Hey everyone! I was wondering if anyone had specific knowledge of how Ebosuite uses these processors.
My projects have a lot of 1080p videos (in HAP codec) that play simultaneously on multiple tracks, with a lot of ISF and Ebo effects on each track, and I’m always running out of CPU on my M2 Mac.
I’m considering a new M4 Mac, but there’s a significant price difference between the Pro and Max versions, with the main difference being the greater number of GPU cores on the Max chips.
While it might seem to be an obvious answer that more GPU cores would mean better performance in Ebosuite, I was just wondering if that was definitely true, or if Ebo and ISF effects actually use more power from the Performance cores than the GPU cores.
Thanks! After digging a bit, I can confirm that the ISF shaders should be handled by Metal, which would then be optimized in the GPU.
But, I can’t 100% confirm that this is always the case, as while digging around more, I read that ISF shaders can be optimized for Metal, but might not always be?
And I’m not certain that Ebosuite/MaxForLive lets the GPU do this work, or if everything is computed within Ebo/Max on the CPU Performance cores and then outputted.
I also tried to find more info on HAP. While it’s obviously way faster and uses less processing power than H264, I’m not sure HAP is hardware accelerated on the silicon GPU. I know that ProRes is, and I might just start using ProRes exclusively going forward.
It’s not really a big deal, I’m sure that both the M4 Pro or Max will be a massive improvement over my M2. But if anyone out there knows more technical info, or knows of a way for me to test CPU v. GPU usage myself, it would be very appreciated.
My M2 was the basic MacMini model: 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, 10-core GPU, and I got 16GB RAM (instead of standard 8GB)
I just got an M4 Max MacBook. My old projects that would push the M2’s CPU beyond 50%, and max-out the M2’s GPU, are running much better on the M4Max: instead of >50% CPU on Ableton’s meter, it’s now running around 10%, and the GPU is running about 15-20% instead of 100%. No more framerate issues, no more video lag!
So, the extra performance cores (10 vs. 4) and extra GPU cores (32 vs. 10) obviously make a big difference. But it also seems like that Ebosuite needs both CPU and GPU to run well. I have to assume that some of the Max4Live stuff that Ebosuite needs is CPU-dependant, while many of the (ISF/Metal) visual effects will use up the GPU.
I guess my advice to anyone buying a new Mac: get a Pro or a Max. the extra CPU/GPU cores are definitely worth it for Ebosuite.
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I’d still like to know if anyone knows if HAP or ProRes will run better. I’m guessing it’s ProRes, as the decoder is baked into the GPU of all the Apple silicon chips.
I’d just like to chime in with some info about how we use gpu&cpu.
hap&pro res should both be decoded on the GPU, and should have very similar performance.
I’d say HAP should still be better, especially if you are using loadram feature of eSamplers: in case of HAP we load compressed frames in RAM so you can fit much much more frames than ProRes.
ISFs, all eFX, blends and similar are running entirely on the GPU as far as we are concerned.In theory Apple could choose to do some part of GPU work on the CPU(or on GPU but in less optimal way) if they don’t support some exotic or ancient GPU functionality. But none of our effects should hit this path, and I still haven’t seen any iSF that does it.
Ableton Live itself also uses GPU to render the UI so it does take some resources away, but nothing to worry about.
So in general, EboSuite app itself should mostly have low CPU usage, and GPU usage really depends on what is happening in the set.
Live itself could have moderate-to high CPU usage with a lot of devices and DSP things going on, and pretty constant and low GPU usage.
This is very general description, the actual performance also depends very much on what else is going on in the system, for example Google Chrome is extremely GPU hungry and can even take over the precious hardware decoders used for h264 and prores.