Base model Apple M2 MacBook Pro SSD Up To 50% slower than M1 MacBook Pro SSD | Half the NAND chips, half the speed

[saltycaramel]

 

This guy doing God's work as usual.

 

Definitely go with a 16GB RAM model for Baldur's Gate 3. 

 

I remember when MacBook Air, 13" MacBook Pro and MacMini were total non-starters for gaming. 

 

Not anymore now that they're supercharged by the M2. 

[Obioban]

8 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

 

This guy doing God's work as usual.

 

Definitely go with a 16GB RAM model for Baldur's Gate 3. 

 

I remember when MacBook Air, 13" MacBook Pro and MacMini were total non-starters for gaming. 

 

Not anymore now that they're supercharged by the M2. 

50-100% better FPS from the M2 vs M1: no thread about it.

 

Slower flash storage in one (base) spec of M2 vs M1, that 99.99% of owners will never notice: 10 page thread.

 

... par for this forum.

[Paul Thexton]

22 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

This guy doing God's work as usual.

 

Definitely go with a 16GB RAM model for Baldur's Gate 3. 

 

Yeah his channel is great. He's also done a video about the system native FPS HUD being introduced in Metal3, won't work for everything but it looks useful for tech reviewers (and people who want to see what impact settings changes are really making)

 

 

[leadeater]

7 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

Baldur's Gate 3

Ah crap I nearly forgot that game exists, I need to buy that.

[leadeater]

7 hours ago, Obioban said:

50-100% better FPS from the M2 vs M1: no thread about it.

 

Slower flash storage in one (base) spec of M2 vs M1, that 99.99% of owners will never notice: 10 page thread.

 

... par for this forum.

Then create the topic? 

[rikitikitavi]

53 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Then create the topic? 

I thought your role is to discourage toxic behaviour…

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, rikitikitavi said:

I thought your role is to discourage toxic behaviour…

I was being serious... Seems like a worthwhile topic to create. Complaining the topic doesn't exist seems pointless and it doesn't exist because it's not created. This forum isn't a big Apple user base so for those that care to complain the topics aren't getting created is because they aren't creating them. I legit had no idea the video existed at all.

 

If the M2 really is up to twice as fast as the M1 then that spells very good news for M2 Pro/Max and high(er) end portable gaming actually on battery.

 

And yea while this topic about slower SSD in the base M2 Mac is quite interesting and should be reported on it's what we would call here "A storm in a tea cup".

[rikitikitavi]

19 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I was being serious... Seems like a worthwhile topic to create. Complaining the topic doesn't exist seems pointless and it doesn't exist because it's not created. This forum isn't a big Apple user base so for those that care to complain the topics aren't getting created is because they aren't creating them. I legit had no idea the video existed at all.

 

If the M2 really is up to twice as fast as the M1 then that spells very good news for M2 Pro/Max and high(er) end portable gaming actually on battery.

 

And yea while this topic about slower SSD in the base M2 Mac is quite interesting and should be reported on it's what we would call here "A storm in a tea cup".

Fair enough.

 

Although, it will probably consist 90% of comments like ‘3060 will give you more fps’ and ‘who cares about a/b/c’…. etc

[DANK_AS_gay]

On 7/1/2022 at 9:16 AM, Blademaster91 said:

And you're still making the 1GB/s SSD sound better than it really is,

Here is something we are all missing here. Let's say, I wanted to download Crysis. The bottleneck is on the server side, and will never reach that kind of throughput. OK, the file is downloaded, rapidly I might add, because the single core performance of M1 is still barely even rivaled by desktop 12th gen Intel processors pulling 5x the power (important for decompression, cool to see how when I downloaded Crysis on my laptop from 2003 with a Pentium M cap out at 5 MB/s of the 10MB/s because the CPU was at 100%), and you want to transfer it to a flash drive you have lying around to put it on a windows computer. Shockingly (sarcasm), said drive doesn't reach speeds anywhere near 1GB/s. So, unless you buy $150 thumb drives, and deal with files larger than 5GB, you are fine with 1GB/s.

 

You are missing the reason why 1GB/s is bad IN THIS APPLICATION. Apple uses the SSD as slow RAM, which means if you were to play videogames, and you only had 8GB of RAM to share between a CPU and GPU, MacOS would use the SSD for less important things, like level geometry, large textures that are not used often, Google Chrome that you left open in the background, etc. However, because it is slower, this causes a notable impact to performance in games, as an SSD doesn't need extra help being slower than RAM. That's why it is bad. Not because someone might need 1GB/s, but because of the above reasons.

 

Seriously, if you are going to argue a point, argue it for the correct reasons.

