So far, I’m not convinced either. Apple has to bring much more here. The next Mac must render my Blender files at least faster than my Linux PC with RTX2080 
So many people are expecting a fan-less, 10 watt laptop to outperform a desktop class workstation, and when it doesn’t they say it’s not very impressive.
I will say this, even when the desktop class cpus show up from apple I don’t expect them to outperform an rtx 3090 at rendering. Until Cycles can support metal compute I don’t think a mac will ever be able to compete with nvidia in this arena. That being said, at cpu related tasks I expect apple silicon to be the market leader once they show their full lineup, with gpu performance that holds its own against amd and nvidia’s mid-range gpus.
But I don’t begrudge anyone who wants a no-compromise experience with linux on an rtx 3090 or quadro rtx 6000. For Blender, that’s simply best-in-class.
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Yeah that is the quite impressive part that this macMini beats my older XEON macs and with that is silent.
Actually a joy to work with without the noise when doing CPU heavy tasks.
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Yeah, I think I will just turn up the samples and not use denoising, because I’ve noticed that takes forever. For example, I had a water simulation, and in the background I had a white plane, and I noticed, on the tiles and areas where it was just the white plane background it was denoting it, and before my very eyes I watched it take like minutes and minutes just for the plane. The actual rendering and denoting of the part where there was water didn’t take that long but since there was a bunch of empty space around it, it was denoising the plane too. Anyway, heres the last frame of that render, but I converted it to PNG so It would upload here.
It looks the same as it was when it was an EXR. Go figure…
But yeah, maybe the rendering took a while because there’s all that empty space around it. I should have flipped the aspect ratio.
There is a Mac version of the SSGI fork!
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Yeah. You’ll want to use EXR primarily for those moments when you need more than 256 colors in a single channel, such as displacement maps. They also give you tons of options when it comes to compositing or color grading, but unless you specifically know you have a need for it, it’s better just to stick to .pngs for your lossless image needs.
Yep. I learned that the hard way.
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There is an issue though, people are believing that the M1 provides the power of the best x86 chips at a far lower cost and with far less power and heat, then complaining (after buying the Macbook) that their favorite app. is having problems which makes various features unusable.
I know the newer AMD and Intel chip designs have had their share of hype, but nothing like this.
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I would not call this hype
Apple in this case does a pretty radical move by switching to SoC away from x86.
The M1 macMini - an entry level device beats my 12 core Xeon macPro.
Even when the Mac is ten years old that is for a such a low power device incredible.
Tim Cook himself compares the SoC only to midrange laptops!!!
The unreasonable expectations are more made up by users not Apple in this case.
I never expected the gpu to deliver what my two gtx 1070Ti do. And the majority of people I think are aware of that too.
Look how long Microsoft is toying with ARM and still don’t have such an instant product launch success.
Not to defend Apple and PR aside one has to congratulate them on doing such a bold move and being that successful at it too.
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The only problem with this comment is that you’re linking to people who are trying to run a program Unreal Engine that can’t load on an M1 and using it as a baseline for the M1 not running like chip “X”
When you compare a program that has released an ARM Mac version against it’s native X86 counter part than Yes it is equaling and beating some of the highest end CPUs on the market.
The rest of us can’t be held responsible for the knuckleheads who are trying to use app X on a system that can’t even load it and then complain.
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The technological interesting part of this SoC is how much can be accelerated versus the old x86 architecture.
Not to say Apple is a savior more pointing out that we are at an interesting technological change
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Isn’t that what Rosetta is for, or did Apple just intend it to be a stopgap so people won’t be out of work (because of M1 apps. being a fairly new thing)?
I thought the thing about Xeons is that they can be a bit slow with single-threaded or lightly threaded tasks (because of their frequency being lower than i7 chips), with their power being truly unlocked once you do things like rendering?
Now the M1 is no slouch, it should be able to easily beat a 10 year old architecture clock for clock or something went terribly wrong at Apple’s computing division.
Yeah, it’s basically what you said…so Mac users can run their needed X86 apps while waiting for an ARM version to come out.
Weirdly enough, a lot of people are reporting that their X86 app runs faster through Rosetta on the M1 than when on their Intel machine.
rosetta for the last generation (ppc to intel) was the same thing, just a stop gap for a few years
I mean if you’re comparing to the base i3 MacBook of last year, the I think the m1 would beat it even with the rosetta 30% performance hit
I hope official native M1 Blender will be available soon…
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My unofficial build of 2.92 for Macs with Apple Silicon is out:
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HDRI works in Cycles now! 
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