Now Avid has released an Apple Silicon native version of Pro Tools, albiet a beta version, the million dollar question for Pro Tools users is how much faster is it, if at all? We investigate.
Ventura Support
Firstly Pro Tools 2022.12 is fully qualified for macOS Ventura running on Intel Macs and Apple Silicon under Rosetta. Considering Ventura was only launched in October 2022 this is impressively quick, particularly for a DAW which has been criticised in the past for being slow to support new operating systems.
This will be welcome news, particularly for owners of new Macs.
Apple Silicon Public Beta
As was widely reported earlier this month, Avid has made significant progress on their much anticipated Apple Silicon Native release and unusually has made the beta version available to Pro Tools users, including Pro Tools Intro users.
If you want to know what does and does not work then read our full article here.
The Test
The test was conducted using a MacBook Pro, 14-inch running an M1 Max with 64GB of memory. The OS is macOS Ventura 13.1
The session consisted of 179 tracks, all mono instances. Each track had audio recorded on it and an instance of LiquidSonics Cinematic Rooms. We chose this plugin as it works both in Intel and Silicon natively. The session is 32bit floating-point set to 48kHz sample rate and the buffer set to 1024 samples; interestingly, although this didn’t make much difference with audio playback, it did affect screen redraw stuttering.
Please note that this test isn’t built as a power test, simply as a comparison test. You can see the results below by comparing the CPU usage...
As the graphics show, there is an improvement between the native Silicon beta of Pro Tools and the Rosetta version. There is also a difference between the Silicon 2022.12 build and the 2022.9 build of Pro Tools.
The performance gains observed during this test, from both the 2022.9 build and Rosetta enabled 2022.12 build, are around 40%. We did observe significantly higher unified memory usage with the native version. We also observed that the allocation of the cores is more consistent than in previous Pro Tools builds.
It’s worth noting that during this test, and for the first time ever, the fan kicked in when testing using the Rosetta enabled 2022.12 build.
Pro Tools Low Roar Demo Session
We compared performance using the Pro Tools Demo Session ‘Low Roar’ available from the Avid website, found in user accounts.
To perform the test we first updated all the Avid plugins using Avid Link to version 22.12.0.326, giving AAX Silicon Native versions of the plugins. We also disabled all instances of AIR virtual instruments, at the time of testing, these plugins are not Silicon Native compatible.
The results are shown below. Giving a significant performance improvement using the Silicon Native build.
Bounce Tests
As requested, we have also conducted some bounce tests.
We bounced a session 3 minutes 8 seconds in length, with 100 mono tracks, all with instances of LiquidSonics Cinematic Rooms. We also converted the session from 48kHz, 32bit fp, to 44.1kHz, 24 bit.
Pro Tools 2022.12 Silicon native: 1 min 30 seconds. No fans kicked in.
Pro Tools 2022.12 Rosetta: 1 min 30 seconds. No fans kicked in.
Pro Tools 2022.9: 1 min 30 seconds. Fans kicked in.
We also tried bouncing the session in the orginal format, there was no noticeable change in bounce time.
Our tests don’t show any improvement in bounce times on this simple session. This may alter with more insert effects, complex routing, and different track widths.
Summary
There are significant performance improvements compared to our earlier tests of Pro Tools using an Apple Silicon build. It’s worth restating that this isn’t a power test; it’s a test using the same session with three different versions of Pro Tools to see how they compare.
It’s also worth noting that this is a beta version of Pro Tools so shouldn’t be used for any mission-critical work. If you would like to try out the beta without losing a previous version of Pro Tools, then simply rename your previous installation before installing the beta version of Pro Tools.
If you’ve installed the beta of Pro Tools for Apple Silicon, do let us know your experiences in the comments below, especially reports on which plugins work and which don’t, but remember to update all your plugins before testing.