I also hope that it can do this with DAC Correction enabled.
I know many DACs don’t support 48K DSD so that is not required but DSD512 is what I am curious about. The M1 Mac mini can handle the above but only at DSD256…
@jussi_laako - What do you think? How would I do a test to see what the M4 Pro setup is capable of doing?
Im between M4 with 24gb ram and 256gb SSD or the M4 pro with 24gb ram and 512gb SSD…
I’m just not sure how important are things like „memory Bandwidth“ ? The normal m1 has 67GB/s and the M4 pro has 273GB/s while the M1 Max had already 400GB/S.
The M4 pro would obviously a nice option for other software I would like to use as well (photoshop , CAD etc ) .
And with all the AI things 16Gb ram will probably be the new 8gb anyways…
Memory bandwidth is fairly important aspect for running HQPlayer. At least earlier, amount of RAM also affected memory bandwidth (number of memory channels in use).
Do you intend to use the M4 Mini only for Roon and set it up specifically for this purpose, or do you use the Mini actively and simply run Roon on it in addition?
I have an M1 Mac mini that I have been using for both Roon and HQPlayer. My current plan is to first try the M4 Mac mini with HQPlayer alone and keep Roon on the M1 Mac mini. If that does not work, the M4 Pro Mac mini will be returned to Apple. If it does work, I will probably keep the M1 Mac mini running Roon as that Mac is probably not worth much at this point and I’ll keep it as the Roon system until it is no longer supported.
Yes, there is an arm64 version of HQPlayer Desktop. If HQPlayer will ever use the M* GPUs is unknown. @jussi_laako would have to answer that. I know the GPUs can be used for calculations but I don’t know if that works well.
If Apple ever makes a GPU (and programming interface) suitable for the purpose.
Maximum precision the hardware supports is 32-bit floating point, which is insufficient. And their programming interface in Apple style is Objective-C or Swift and I don’t use either one (well I do have tiny snippets of Objective-C, but I avoid it to the extent possible since it is rather horrible).
What they offer for GPU use is very, very far from what Nvidia or AMD offer. But OTOH, they don’t seem to be targeting HPC market in general.
Who knows … maybe there will be something like Rosetta with Apple AI and metal that will make it possible for HQplayer and other software to offload some calculations to GPUs.
For example who would have ever thought a Apple chip will rival a gaming console like a ps5 pro in framerate and ray tracing .
So far, Rosetta is not able to run the x64 (Intel silicon) build of HQPlayer on Apple silicon. Because it doesn’t support any of the advanced instruction sets of Intel CPUs. Not involving GPU at all.
But currently Apple GPU lacks the needed basic capabilities to do what HQPlayer needs.
It is still very very far from what you get with with something like i9-14900K + RTX 4090…
Apple SoC’s are best compared with the ultramobile offerings of Intel and AMD.
If you seek highest performance per Watt, then Apple is certainly leading, IOW most performance at low power. If you look for highest computing performance disregarding power consumption, then Intel/AMD/Nvidia combination gives the highest performance.
Not sure that is fair. The M3 is more inline with the 30X0 RTX line from the benchmarks I saw after it was released. M-series Macs are pretty good at gaming. There just isn’t a lot of games ported for them, and it’s probably not worth the time to do so for most developers. From my personal experience, my M1 Macs run the type of games I play (which are not FPS) just as well as my i9/4060 desktop.
I agree for all-out performance, they aren’t going to compare to a high-end Nvidia card, but 4080/90 cards make Apple’s prices look almost sane.
But another aspect is games, not about HPC/scientific computing performance. These are two different things. Apple GPU hardware just doesn’t support what HQPlayer needs. And Apple’s Metal is nowhere near what CUDA or ROCm offers. First of all, they are a decade behind AMD and two decades behind Nvidia in GPGPU development in first place.
And if you compare at 1:1 clock frequencies, i9 core is 4x more performant at same clock frequency as the ARM core in Apple M. And it can do about 2x the clock frequencies (6 GHz).
Sure, i9-14900KS + RTX4090 can draw close to 1 kW of power with proper cooling in place. Something like Mac Mini M4 cannot get anywhere near that.
Depends on what you are after, there is certainly market for both categories. They are just very different.
