Apple M2 performance?

Video AI General
1

Hello all,

I am attempting to upscale a 1080p video to 4k. The video is approximately 40 minutes long. While the initial preview results are good, the average FPS is quite slow. At present, I’m averaging about 5.7 FPS. My computer is a M2 Max MacBook Pro with 32 GB of RAM.

I’ve thrown a fair number of resource intensive tasks at this computer and none (save for Handbrake, which still isn’t optimized for apple silicon) have given it any difficulty. At present, the fans on my MacBook are so loud that they sound like my 14 year old Mac Pro. Are there any settings I should be considering? Is there something I’m missing here?

Thanks in advance.

2

Video AI will stress your system to the max, so I don’t see anything unusual about what you’ve described.

Personally, I wouldn’t run it on a laptop. You’re going to shorten it’s lifespan due to the heat.

A high end PC workstation with a top end dedicated GPU is really what you want.

You can look at the performance numbers for various hardware in the benchmarks forum:

3

I’ve used Video AI on my Mac Pro for years so I’m familiar with loud fans :grinning: As of late I’ve been working on the road a lot so a workstation didn’t make much sense for me this time around, and sometimes I’d like to be able to run projects overnight wherever I might be.

Thanks for letting me know about benchmarks. I’ll be sure to check them out. Any settings I can use to optimize performance?

4

Definitely don’t do graphics intensive things on a laptop. Just like don’t mine BTC on a laptop lol.

I have yet to see any post that shows an improvement between the M1 and M2 chips.

If there is a dramatic improvement then I will buy a ton of M2 Mac Minis. lol

5

Yes, you may want to limit the memory usage under Topaz Video AI > Preferences. I would also recommend an app like TgPro to monitor temps and to adjust fan speed when needed.

6

Why would limiting memory usage improve performance?

7

It won’t but it will stop the system from slowing to a crawl due to lack of resources for other processes and may cut down on the heat and energy usage.

8

  1. limiting memory in fact still does improve speed of TVAI on Apple Silicon for SD sources.

  2. on Apple silicon the system stays fully usable during encodes no matter what you set the ram to.
    That is IMO one BIG advantage over a typical PC system which really can get sluggish for even desktop operations during TVAI encodes(i7 13700 w. RTX4060 here) vs. myboth my Macs where -except for fans running-you don’t really notice that TVAI is running in the background.