Handbrake performance on M1 pro/max?

gobucks83 said:

Hello, I recently purchased an 14" MBP with M1 max (32 core) and am trying to figure out if my performance results on Handbrake are typical. I've started shooting more home videos after the recent birth of my daughter using a Sony A7RIV, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to encode my movies for more efficient storage. It seems like HEVC is the way to go, but unfortunately iMovie doesn't encode from Sony's h.264 format to HEVC, so I've been looking at conversion tools. I have a trial version of Final Cut which can make short work of the conversion (but obv would cost a lot to buy), and another converter called videoproc also seems to perform pretty well. On the other hand, Handbrake is dismal. I'm getting like 2-3fps, and more worryingly, my CPUs shoot up to 100c+ almost instantly. Is this typical? I thought this app was updated for apple silicon, and I expected it to make better (any?) use of GPU acceleration. Am I missing something?

Click to expand...

will give it a try tonight and report back - acc. to my understanding handbrake uses the CPU on MACs and since 1.4.0 it runs natively with an Univ resale binary on non Intel MACs.

Jut give me a few hours.

Using the latest version of Handbrake on MacBook Air 8 core GPU. Encoding a 2 hour 45 min video from H264 to H265 10 Bit using video toolbox option took just 20 mins. Averaging at 200 FPS.

My 2017 iMac would have taken at least 1 hour 30 mins using H265 Video Toolbox but not 10bit. Averaging at 50-60 FPS.

I hope that helps.

Thanks for the replies! This is my first time using handbrake on Mac, I did not realize I needed to use videotoolbox in order to use hardware acceleration. That explains why it was crushing my CPUs.

gobucks83 said:

Thanks for the replies! This is my first time using handbrake on Mac, I did not realize I needed to use videotoolbox in order to use hardware acceleration. That explains why it was crushing my CPUs.

Click to expand...

as promised - done my test - looks like there is some inconsistency in the results with respect to HandBrake. I have to admit that I am using it only occasionally.

Setup a quick transcoding from MPEG4 to h.265 with the two scenarios:

1. H.265 (x265) => CPU rendering
2. H.265 (VideoToolbox) => GPU rendering
3. Audio transcode to two 7.1 audio streams MA to AC3 5.1

I've tested it on two machines

1. iMac PRO late 2017 10C / 64 GB RAM / 2 TB / AMD Vega 64 / 16 GB RAM
2. MacBook Pro 14.2" 10C / 64 GB RAM / 8 TB / 32 GPU cores

The results are a mixed bag for the transcoding speed:

• CPU time for transcoding a 2 h film:
  • iMac PRO: 4455''
  • MBP 14.2": 3780''
• GPU time for transcoding the identical film:
  • iMac PRO: 861''
  • MBP 14.2": 2262''

What did we learn?

1. CPU driven transcoding:
   • MBP is 15 % faster as expected - very reasonable for a laptop
2. The GPU driven transcoding:
   • MBP is 162 % slower
   • it is still faster than the CPU driven transcoding on both machines

In other words - the Apple ARM implementation of HandBrake seems to underperform dramatically - this is most presumably the case for many 3rd party applications. At this point in time I'd not compare any real world since many might still use Open CL or Open GL implantations of code which are 2nd best to say the least - or in other words - it will take some time to fully unleash the potential of the MBPs with M1 MAX - maybe just a fresh compilation and sometimes heavy lifting under the hood in the underlying code base.

Don't worry - this will happen rather soon.

The speed is still reasonable and not worrying me. It also shows that the iMac PRO is for many applications still a great machine.

--
_____________________________________
A7R IV - one camera to rule them all
ISO 9000 definition of quality: 'Degree to which a set of inherent characteristic fulfills requirements'
I am the classic “Windows by Day, Mac by Night user'
“The horizon of many people is a circle with zero radius which they call their point of view.” Albert Einstein
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." Douglas Adams

joger said:

In other words - the Apple ARM implementation of HandBrake seems to underperform dramatically - this is most presumably the case for many 3rd party applications. At this point in time I'd not compare any real world since many might still use Open CL or Open GL implantations of code which are 2nd best to say the least - or in other words - it will take some time to fully unleash the potential of the MBPs with M1 MAX - maybe just a fresh compilation and sometimes heavy lifting under the hood in the underlying code base.

Click to expand...

This is really helpful. Good to know that the software isn't currently well optimized, because it was really making my shiny new (and expensive) toy look sluggish. Seems like for the moment, maybe the best option is to use something that is well optimized for the M1, like Apple's Compressor.

gobucks83 said:

gobucks83 said:

In other words - the Apple ARM implementation of HandBrake seems to underperform dramatically - this is most presumably the case for many 3rd party applications. At this point in time I'd not compare any real world since many might still use Open CL or Open GL implantations of code which are 2nd best to say the least - or in other words - it will take some time to fully unleash the potential of the MBPs with M1 MAX - maybe just a fresh compilation and sometimes heavy lifting under the hood in the underlying code base.

Click to expand...

This is really helpful. Good to know that the software isn't currently well optimized, because it was really making my shiny new (and expensive) toy look sluggish. Seems like for the moment, maybe the best option is to use something that is well optimized for the M1, like Apple's Compressor.

Click to expand...

Correct - will do some tests here as well - bound to some work before I can do that

( let others play the B$ bingo on benchmarks that make limited to no sense )

--
_____________________________________
A7R IV - one camera to rule them all
ISO 9000 definition of quality: 'Degree to which a set of inherent characteristic fulfills requirements'
I am the classic “Windows by Day, Mac by Night user'
“The horizon of many people is a circle with zero radius which they call their point of view.” Albert Einstein
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." Douglas Adams

gobucks83 said:

I thought this app was updated for apple silicon, and I expected it to make better (any?) use of GPU acceleration. Am I missing something?

Click to expand...

"Updated for Apple Silicon" could mean just that the developers recompiled the source code, so that there is ARM machine code for the CPU cores to run. It doesn't necessarily mean that the application makes good use of co-processors – such as the GPU, or the media engines.

For your task, media engine acceleration might beat GPU acceleration, which in turn beats relying solely on the CPU cores. Your M1 Max has two media engines.

However, from your description of Handbrake's speed – plus the fact that the latest version came out before the M1 Pro and M1 Max – I'm guessing that the application doesn't take advantage of them yet.

I have seen a report that a Mac Mini M1 runs handbrake much faster than a MacBook 16" with M1 Max. It is probably a bug.