Mac Mini M2 for render? Faster than iMac 27?

[Carlos32979333dazi]

Hello, I have one question. I have one iMac 27 late 2014 with i5, 24gb RAM, graphics card of 2gb... and obviously now with After Effects or ME it's very slow, too much lag and also takes 3 hours to render in full hd a video of 10 min.

The question is, if I buy a 16gb RAM Mac Mini M2, how much can the improvement be?

How long can the render take? Because 3 or 4 hours it's a lot of time.

Thanks

[David Arbor]

A computer that's nearly a decade newer will be a substantial improvement. Nobody can tell you how long it will take to render your comp because it completely depends on what's in your comp, among many other factors, but you will likely be seeing substantial, if not monumental performance differences. Of course, the M2 Pro will provide even more performance, but there's no simple way to tell you how much faster either machine will be. You can look at benchmarks for the M2 and compare them against your machine for some idea of the performance differences.

[Carlos32979333dazi]

Thanks, and one question, After Effects what uses most, CPU, RAM or GPU?

Thanks

[David Arbor]

Warren posted some good info, and I'd definitely check out that project. To answer your question specifically, After Effects uses CPU and RAM more than GPU. With the new-ish Multi-Frame Rendering, more cores can process more frames at the same time.

[Warren Heaton]

Download and run Equiloud's After Effect Performance Test:  https://vimeo.com/118053656

I'd expect your Mac to do it in about 18 to 20 minutes and an M2 Max to take about 4 minutes.

Here are results I've gotten on various Macs::

• 5 min. 11 sec. (Metal), Apple M1 Mac Mini (2020), Apple M1, 16GB, Apple M1 Build in
• 5 min. 55 sec., Mac Pro (Late 2013), 2.7 GHz 12-Core Intel Xeon E5, 64 GB 1866 MHz DDR3, AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB
• 6 min. 34 sec., Mac Pro (Late 2013), 3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5, 64 GB 1866 MHz DDR3, AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB
• 7 min. 35 sec., Mac Pro (Late 2013) 3.5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5, 64 GB 1866 MHz DDR3, AMD FirePro D500 3072 MB
• 10 min. 9 sec. (Metal), Apple Developer Mac Mini (2020), Apple A12Z Bionic, 16GB, Apple A12Z Built In
• 18 min. 38 sec., 27-inch iMac (2010), 2.8 HGz Quad-Core i5, 12GB RAM, HD 5670512MB
• 22 min. 10 sec., MacBook Air (11-inch, Early 2015), 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 Intel HD Graphics 6000 1536 MB
• 32 min. 48 sec., MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2016), 1.2 GHz Intel Core m5, 8 GB 1867 MHz LPDDR3, Intel HD Graphics 515 1536 MB