Is the M2 Ultra Mac Studio really that much better than M2 Max Mac studio

the Ultra is two Maxes connected together. The memory Bus size is doubled, so it has even more throughput. So when you look at these numbers, the primary difference is how fast it can get to memory. The other factors scale in a fairly predictable way:

I think I stole this graphic from AppleInsider

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when I was buying a replacement clutch for my old car, I had to go to a speed shop to get the parts. There were several choices available. I asked the counter-man what was the difference, and he replied, "How fast does your Wallet want to go?"

I would say that for photo work, and light video work, the M2 Ultra Mac Studio is gross overkill. Unless you're throwing tons of processing-intensive photo batch jobs at the computer all day long, the extra cores of the Ultra are going to sit there unused much of the time, while the computer waits on the bottleneck in front of the screen – you!

If you were doing a lot of high-end video work where the computer was going to be spending lots of time encoding or transcoding video, and that was going to bottleneck how fast you could get your work done, then the extra cores and hardware video engines on the Ultra might come into play enough to justify the extra money.