Does anybody in the community run this combo on location? I just migrated to using the MBP 16" and the battery of the MBP gets drained so fast its scary. Anybody has the same experience? Tested running activity monitor while the MBP was processing images and it spikes up in the 400 range in cpu. According to Apple 100 is already high. I did the test both in C1 12 and C1 20 - same result. On a shoot last night with the MPB running together with an external battery pack plugged in under light use with just C1 running, the MBP was empty in about 1 1/2 hour. Is C1 really optimized for Catalina?
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MBP 16" Catalina with Capture One and IQ4150
- Thread starter Aviv1887
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Greg Haag
Well-known member
I have the IQ3 100 with 16" MacBook Pro (specs below), I would have similar experience with battery life. My experience so far is that in general the battery life is less than I had expected.
I can't help with battery use while processing IQ4150 pictures (don't own one) but would like to give insight into performance and suggest where the power use actually happens. I just got my own 16 inch MPB, so I am also learning what it can do.
The 16 inch MBP has 8 processor cores so it can peak at 800%. Apple saying 100% is high is somewhat misleading. That peaks one core, but there are 7 cores left. You are seeing about half the processing capability being used. This is fine.
Then there is the word "spike". If you measure any modest activity on a short enough time interval it will consume 100% of computing during the short measurement. Sustained 100% activity is what burns power, not spikes. You are not seeing sustained activity.
But this is not the important area to look for power consumption. One big usage area will not even show up in the perf monitor.
The new MBP has a very powerful video card. Capture One uses that video card for accelerating picture processing. This is probably where the big power usage goes.
That device can really burn power when it is turned loose. You can tell this by feeling the case. It will get very warm and the computer fan will be loud. I don't doubt it could drain the battery in short time.
You can disable Capture One from using the video card to accelerate picture processing, but then it will take longer to complete. I imagine disabling acceleration would use battery power more wisely, but at what cost in time?
I would stay with the default acceleration feature and take along some of those power packs that can recharge a battery in the field. A power pack with USB-C connector would fit directly onto one of the four MBP USB-C ports.
Bottom line: if you don't use the video card for accelerating processing, the bigger battery in the new MBP will give improved life. But, turn on the video adapter power hog and no battery will give great life. That is just the nature of high power devices, they work best when connected directly to a power supply.
Apple gives you a choice of longer battery life or powerful processing but you can't expect both under field conditions.
Mexecutioner
Well-known member
I think Gregg was not using the dedicated GPU as his system profile screenshot shows the Intel graphics, not the 4GB or 8GB options for the 16" MBP. But I agree with you, the graphics are battery hogs.
I think the "About this Mac" display only shows the built-in (on chip) graphics, not the PCIe graphics card. You have to click down to the Grahics tab on System Report to see the other one.
You may be better able to assess the energy impact by switching to the "Energy" tab on the activity monitor - it not only shows you the power consumption of a given app but also tells you which graphics card is currently active. If the "Graphics Card" column for a given application says "Yes", then that application is using the (very power hungry) PCIe graphics card.
Thank you all for giving your thoughts and advice. Today I did hear from DT whom are helping to resolve this issue. It might be happening due to the new video card and that open CL in C1 is not updated yet to this card. C1 might not be able at this stage to utilize the GPU and pushes the work load to the CPU. I didn't get a chance to do any more testing today. However, on a shoot with the MBP plugged into AC the whole day it was running totally fine. Interesting to hear that 400 is not that high and that the MBP should be able to handle this with the 8 cores.
Mexecutioner
Well-known member
It does display the PCIe card, at least on my 2017 here at work. I wonder why his screenshot shows the built in one only?
Greg Haag
Well-known member
The strange thing is when I saw your post, I went back and looked at mine, here is what is showing now?
Did you migrate content to your MBP? Did you create a lot of new content?
My experience with new OS installs is that for the first few days it appears like the machine is a slug and the battery performance is dreadful. A little bit of detective work leads you to the dreaded mdworker which as I understand it is the Spotlight indexer.
This comment is not relevant to a bare new MBP with no large content load.
If it is the mdworker then it should settle down.
My experience with new OS installs is that for the first few days it appears like the machine is a slug and the battery performance is dreadful. A little bit of detective work leads you to the dreaded mdworker which as I understand it is the Spotlight indexer.
This comment is not relevant to a bare new MBP with no large content load.
If it is the mdworker then it should settle down.
Interesting - I'm running Catalina on a 2012 Retina Macbook Pro, and the PCIe card doesn't show on "About thi Mac", but does show on system report and on the activity monitor. Putting on my software engineer hat, I'd say that's a (minor) bug.
