FEBRUARY 2021 PCWorld 57with the GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q in the
older MSI Prestige 14 pulling even with
Apple’s M1. The GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q in
the Acer Predator Triton 500 has no problems
leaving the smaller laptops far behind though.
The compact Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 with
its 8-core Ryzen 9 and GeForce RTX 2060
Max-Q which dusts off all comers.
This probably indicates that GPU
encoding capabilities matter for how
PugetBench sets its test up. When balanced
with a multi-core chip, it’s a winning
combination overall. Still, it’s a good showing
for the M1 Mac, but realistically, it’s probably
going to be slower than a budget gaming
laptop in many Premiere tasks.
The big question is how much of a boost
the M1 gets once Adobe offers native support
in its apps. Since Adobe’s products are so
vast and what people do are so varied, it’s
pretty hard to say if the native performance
boost will be as large as we see in Cinebench.
There are just so many things being touched.
We can say there will indeed a performance
bump—but nobody knows how big it will be.
TOPAZ GIGAPIXEL AI
PERFORMANCE
One more chore we wanted to throw at the
laptops uses advanced AI features. We find
that in Topaz Lab’s Gigapixel AI (go.pcworld.
com/tpaz) application, which uses machine
learning models to upsample images in a
method that can be far more effective than
traditional enlargement techniques.
For our test, we took an image of a US Air
Force F-22 Raptor shot in 2010 on an 8.2MP
Canon EOS 1D Mk IIn DSLR. We feed the
image into Gigapixel AI and task it with
increasing the resolution by 6x. The
application uses Intel’s OpenVINO framework
and is quite impressive—on Intel hardware.
Since Macs up until now have been based on
Intel, that’s been a plus for the many Topaz
Labs customers.
Macworld ran the same build of the app
on the MacBook Pro M1 with the same
settings that we used on our Windows 10
machines. If you read our 11th-gen Tiger Lake
preview (go.pcworld.com/tgel), you know
that Intel’s new-look CPU rocks the Ryzen
4000 chip. It’s fair to say that it’s a slaughterTopaz Gigapixel AI 5.3.1
Raptor Unsample
Seconds
Asus Zephyrus G148-core Ryzen 4800HS (Default AC)
Lenovo Slim 78-core Ryzen 4800U (Default AC)
Lenovo Slim 78-core Ryzen 4800U (Performance AC)
Apple MacBook Pro 138-core M1 (Default AC)
MSI Prestige 144-core Core i7-1185G7 (Default AC)
MSI Prestige 144-core Core i7-1185G7 (Performance AC)
MSI Prestige 146-core Core i7-10710U (Default AC)
MSI Prestige 146-core Core i7-10710U (Performance AC)
Acer Predator Triton 5006-core Core i7-10750H (Default AC)
LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE94552402072445528482206