Doing DSD1024 with default filters and ASDM7EC-light modulator on i9-14900T (35W TDP) is no trouble at all, without any GPU help. I would be happily surprised if the M4 Pro can do that, but I’m not holding particularly high hopes. I’m happy if it can now do what my M1Max MacBook Pro can do at DSD512. (although I suspect the small case will sound like a tiny vacuum cleaner under load, or it will thermal throttle)
As is the price. My whole Intel/Nvidia desktop build cost just less than a 4090 by itself. A 4060 runs modern, non FPS games, great. So does my M1 Mac. I am not saying an M series Mac is even comparable to a 4070, just that it isn’t as dire as you said it.
You said in reply to a quote about gaming performance:
Apple SoC’s are best compared with the ultramobile offerings of Intel and AMD.
That is just not true. You can’t game on Intel graphics laptop, at least not modern games. I can’t argue with you on what it can do for your software obviously, nor am I am trying to.
Agreed though, Metal is not ideal. Apple should quit expecting game developers to jump through hoops to put games on Mac. Some will of course, but it will never be a great gaming platform because of it.
I didn’t refer to gaming performance. I’m not interested in gaming performance. But what at general purpose computing that is what is equivalent in terms of TDP ratings, etc.
Yesterday I configured a HQPlayer suitable Mac Mini M4. And with M4 Pro it costs 3000 EUR here. Not particularly cheap for something likely able to just do DSD512 with HQPlayer. Nice and tidy yes. From price perspective not particularly competitive. At 3000 EUR I can do DSD1024 easily without GPU and have spare power, RAM and storage left for other things.
Mac Studio with M Ultra CPU is certainly not cheap either. And it still doesn’t necessarily give you DSD1024 output with HQPlayer because single core is still restricted to less than 3 GHz clock speeds. While Intel desktop offerings exceed 6 GHz speeds with 2x to 4x computing capacity per core. Sure the Intel solution will also accordingly consume more power.
While I’m writing this on my i9-14900K + RTX4500 machine, it is consuming 90W of power from the powerline.
Normal M4 Pro Mac Mini with 24gb 512gb SSD and 10gbps Ethernet should be a nice computer for most people .
If I can do HQPlayer DSD256 with some nice filters I will be happy as pig in sh*t.
(If I need a 900 watt machine with a 1500 euro GPU to run HQplayer only to listen to music , the software definitely needs to be optimized in my opinion.)
Well, it seems that you really hate on Apple SoCs…
The M4 single core performance in benchmarks is better than the i9-14900K single core performance. Yes, I know those are synthetic benchmarks but that would contradict your 4x at the same clock frequency statement.
It is already optimized a lot, but the amount of computations being done is very high in many cases, not optimization can make that go away. If you need to make 100 billion calculations per second, then you need 100 GFLOPS performance.
No I don’t. I just have level expectations. I’m happy if I encounter M4 to be able to do more than I expect. But for example nobody has reported any significant performance improvement with M2 and M3 over what M1 has been able to do. And I have two M1 machines, the original Mac Mini M1 and the MacBook Pro M1Max (which I’m typing this on).
If you want to look for some benchmark closely applicable, they should be at least pure 64-bit floating point computations on large data sets, running on AVX2 instruction set on Intel/AMD. And NEON/SVE/SVE2 on ARM. So mostly some scientific computations, like physics simulation models and such.
Edit:
I just built my own DSP performance test again for Intel and Apple M. Comparing i9-14900K vs M1Max, the M1Max is 30% - 60% of performance of the i9-14900K depending on test.
single core performance between the normal M4 and M4pro seems to be not that much different. also the higher memory bandwidth is for the shared memory. so mostly for GPU related tasks really, from what it looks like HQplayer won’t benefit anyway? that’s a bummer…
its a bit like with pro audio software where the efficiency cores could be used for some plugins.
so its nice to see that the M4 Pro has more performance again… if think the M3 Pro was a bit of a flop here with all its efficiency cores.
anyway intel is dead in my opinion… they still doing what they did since the Pentium 4… I don’t want a 300 watt cpu with a 600 GPU.
I also hope Roon will make the move from Intel Nuc rock to AMD in the future.
