Mac Studio M2 Max 30/38-core GPU

[DiogoMP]

I'm going to buy a Mac Studio M2 Max.
I work with Premiere (exporting 1080p but often using 4k footage), AE mainly for 2D animation/motion design, chroma key, Illustrator and Photoshop as needed and ocasional photo editing as a hobby.

The question is simple: Does 30 core to 38 core on the GPU makes much difference? Where?
I'm thinking of getting 64Gb of RAM but the number of GPU Cores issue might change my opinion on that.

I've gone through the Adobe Hardware Recommendation page but I can't find info on this particular issue.
Thank you

[Shebbe]

I would highly recommend getting as much RAM as possible in the first place. Especially since on the Mac Studio the RAM is unified (shared between GPU and normal RAM), 32 may be on the low side for working with 4K material. On top of that I would logically say the more GPU cores the better, but I don't know of any M2 benchmarks that clearly mark a performance increase for AE. AE is notoriously crappy when it comes to fully utilizing GPU so differences may be negligible.

[DiogoMP]

Thank you Shebe.
That's actually what I was thinking but I can't find any documentation supporting that, so general opinion is the second best option I guess.

[Warren Heaton]

Art Is Right does some great review videos.  Even though it's slanted toward photography, the slides focus on what's CPU, GPU and RAM related.
M2 MAX 38GPU vs 30GPU Real World Photo Test, is it worth the extra $200?

If not getting the Ultra (which is what I'd try to get), I'd save the $200 and put that toward more RAM or larger internal storage.

Premiere Pro, After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop all run really well on Apple Silicon.

[Conrad_C]

Your use case sounds similar to mine, like editing and exporting 1080p with 4K material, although I primarily do photography. I use a 32GB M1 Pro, and it works pretty well for most things. However, I do wish I had 64GB when I use After Effects, because among other things it would enable longer real-time previews cached in memory.

30 GPU cores are way more than my M1 Pro has. Although that can benefit Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects, support for GPU acceleration in all of those applications is still limited enough that they might not even make full use of 30 GPU cores. Paying for 8 more GPU cores might not make a noticeable additional difference.

8 more GPU cores might speed up things like GPU-accelerated video export (Premiere/Adobe Media Encoder), because that tends to employ all available resources for an extended amount of time. And of course, if you frequently use GPU-accelerated video effects. Another place more GPU cores would help is if you plan to use the latest AI features in Photoshop/Camera Raw, such as AI-assisted upscaling, denoising, and masking, because the AI features that take the most time to calculate tend to lean heavily on the GPU. But because those tend to be one-off tasks and not long and continuous like video export, you still might not notice 8 more GPU cores if there are already 30 cores.

I think what we want the most for this use case is for After Effects to use the GPU a lot more…