it.

terafo 5y ago

This benchmark makes no sense. I was looking for some reference points and found forum topic[1] with few PC benchmark results and they are `strange`. Only RTX 3090 benchmark result is around 12k in raster, while RTX 3080's result is 13k. And there are 2060's that run like 1050Ti(both giving result around 5k). And 1660 Super that outputs 10k with 3070 and 2070 giving similar results. There's something seriously wrong with this benchmark. [1] https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/124022-benchmark-1900-results/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/124022-ben...

klodolph 5y ago
Isn’t it possible that this is an unusual workload? That’s what the thread seems to be claiming.
- terafo 5y ago
  Performance doesn't scale with memory bandwidth, SM count or any other spec that is known to me. RTX 3090 and 3080 are not just similar cards from the same generation. They are the same GA102 die with some configuration differences : 3090 does have 24gb VRAM while 3080 has only 10. On 3090 82 SMs of initial 84 are active and on 3080 it's 68 SMs. And they both perform only marginally better than 1660 Super, while usually the difference between this cards is in 3x range. It's likely just poorly written software.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    “It’s likely just poorly written software” sounds completely glib to me, it sounds like an intuitive leap rather than a reasoned-out conclusion. Again, it sounds like an unusual workload. I don’t see why performance must scale with some spec in any particular straightforward way—I think we all remembered seeing workloads that would get faster once you added more CPU cores, then slower once you kept adding CPU cores—because back in the day, most of us didn’t have experience with systems that had lots of CPUs. GPUs are optimized to suit common workloads and, quite predictably, aren’t optimized to suit uncommon workloads. Modern graphics uses a mix of CPU and GPU work. The back-and-forth, especially returning results from the GPU to the CPU, has historically caused all sorts performance problems. We don’t have the explanation for why here, but I see no reason to conclude that it must be poorly written software just because the performance characteristics are unintuitive.

huih333 5y ago

The upcoming I9-12900HK will beat M1 easily. It has higher single core performance and multicore performance than M1 Max: https://www.hardwaretimes.com/intel-alder-lake-mobile-flagship-core-i9-12900hk-beats-apple-m1-max-destroys-amds-ryzen-9-5900hx/ https://www.hardwaretimes.com/intel-alder-lake-mobile-flagsh... It's a mobile CPU with TDP of 35-45 watt. M1 has TDP of 30 watt. Single Core: M1 Max: 1785 12900HK: 1851 Multi Core: M1 Max: 12753 12900HK: 13256

shmerl 5y ago

Is it useful to anyone? Or it's some super edge workload? Very doubtful that it's a general enough benchmark to be useful.

MobiusHorizons 5y ago
Affinity photo is a photoshop alternative. It is supposed to be quite good, and is exactly the type of workload I would expect to see running on a MacBook Pro. It’s only indicative of the performance of that one workload, but that is still quite useful IMO.
- shmerl 5y ago
  As for a Linux user that's probably not of big use for me. But it would be great to have more professional graphics tools with Linux support for sure.
- Snoozus 5y ago
  I can't remember the last time I had to wait for affinity or Photoshop to compute. Maybe if you have 100MP images from a Hasselblad?