Hello! I’m trying to figure out what kind of chipset/shared RAM would best suit a given scenario. There are two graphic-intensive things I use my current setup for (late 2019 i9 32GB MBP), and both seriously drive the Activity and CPU/GPU nuts slowing everything down to molasses.

  1. I regularly need to use three screens for work. The built-in retina display, an external monitor, and a 65" Promethean board (a Promethean board is similar to a SmartBoard). All three need different information on them. Currently, I need to downsize the resolution on the external monitor to avoid lag/freezing.

  2. I do a fair amount of video editing using Final Cut Pro. I’m not importing 4K video, but I do regularly need to combine several 3-5GB video files into several multi-cam clips. The background tasks often slow the process down. While scrolling the timeline view to insert titles the audio track preview (waveform) doesn’t render for several minutes.

My questions are how to avoid this on a future laptop. Would the extra GPU cores on the M2 chips do a better job with these tasks or is this a CPU issue? Would there be a noticeable difference between the Pro and Max chips and/or 32GB versus 64GB? Ideally, I would like to be running both Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro at the same time.

Thanks in advance for any replies. The new shared RAM has me scratching my head.

  • @green_dragon
    3•2 years ago

    Can’t help you out in specifics but for video editing I’d always go with the maximum RAM and CPU I could afford. Extra cores always help; I find that I am using the GPU more when I am doing AI video editing. For example when I am up-scaling from 640x480 to 1080p my GPU floats at 95% when my CPU cores float around 35% max. Always go for the maximum RAM you can afford in your setup as it is not up-gradable. For my instances I am scrapping by with 16GB; I wish I would of gone with 32GB but that was not an option at the time. Hope this basic info helps. Setup here is an Gen 7, i7, 16GB; still running Catalina.

    Green_Dragon

    • @nuachtanOP
      2•2 years ago

      Thanks so much for the reply. I had a feeling the better GPU was the solution. Do you know, does the GPU also “control” displays in addition to rendering in apps like Final Cut?

      • @green_dragon
        1•2 years ago

        I’m not sure to be honest; it might be handled by the CPU and GPU? Usually anything that can be resolved better by the GPU is handled that way. I’m not really using Final Cut as my application. Sorry couldn’t be of more help.

        • @nuachtanOP
          2•1 year ago

          No worries. I appreciate the reply!