[DANK_AS_gay]

26 minutes ago, rikitikitavi said:

Although, it will probably consist 90% of comments like ‘3060 will give you more fps’ and ‘who cares about a/b/c’…. etc

The fact that a 35w combined part is compared to a 170w (for the GPU alone) in any way in terms of performance is astonishing. Apple really looked at encoders and decoders, said, "Huh, that's something we can excel in" and went and competed with AMD and Nvidia in terms of video editing, an increasingly demanding field.

[leadeater]

48 minutes ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

You are missing the reason why 1GB/s is bad IN THIS APPLICATION. Apple uses the SSD as slow RAM, which means if you were to play videogames, and you only had 8GB of RAM to share between a CPU and GPU, MacOS would use the SSD for less important things, like level geometry, large textures that are not used often, Google Chrome that you left open in the background, etc. However, because it is slower, this causes a notable impact to performance in games, as an SSD doesn't need extra help being slower than RAM. That's why it is bad. Not because someone might need 1GB/s, but because of the above reasons.

That's a better argument for why 8GB isn't enough, less so about the SSD. Memory operations tend to be done in small page sizes so it's legitimacy impossible to attain the seq performance speeds banded about. Also it's doubly bad since the system memory is also the SSD RAM buffer/cache so heavy memory pressure from system memory, GPU memory "swap" to SSD and SSD cache itself is all going to lead to really bad performance overall.

 

Even on an M1 Pro SSD performance is

• RND4KQD64: Write ~142MB/s, Read ~650 MB/s
• RND4KQD1: Write ~40 MB/s, Read ~65 MB/s

So relying on SSD for small page memory operations is a really bad idea. Also an ADATA SX8200 is ~300/~300 for the same thing so for whatever reason it seems Apple SSD's aren't good at small operations which really surprises me, I was expecting this to be above standard performance not well below. Could however just be the few tests online I could find being bad data for some reason, who knows.

[Blademaster91]

53 minutes ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

Here is something we are all missing here. Let's say, I wanted to download Crysis. The bottleneck is on the server side, and will never reach that kind of throughput. OK, the file is downloaded, rapidly I might add, because the single core performance of M1 is still barely even rivaled by desktop 12th gen Intel processors pulling 5x the power (important for decompression, cool to see how when I downloaded Crysis on my laptop from 2003 with a Pentium M cap out at 5 MB/s of the 10MB/s because the CPU was at 100%), and you want to transfer it to a flash drive you have lying around to put it on a windows computer. Shockingly (sarcasm), said drive doesn't reach speeds anywhere near 1GB/s. So, unless you buy $150 thumb drives, and deal with files larger than 5GB, you are fine with 1GB/s.

 

You are missing the reason why 1GB/s is bad IN THIS APPLICATION. Apple uses the SSD as slow RAM, which means if you were to play videogames, and you only had 8GB of RAM to share between a CPU and GPU, MacOS would use the SSD for less important things, like level geometry, large textures that are not used often, Google Chrome that you left open in the background, etc. However, because it is slower, this causes a notable impact to performance in games, as an SSD doesn't need extra help being slower than RAM. That's why it is bad. Not because someone might need 1GB/s, but because of the above reasons.

 

Seriously, if you are going to argue a point, argue it for the correct reasons.

First of all a 256GB SSD isn't enough if you want to install games, so you'd likely need to buy a $150+ external SSD, and you seem to be saying that 8GB of RAM and a 1GB/s SSD isn't enough for anything but basic tasks, as @leadeater pointed out even a relatively cheap ADATA SX8200 is even faster at small reads/writes than the SSD in the m2 macbook pro, for a "pro" machine I would expect at least on par to a nvme SSD or better.

9 hours ago, Obioban said:

50-100% better FPS from the M2 vs M1: no thread about it.

 

Slower flash storage in one (base) spec of M2 vs M1, that 99.99% of owners will never notice: 10 page thread.

 

... par for this forum.

50-100% better FPS in games is interesting, but not surprising given the increased L2 cache and higher transistor count over the M1, but Apple doesn't market towards gaming, and most mac users aren't going to play games. And the majority of gamers will stick with PC's or consoles which are cheaper and have a much better variety of games to choose from without having to mess with emulators or VM's.

People point out gaming, which 99.99% of mac owners won't be doing, yet a 10 page thread on defending their favorite company for storage slower than the previous model is par for this forum. I don't see people defending other companies on this forum for bad business decisions, there weren't pages of people defending Microsoft for forcing TPM on users with Windows 11, or Intel with high power consumption CPU's.

