Apple M1 max for Blender Cycles? VS PC

Hi Blender users
I work professionally with Blender every day and I always been using Mac computers which isn’t ideal for what I do so it’s time it’s time for me to get a really good computer and switch to a PC that is designed to handle blender without the lag in the viewport and crashes and render faster.

I only render using Cycles and mainly doing Product design, architectural design and product animations.

Since I’m new to the world of PC I would really appreciate your feedback on this configuration
Thank you.

Hi guys been trying to buy a computer that I can use for work modeling and rendering using Blender cycles. Wanted to get a PC but with the supply chain and other problems I’m interested in hearing what you guys has to say about the new M1 Max from Apple. Does it hold up for 3D work (Cycles).
if so, I would be glad since I’m a Mac user and feel comfortable using Macs.

This is the PC I was putting together
Housing Lian Li PC-O11WXC Midi-Tower - black window
Motherboard ASUS Prime X299-A II, Intel X299 motherboard - Socket 2066
Processor Intel Core i9-10920X 3.50 GHz (Cascade Lake-X) Socket 2066 - boxed
CPU cooler NZXT Kraken X73 complete water cooling - 360mm, black
RAM Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro black, DDR4-2666, CL16 - 64 GB quad kit
Graphics card Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Gaming OC 12G LHR, 12288 MB GDDR6X
SSD (M.2, NVMe) Samsung PM9A1 NVMe SSD, PCIe 4.0 M.2 type 2280, bulk - 256 GB

I’m not certain as I’m not a Mac user currently, but I don’t think you get any GPU acceleration on M1 Macs for Cycles right now. You need to wait until the Apple sponsored work to integrate their new Cycles Metal back-end is completed sometime after Blender 3.0.

You may be able to get the OpenCL to Metal wrapper to work, but reports I’ve seen say it’s slow and buggy. This may require modifying Blender to enable as well, again I’m not sure.

Of course if you can live with CPU rendering for a few months then you may eventually happy with the Mac, though it may not come close to a desktop PC system with the specs you have listed there, and you’ll get substantially more performance bang for your buck from the PC (unless the Metal Cycles back end turns out to be miraculous which of course Apple is probably trying to achieve).

Whatever you buy it will be obsolete way before you want it to be :smiley:

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