Apple ray tracing and Blender 3.6

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1

Hello,

Context
I have a m1 laptop. I tested in my workflow a scene that the m1 is rendering at about 3 min 36 sec - also with a loaned m2 max at just that rendered at 66 sec (returned the laptop because I hoped it will be closer to the 14 seconds on my work pc wit i7 gen 11 rtx 2070 Super).

I found in my limited searching that blender does not have ray tracing exactly, rather the inverse - path tracing.

Question

For those who saw that m3 comes with hardware acceleration for ray tracing - what does it mean for Blender?

Please stay on subject, i wish this to be a short topic and not 1000 reply

2

For Cycles it will probably be a big upgrade. Support has already been added to 4.0: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/114296 But just have a bit of patience, in a few days we will see the benchmark results popup everywhere.

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Yeah so I went and tested the base M3Pro → CPU 5P + 6L with 14GPU and 18GB RAM.

image
image2036Ă—1612 893 KB

This image is rendered in 30seconds at 2666x2000 resolution on 128 samples (no denoise). It is my project and it can be seen on my travel blog www.europeoncamera.com
RT Experimental is ON and IT REALLY WORKS, it cuts the time in half for any of my files (cars, trains, buildings… any project I open is half as fast with RT Experimental). It feels like Optix turned ON on a RTX GPU. Except that Optix is not just 2x the speed but more like 5X in some cases.

I am using Blender 3.6.5LTS for this test.
For this 3,2GB blender file it is using 10,3GB of RAM in Blender (bottom text indication). If you take a 8GB RAM for Blender… well you can do low poly stuff but not that many in one scene.

From this list of laptops, only the M1 16GB is mine and the 8GB is my wife’s.

  • 30 seconds for M3Pro (base) 14GPU 11CPU RT Experimental ON

  • 66 seconds for M2Max 30 GPU 12CPU (RT Experimental does not work, of course) (this I tested when the M2 Max came, in spring so on Blender 3.5.1)

  • 214 seconds on my personal laptop M1 7GPU 8CPU 16GB Ram.

  • over 6 minutes on a M1 8GPU 8CPU 8GB Ram

  • just 15 seconds on a Lenovo workstation i7 13gen Rtx 2000 ada laptop with 170W power source (connected).

I want to stress out a few things:
This new machine is 2500e in France, a bit more cheap in Luxembourg, but not worth the trouble to get there just for this :))
I am using a 1400e M1 MacBook Air.

With both laptops I can work on that 3,2GB file. However when rendering to test textures, the new M3 machine is fastest.
Loading shaders and working on each individual hexagon tile, both are super fast, in some cases faster than my work CAD laptop. By work I mean actually making the models, applying materials, camera movement, and much more. The only part that sucks on the M1 MacBook Air is the rendering (checking). Sometimes it takes minutes where this machine takes seconds.

I presume the M3Max (at 4000e) will be twice as fast as this M3Pro locked model (11 CPU/14GPU) but then… should you render for one full 8h day an animation on a laptop… or on a 4000e laptop?? PC is for animations…

I have the black M3 model and finger prints are visible on the keyboard deck :)) but it looks great, no joke. I am not a fan of apple is just I cannot game on a Mac so I cannot get distracted. I had gaming laptop 5-6 yrs ago an mostly I would do CS GO and sell skins…
So far I am loving the laptop, the speakers, the brighter screen (I work on commute, in a bright natural lit room at work etc) and love the sound it makes the keyboard.

I wish Nvidia would make a laptop also to compare with this one… something with CUDA and RTcores instead of MetalRT, with great screen (on battery), and good battery life (I rendered 10 frames and lost 6% of battery, while also listening to a podcast, and writing these words). My work laptop which is from 2020 (RTX A3000 (not ADA) lasts 2h max without power and it changes the color profiles depending of app… that I hate the most.

Peace and stay safe!

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4

In the just released M3 generation Apple silicon even with hardware RT is still not close to a 2000,- PC with nVidia 4080RTX (which can be upgraded to RTX 50?? with no effort once released).
Therefore in my calculations spending 3000,- + bucks on Apple hardware (like M3Max) that is not upgradeable cannot really be justified.

So still the combination of a ~2000,- Apple MBP for composing scenes and all other everyday work plus a PC in similar price range with an upgradeable nVidia RTX (for rrendering animations and maybe gaming) is still the most reasonable solution and will continue to be for the time nVidias RTX generational gains keep up with Apple ARM progress.

I’ll hopefully join in with a MBP M3 soon, cheers!

1 Like
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By the way, the new Blender 4.0 came live. None of my Blender 3.6.5 LTS files open. All make Blender open and then close in less than a second. Hope they push a 4.0.1 update…

Yes I also have a PC for animation render and high sampling. I don’t need a laptop to blow itself out while I am sleeping. I use laptop on the couch, transit, work, and … that is it.

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I come with an edit.
During the cleaning of .blend files (by Blender tools) it generated an empty text object (no text, no font). Since I use an initial file, that I duplicate, edit, save, then duplicate the previous, edit, save etc I did move the bug from one file to the next.
Finally, the big file that I use for testing since 2022, was rendered in 32 seconds (same as 3.6.6 build, same as 3.6.5 LTS with RT Experimental ON. I don’t have anymore the M2Max MBP 14 so I cannot test that one anymore so I assumed the M3 Pro (base) is still 2x faster.
I did not see any difference in terms of optimization, and that could be because Apple is focusing on Blender 4.1 instead of 4.0.2.

Finally I ended up returning the macbook Pro M3Pro base as the PWM issue is alarming for me and I am waiting for M3 Air, hoping it will still have RT hardware acceleration and the same no PWM screen as M2 has.