[DANK_AS_gay]

1 hour ago, Blademaster91 said:

Apple doesn't market towards gaming,

They talked about Metal 3 and the advantages for gaming. They introduced newish AAA games being ported to native M1 silicon. They are heading in that direction. However, that was an example.

 

1 hour ago, Blademaster91 said:

256GB SSD isn't enough if you want to install games

Wow. That is false. Apex Legends is 60-80GB (doesn't even work on Mac, but even still). Assuming 70GB, that's roughly 3 AAA titles. That's hardly 0 games.

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

That's a better argument for why 8GB isn't enough, less so about the SSD

Yeah, the SSD is there as a bandaid tho, and what Apple did was rip off half the bandaid. They had good reasons to do it, like 30% price increases from storage chip suppliers, shortages, etc. It still sucks tho.

 

The M2 base model Pro is not a good option IMO, I would recommend the Air, and a set of thermal pads to my family, and I would recommend the 512GB SSD (mostly because I constantly have to delete stuff, but I am not a good example, given that I download PS3/2 games to emulate lol) and 16GB of RAM, so that it lasts longer before getting sluggish.

[RedRound2]

9 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

First of all a 256GB SSD isn't enough if you want to install games, so you'd likely need to buy a $150+ external SSD, and you seem to be saying that 8GB of RAM and a 1GB/s SSD isn't enough for anything but basic tasks

Basic tasks are what 99% of people who buy these laptops do. My god. No one buys a entry level machine to play games. Its possible, and it wouldn't suck so much, but that was not this laptop was designed to do.

9 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

50-100% better FPS in games is interesting, but not surprising given the increased L2 cache and higher transistor count over the M1

What did you expect Apple to do? Suck out extra performance from Ether? 50-100% performance is impressive on a YoY improvement, whatever improvements they made. You know, something we don't see often in PC space

9 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

Yet a 10 page thread on defending their favorite company for storage slower than the previous model is par for this forum. I don't see people defending other companies on this forum for bad business decisions, there weren't pages of people defending Microsoft for forcing TPM on users with Windows 11, or Intel with high power consumption CPU's.

People following on about paper specs are the real problem, while ignoring usability and user experience. And you wonder why Apple is as successful as it is today? Because they actually focus on things that matter. Yes, SSD downgrade is not ideal, but its far, far, far from a deal breaker that you make it out to be and 99% of users wouldn't notice it. And they were probably forced to because of chip shortage/component surge pricing - which is an actual thing affecting everyone.

 

And again, need I remind you how you ignore/ adjust to all other real problems in a non-Apple laptops? The double standards right there is enough to discredit every single thing you've written here on this thread

 

Other examples you gave are things that directly affects certain user groups and experiences. Windows 11 basically outdated most of my family PCs (and my custom gaming rig) despite all of them being well capable of running Windows 11, for no good reason. Intel increased power usage has basically 0 advantages and increases thermal throttling and increases needs for good cooler and better PSU - directly increasing the cost of entire thing. Your comparisons are pretty shit.

[rikitikitavi]

2 hours ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

Wow. That is false. Apex Legends is 60-80GB (doesn't even work on Mac, but even still). Assuming 70GB, that's roughly 3 AAA titles. That's hardly 0 games.

No, it is either 0 or 123 games installed at the same time lol

 

To be fair, games can get quite heavy with CoD @ 230GB and RDR @ 150GB, or if we add some games with endless DLCs... so for a game-centric system 1TB is a safe bet... which MacBook is not ( @Blademaster91)

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

Yeah, the SSD is there as a bandaid tho, and what Apple did was rip off half the bandaid. They had good reasons to do it, like 30% price increases from storage chip suppliers, shortages, etc. It still sucks tho.

If an I/O operation isn't large enough it won't span across NAND modules, but then if there is enough inflight I/O operations then they will spread across them. So I'm a little unsure how much it matters.

 

Someone at some point mentioned there was a test that shows performance going really bad on the M2 base model? And the same M1 was also tested? Anyone able to point me to that? Theory is all well and good, on both sides of this, but actual test data trumps all. If there is evidence that a M2 Mac with 8GB RAM and 512GB SSD does not have application performance degradation but the 256GB does then that's about as conclusive as it gets. But I don't mean an application test that itself is essentially a measure of seq maximum storage performance, one like your example you gave is best here.

[Lightwreather]

10 hours ago, leadeater said:

Then create the topic? 

