I’m interested in the M4 Mac Mini based on the excellent reviews. I realize that there are far faster and more capable machines, but is the M4 a reasonably good machine for Blender 3D?
My current M1 Mini 8GB seems to hit a hard wall with geometry nodes: bogs down to an unusually slow and unresponsive state like it just can’t handle even displaying what I’m doing. I’ve suspected the small amount of RAM is the major factor there.
Anyone here using an M4 Mini for serious Blender work? Any regrets or limitations to share?
In most cases it performs much better than I would have expected. It’s the machine I use for most day to day things, and I was pleased when Blender ran nicely on it. I do have a PC desktop with 64GB RAM and a 4070ti, so that would be the ‘workhorse’ for more heavy duty stuff.
16GB on the Mac is a bit of a limiting factor. That’s used as the system memory as well as the GPU memory. The way it uses it is more efficient than with a discrete GPU, but it is being shared between the two functions.
There are occasions when Blender will hang, if I’ve been doing a lot of shader noodling in EEVEE. I think that’s mainly down to the GPU memory, as sometimes the viewports will go black. Only restarting Blender will bring it back. That system spec list recommends 32GB, and I would agree with that.
I do plan to upgrade to an M4. Though I might wait to see what the Mac Studio has to offer before I do. I’ll be look at at least an M4 Max, with as much memory (and disk space) as I can afford. At that point it will be my primary machine, and I probably won’t need to fall back to the PC all that much.
As with most things tech, my general principle is: Decide how much you’re prepared to spend, then spend it.