Given the widely reported slowdowns of up to 30% (I’ve seen 50% in very unusual cases on the systems I run as my day job), I’m a little skeptical that Apple has managed to pull this off without a major hit, but am interested in what you are all seeing. I’m a little concerned as even though I have a “beefy” mac, it’s 4-5 years old now and the individual core clock speed has never been spectacular. I’d have preferred a lower core-count and higher individual clock speed, but as I got this second-hand from a friend I can’t really complain…
I am planning on updating myself (I think we’re all going to have to, unless you’re using an air-gapped system with no internet access) but I’m holding off for a few days until I finish my current round of tracking; I’ll then verify that my timemachine backups work and I can roll-back successfully in case there is too much of a performance hit.
Unless you can show a benchmark of anyone getting 30% - 50% performance hit on their DAW system, it’s safe to say you’re FOS.
Not sure if you understand how this all works, but the performance hits you MAY see would be related to specific tasks, not the entire system. Any substantial hit to something like NVMe drives or virtual memory, or networked machine performance, would be absorbed and averaged into all the other functions that are not affected.
Unsurprisingly, every single benchmark from the 1st week of January till today has show very minimal performance impact across the board - EXCEPT in very specific circumstances related to computational tasks that are well beyond the scope of a DAW machine. Now, if you’re running extremely complex statistical analysis, elaborate physics simulations, or doing a ton of 4K video / graphics rendering off of very specific types of drives, with specific types of memory setups then there might be a case.
Everyone else can relax and be glad that there performance hits will be well within the margin-of-error of day to day performance. Anyone saying otherwise will have to show conclusive benchmark performances of before / after patch, and backup claims that any significant perceived performance loss are directly related to the patch…i.e. they have to fall into the purview of what the patches addressed…not some of other variable that is unrelated.
Some fun benchmarks to waste your lunch time break reading:
Yeah, sorry - I should have been much clearer in my original post. $DAY_JOB is nothing whatsoever to do with DAWs, and those extreme cases were nothing to do with audio engineering. Basically things that were very heavy on I/O and syscalls, and in the pathological 50% case, were just poorly written (and to be fair, was really more of a cascading failure rather than one component). I hadn’t seen some of those benchmarks before, thanks for the links.