Wayne Fox
Workshop Member
Actually if you take a look at Activity monitor, you will see that in Intel multi core CPU’s they have 8 actual cores but also have 8 virtual cores. If you follow the activity of the CPU’s the machine is capable of 1600% CPU utilization, not 800%. A 400% utilization is only ¼ of the available CPU power. Very few programs are capable of actually using all of the CPU power, but if you do a major import, export, or 1:1 preview creation in Lightroom, you will see the CPU percentage for those process’s easily hit greater than 1500%
I’ve been doing some extensive testing of how well the various MacBook Pros stack up (comparing a 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 16” MBP). Here’s a screen shot of one of the tests being run, you can see the 16 cores, as well as LR using 1567% available CPU.
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Wayne Fox
Workshop Member
You can open activity monitor and then open GPU history under the window menu to see all GPU’s and their usage.
the idea that the new video card is not supported is very possible. This is true of Adobe Premiere, it only uses the intel graphics, not the new Radeon Pro. Right now the 16” MBP is slower than the 2019 MBP when running some adobe programs (although not Photoshop, since Photoshop doesn’t leverage the GPU that often or that well). Adobe has a list of supported GPU’s for Premier, the new Radeon 5500 is not one of them.
Hopefully Adobe and Phase can update to use the new cards. I also hope Phase is working on moving from openCL to Metal. I believe once the programs use Metal, then any video card in the Mac would be automatically supported (although premier claims to be using metal so maybe not).
On another note and more to the topic, my battery life is better on my 16” MBP than the 2019 BMP. But I haven’t done any extensive work. You can also use a program like intel Power Gadget to monitor the power consumption of the computer, if it runs constantly above 50 watts then the battery is going to go pretty fast. Using things like safari etc only run at about 2-3 watts but as you can see from the screen shot in the previous post, that 1:1 import was using 40-50 watts of power. this would drain the MBP in about 2-2.5 hours.
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i think the cards show depending on having a monitor plugged in or not. (and maybe power saving prefs) i know this as i was looking at my machine last night unplugged on my lap to see what specs i would be upgrading from and noticed only the intel card, i’m now plugged into power and eizo and it shows the radeon pro card also.
dchew
Well-known member
That might be true, but I also think it is related to what programs are open. Right now, I am on my 15" MBP with nothing connected except power. Without PS open, all the programs say "No" in the Activity Monitor column "Requires High Perf GPU". About This Mac shows only the Intel GPU. If I open PS, it says, "Yes" in that column and About This Mac shows both GPU's.
Dave
Wayne Fox
Workshop Member
So a little quick testing with C1 20 on 16” MBP, Catalina 10.15.1.
It does utilize the Radeon Pro 5500 GPU quite a bit. I still see the intel GPU getting hit, but certainly could be from something else I’m running. CPU utilization is pretty low, rarely using more than about 30-40% of the available CPU. I haven’t tried anything that would stress it yet, I may try some exports of some heavily developed files and see if that pushes the system at all.
As far as power, it fluctuates between 5 and 10, spiking to 20-30 watts sometimes, and occasionally higher. Intel Power Gadget doesn’t show an average on this, but at these levels 5 hours of battery life should be doable. Not sure what the OP was actually doing while using it, and how various tasks in C1 affect that. Obviously any function that pushes the CPU and GPU more will require more power. The system will limit power and CPU speed based on thermals, so far it seems the thermals are a little better than the 2019 MBP (which really wasn’t an issue for photographers)
C1 is definitely leveraging the GPU much than LR or PS.
It does utilize the Radeon Pro 5500 GPU quite a bit. I still see the intel GPU getting hit, but certainly could be from something else I’m running. CPU utilization is pretty low, rarely using more than about 30-40% of the available CPU. I haven’t tried anything that would stress it yet, I may try some exports of some heavily developed files and see if that pushes the system at all.
As far as power, it fluctuates between 5 and 10, spiking to 20-30 watts sometimes, and occasionally higher. Intel Power Gadget doesn’t show an average on this, but at these levels 5 hours of battery life should be doable. Not sure what the OP was actually doing while using it, and how various tasks in C1 affect that. Obviously any function that pushes the CPU and GPU more will require more power. The system will limit power and CPU speed based on thermals, so far it seems the thermals are a little better than the 2019 MBP (which really wasn’t an issue for photographers)
C1 is definitely leveraging the GPU much than LR or PS.
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It should be noted that with 100wh battery in the MBP and a cpu with TDP of 55w and a AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20 with a TDP 100w (likely to be throttled back) at full pelt you are only going to get 20 mins of run time, ignoring screen, ram and storage power. My Laptop has a 90wh battery and when its chewing IQ4 150 files it only lasts about an hour