I was testing out Aiarty for its video upscaling and sharpening, which it does pretty well, and I noticed what I thought was some odd behavior. The GPU was pegged at 99% (perf cores at 43%) with some relatively toasty temps but fans not running much at all. I’m not particularly bothered, and it seems the processing was likely going as fast as it could, but I was a bit surprised that the fans weren’t getting much use. The processing took over an hour so it’s not like the temps weren’t sustained. I don’t do too much heavy lifting like this so I haven’t had much opportunity to make observations. I just figured that running at high temp for a while would fire up the fans a bit more than 7%.
I had the original 13” M1 MacBook Pro and the only two things that reliably got the fans going were:
- Video transcodes, and
- X-Plane flight simulator.
I could sometimes hear them if I set it going on a particularly large batch of photo exports from DxO PhotoLab where I use their ML-based denoising. Something like 50+ images it would start to involved the fans.
Yeah that still amazes me - even as long as I’ve had this MBP - just how unflustered it gets even with heavy workloads. I used to do some civilian-level transcoding on my 2011 Intel Mac and boy would that thing get hot. If I remember correctly, you could barely keep your hand on the back of the chassis after a little work with Handbrake. And the fans were running quite a bit over 7%!
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