I'm fairly certain that thread existed…

and was moved to another sub-forum for not meeting sub-forum guidelines or something…

[LAwLz]

9 hours ago, leadeater said:

Even on an M1 Pro SSD performance is

• RND4KQD64: Write ~142MB/s, Read ~650 MB/s
• RND4KQD1: Write ~40 MB/s, Read ~65 MB/s

So relying on SSD for small page memory operations is a really bad idea. Also an ADATA SX8200 is ~300/~300 for the same thing so for whatever reason it seems Apple SSD's aren't good at small operations which really surprises me, I was expecting this to be above standard performance not well below. Could however just be the few tests online I could find being bad data for some reason, who knows.

Can you link to the review that got these numbers from? More specifically the 300MB/s reads on the SX8200, and the RND4KQD1 on the M2.

 

Anandtech only got 90MB/s in their RND4KQD1 test of the SX8200. 

[Paul Thexton]

42 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Can you link to the review that got these numbers from? More specifically the 300MB/s reads on the SX8200, and the RND4KQD1 on the M2.

 

Anandtech only got 90MB/s in their RND4KQD1 test of the SX8200. 

Hector Martin found some time ago that Apple's firmware is sub-optimal when handling fsync() - would recommend reading through the full thread for what he found and how he tested it

 

 

[Obioban]

14 hours ago, leadeater said:

Then create the topic? 

I did, in this section of the forum:

One of your fellow moderators immediately buried it in the "laptops and prebuilts" section, and then, when I said that wasn't the relevant section, moved it to "CPUs, Motherboards, and Memory"

 

... also clearly not the relevant section, but at that point I gave up.

 

[Dracarris]

9 minutes ago, Obioban said:

One of your fellow moderators immediately buried it in the "laptops and prebuilts" section, and then, when I said that wasn't the relevant section, moved it to "CPUs, Motherboards, and Memory"

JFC. That is pathetic display for this forum and really showing. While this anti-Apple thread below was only moved after being "hot" in the Tech news for quite some replies, and then to "General Discussion".

 

 

[DANK_AS_gay]

9 hours ago, leadeater said:

If an I/O operation isn't large enough it won't span across NAND modules, but then if there is enough inflight I/O operations then they will spread across them. So I'm a little unsure how much it matters.

 

Someone at some point mentioned there was a test that shows performance going really bad on the M2 base model? And the same M1 was also tested? Anyone able to point me to that? Theory is all well and good, on both sides of this, but actual test data trumps all. If there is evidence that a M2 Mac with 8GB RAM and 512GB SSD does not have application performance degradation but the 256GB does then that's about as conclusive as it gets. But I don't mean an application test that itself is essentially a measure of seq maximum storage performance, one like your example you gave is best here.

I want Linus to do a video on it, as all I can find is MaxTech, and he isn't very reliable.

So, I mean... It's possible.

[DANK_AS_gay]

9 hours ago, rikitikitavi said:

No, it is either 0 or 123 games installed at the same time lol

 

To be fair, games can get quite heavy with CoD @ 230GB and RDR @ 150GB, or if we add some games with endless DLCs... so for a game-centric system 1TB is a safe bet... which MacBook is not ( @Blademaster91)

Yeah, I play older games, so I can get roughly 20 games on here without too much issue.

[MageTank]

17 hours ago, leadeater said:

Ah crap I nearly forgot that game exists, I need to buy that.

It is still in the oven and far from finished. Would personally recommend Solasta if you want that 5e-style experience.

 

On 7/6/2022 at 10:19 AM, saltycaramel said:

 

This guy doing God's work as usual.

 

Definitely go with a 16GB RAM model for Baldur's Gate 3. 

 

I remember when MacBook Air, 13" MacBook Pro and MacMini were total non-starters for gaming. 

 

Not anymore now that they're supercharged by the M2. 

Interesting results, especially the emulation. Compared to older consoles where 30fps was considered the norm, this is extremely playable.

[igormp]

16 hours ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

You are missing the reason why 1GB/s is bad IN THIS APPLICATION. Apple uses the SSD as slow RAM, which means if you were to play videogames, and you only had 8GB of RAM to share between a CPU and GPU, MacOS would use the SSD for less important things, like level geometry, large textures that are not used often, Google Chrome that you left open in the background, etc. However, because it is slower, this causes a notable impact to performance in games, as an SSD doesn't need extra help being slower than RAM. That's why it is bad. Not because someone might need 1GB/s, but because of the above reasons.

What you're referring to is called swap, all operating systems do that, and no matter how fast your disk is, once you have an application big enough that it needs to rely both on ram and swap you're going to notice your system slowing to a crawl since your disk is orders of magnitude slower than RAM, and I've experienced that on both windows, Linux and MacOS (even with a M1 Mac mini). 

 

For small stuff, as you mentioned, you won't notice the impact since that's easy to copy back to ram, so the 1gb/s is more than enough to load back that chrome tab in the background.