Oh and another thing, the letters at the end of Intel chips are important – don’t buy the 12900KF (F means no integrated GPU and no Quick Sync). It’s worth noting though, that not all types of H.264/H.265 are supported and a lot of cameras from the likes of Sony, Canon and Panasonic record 10bit 4:2:2 AVC (H.264) which is not supported and therefore can only use the brute force of the CPU (which is where proxies come in). Nvidia has been ahead of AMD for a long time, with CUDA performing much better in apps like Premiere and with the release of the 12th gen Intel Core series, there was a big leap ahead in scores, due to how Premiere leverages the built in Quick Sync H.264/H.265 hardware encoding/decoding alongside the GPU.
To give the PC a fighting chance I mainly looked at Intel and Nvidia pairings as those score higher (see the Intel vs AMD CPU tests and the Nvidia vs AMD GPU tests). I compared those numbers to seven common PC configurations – here I’m focusing on the CPU and GPU pairing, as that pretty much defines the score as long as you follow best practice for the rest of the PC. I found scores for three configurations of Mac Studio:
Scores found in the PugetBench for Premiere Pro online database My method was to find the average of 10 results for each configuration. As Puget don’t tend to test Macs as they don’t sell them, I took the time to search the database myself and put together some results. It is so valuable because it is a standardized test, with each user putting their machine through exactly the same everyday tasks, like playback and export, with multiple codec types. Thankfully, we have an excellent resource in the publicly available database of PugetBench results – populated by Apple and PC users round the world every time they run the benchmark. You can find a few head to head comparisons on YouTube which are interesting to watch, but coming from a scientific background, I’m much more interested in hard data. I thought I’d take a bit of time to look into this claim, focusing mainly on Adobe Premiere Pro as that is what I use most in the day to day. If you watched the Apple launch event for the Mac Studio or saw some of the presentation slides, you’d certainly be forgiven for thinking that yes, the tiny little silver box is a PC killer, and quieter, smaller and more energy efficient to boot.