Purchasing a Macbook Air M1

For the longest time I have been considering buying a Macbook Air M1, unrelated to Topaz Video Enhancer AI.

But since I realised it is fanless/silent even under full 100% load, I thought about using it for upscaling videos.

Does anyone have a Macbook Air M1 or other Apple product with their new ARM chip in and can you let me know what kind of performance you get?

My Laptop has a 3070 GPU and a 5800 Ryzen CPU and I do 480p to 720p Artemis MQ with grain. I get about 0.11 sec/frame to 0.15/sec frame for my upscales with it.

Even If I got moderately worse performance on the Mac I would consider it a victory simply due to its silence.

Thanks

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I have a M1 Mac Mini available for testing.

However, I can’t tell you how it stacks up against your system. We would have to convert the very same video file with the exact same settings.

If you make a sample video file available for download, and write down the exact conversion settings, I can do a comparison.

Thanks a lot, I have uploaded a 110MB file which is the exact file I would be working on next here:

And there are the settings I would be using:

(The forum won’t let me upload screenshots on here directly)

Alright, I got the file and the settings.

I set it up just as pictured in your screenshot. But I must say it makes me wonder why you chose 125% enlargement, because if you are shooting for 720p you should set the output size to 960x720, but 125% results in 900x680.

Is this intentional?

Anyway, at your posted settings, the conversion is running at roughly 0.14 sec/frame on the Mac Mini M1. I will let it finish and post the final measurement as well.

Thanks, I will make the change to 960*720. The 0.14 sec/frame is very good. What I think I will probably do is wait a while, the first Macbook Air with the M1 chip is is almost a year old - there may be an upgraded version of the Air and/or the Mini coming some time soon hopefully with a more powerful version of the original M1 chip.

Thanks for all your help!

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gibt es mit dem M2 im nächsten Jahr / Jetzt gibt es vor allem den neuen M1 Pro und Max…

Hi! I have a M1 Macbook pro with 16GB of Ram and I have been very impressed with processing times. The released version of Video Enhance AI 2.4 is compatible and has been optimized with the M1 chips, however, it is not yet native. We are working on a M1 native release right now :slight_smile:

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MacOS Monterey was just released. If you get a moment could you please check to see if it brought any speed improvement. Thanks

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I’m wondering this myself-and if they plan to update it to take advantage of the M1 Pro and M1 Max machines. I’m planning on getting a 16" M1 Max with 32 gpu cores and 32 gigs of ram. Really hoping Video Enhance on it will just rip through footage compared to the company issued i9 8 core I’m using now. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

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The lack of fan in Macbook Air is an issue. The machine will start throttling in my experience and when it does it slows by approx 40%. With the pros or mac mini this will likely not be an issue. That said after throttling i get performance equal to my gtx 1080 desktop. But i don’t feel comfortable running the air for long hours … so its better to get mini or plurge on m1 pro.

I am happy to see Topaz Labs sees the potential of making good use of the new M1 CPUs. I am looking forward to a native version which is even more efficient.

Any early adopters upgraded to the new Mac m1 Native version yet and seen any improvements in speed? Version 2.6.0 is out now.

Yesterday, I posted a thread in this forum comparing the speed of processing a clip under Windows on my Late 2019 Mac Pro, under Monterey on the same machine, and using the native Apple Silicon version of VEAI on my M1 Max (10 core cpu, 32 core GPU, 64 GB of Unified Memory). The M1 Max affords only marginally higher speed of processing as its gpu resources are not utilized by VEAI.

Tom