Magic Performance on Mac Studio

[SelfDrivingCarp]

I'm pretty frustrated with Windows and the direction Microsoft is taking it in. I'm thinking of switching to a Mac Studio. I'm very comfortable in MacOS. Is anyone running Magic on a recent Mac Studio? If so, what CPU and are there any Magic setups you find the machine struggles with?

I was originally running Magic on an M1 MacBook Air and found I was getting stalls, so I switched to a monstrous AMD Windows machine with an RTX 4070, which I think is gulping electricity and belching heat to be mostly idle.

I also had the idea that maybe I could install Magic on Steam OS. I tried it on my Steam Deck with the demo and sadly it would launch but no UI would render in the windows. While I'd love to see Magic on Linux I don't expect it to be in the roadmap.

[Magic]

The next version of Magic (3.0) will support Apple Silicon natively, so there will be a bit of a speed boost from that. However, we've been testing on our M1 machine, and it's not an amazing speed boost.

Further, PCs with discrete graphics cards (NVidia, AMD) still give much better performance and much better bang for the buck.

Until Macs can compete with PCs in terms of things like gaming (because Magic is essentially a very specific type of game engine), Windows is still the best value for running Magic.

That being said, Apple Silicon Macs do have one advantage due to their unified memory, which is that exporting a movie (going from a GPU frame to a frame in a video file) is much faster, because the frame doesn't have to travel "backwards" across a PCIe bus. The PCIe bus in a PC is optimized to send data to the GPU, not get data from the GPU. So PCs always have extra latency there.

If you already have an RTX 4070 system, I'd stick with that for now and try to somehow manage the electricity usage and heat so it isn't too bothersome.

[SelfDrivingCarp]

Does it make a difference that my use case has output going from Magic to OBS via Spout2/Siphon? I'm doing DJ streams on Twitch and the focus is really the music. I just have Magic doing 720p, not 4k or even 1080p. The Spout part makes me think I'm paying that extra bus trip tax either way.

[Magic]

Spout sends video using the GPU, so it’s very efficient. The performance hit in your case would be inside OBS, because that’s where you’re going from the GPU to a video stream. But with your graphics card, I still think you could run both Magic and OBS at 1080p with no problems. Have you been getting hiccups?

[SelfDrivingCarp]

Not at all, hence me saying that I think the PC is mostly idling. This is all just looking at switching from Windows to Mac out of frustration with Windows. Reduced power consumption and heat exhaust is just a side benefit.

I had some performance issues with the M1 MacBook Air but I knew I was asking too much of that machine.

Given the exorbitant cost of PC parts right now I could easily sell the Windows machine and cover the cost of a nicely-specced Mac Studio. I don't want to make the switch to ditch Windows and then find that I'm back to stalls.

Love the software in general, appreciate the insight on this question.

[abossard]

I'm using Magic exclusively on my Macbook Pro M1 Max 64GB and so far haven't had any performance issues. I'd bet a well specced Mac Ultra will handle Magic just fine.

On the same Macbook I also run VirtualDJ and custom fork of QLC+ without any stalls or hiccups. It does get warm though

If you want I'm happy to test your Magic project.

Cheers