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Apple MacBook Pro M3 MAX Performance

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Daniel Biegger
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dear Capture Team,

since a couple of weeks I'm running Capture on a MacBookPro 16" M3 MAX.

Unfortunately I don't see any! Performance Improvments over my MacBook Air M1 I used to last two years and even my Workstation PC with a GTX 2070 card beats the M3.

So my question:

Is Capture using the full potential of the M3 Max Chip with it's Graphics?

Could you look into that?

cheers!

Lars Wernlund
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Which version of Capture are you using and what are your visualisation settings?

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Daniel Biegger
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hi Lars,

Version 2023.1.8.

usual Settings:

RenderQuality: AUTO

Smoke: Variant=0%

Capture seems to struggle especially with "Multi-Instant-Fixtures".

Even when not used in pixel-modes! for example a simple SGM P-6 in 6CH mode causes the performance to drop drastically!

I'm gonna send you a mail with more detailed examples and files.

But besides my cases.. the M3 MAX is a very powerful graphical maschine, but Capture seems to make not very much use of the Apple GPU. Can you see a reason for that?!

best regards,

daniel

Jens castor
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Hello 

i would like to know if there is something new or an answer on this?

I am interested in buying a new Macbook Pro. I am using a M1 Macbook Pro for some years and have the Capture Quartett licence 2024. 
I remember that in old videos Q&As on youtube there were some topics on how good is capture able to perform on a Mac and, that Capture has some issues to fully utilize the Mac
And i think there were some improvements made on this.

But to come back on my question, is it worth to spend money on having a high performance Macbook Pro to use it for Capture?
What is the acutal point and regarding of Capture 2026, is there something new.

What hardware would you suggest to use for Capture, of course this depends on your individual need.
But lets say, you have a quartett license und wants to be able to visualize 30 Moving Heads with gobos and have some nice details

Floriaan
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As a rule of thumb I would say, that buying hardware or installing OS'es that are released after the release of the version of Capture you are using, might not use the full potential of that hardware or OS. Capture is not only ading new feutures with each release, but also catching up with new capabilities of hardware and software it depends on. 

So, using a version of Caopture that was released before your new hardware came out, might be the problem here.

Capture 2023 was released in spring 2023, your M3 MacBook Pro Max and the OS that it came with were released in November of that year.

Floriaan Ganzevoort
Lighting Designer - Theatermachine
Lars Wernlund
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Basically the question asked, if Capture uses "the full potential of the M3 Max Chip", is almost impossible to answer. Of course we try, but there are plenty of reasons why we might not always that are also OK. The most obvious example being a really simple project with only a few lights. But there are more complex scenarios - if for instance you are playing back a high resolution video file then the decoding may take some time during which we're not able to do anything else that is constructive.

We spend a fair bit of time on each release simply opening heavy Capture files, analysing what the bottleneck is, and then attempting to adress that. But everything keeps changing - the hardware, the capabilities of the library, which fixtures are being used etc - so it's a constantly moving goal post. The bottlenecks also vary between project files, what's good for one file can even be bad for another.

Some advice:

  • Download and try the latest version of Capture. It might give you better results.
  • Export a presentation file of a project. Make sure it has snapshots. Play them back on your computer, perhaps taking notes on how it performs. Then bring the presentation file to the computer store and ask to run it on a computer you're interested in. You'll see quite fast if there is an improvement.
Technical Director
Capture Visualisation