Continuing the discussion from Mac: M2 Ultra - *VR (Part 1) - #10159 by shteeve.
Previous discussions:
Ok…so who’s ordered the new Mac Studio M2 Ultra?
At $4k for the base configuration, it’s a tad rich for my taste, but if it can be shown to beat my current system, I might just have to bite the bullet and grab it.
I think it’s a fairly safe buy as I don’t think the M3’s will make the transition to the Studio until early-mid 2025 (or very late 2024 at the earliest).
My general policy is to try to upgrade every 4 years max, and it’s coming around to that time (plus Intel, plus Hackintosh).
So for me, it really comes down to the benchmarks. If some of the Cycles render times are shown to beat what I can currently get, then I’m in.
Ok…so who’s ordered the new Mac Studio M2 Ultra?
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Yes, please render the Classroom scene then and report back here. I am actually happy with my M1 Mac Studio 
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I just got my M1 Max so I will wait a little since I have a PC with an RTX 4070 under the table.
But I feel confident that Apple is on a good track now.
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What I really don’t get is the Mac Pro, limited expandability for $3000 more than a Mac Studio….what am I missing?
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This is very interesting:
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I bet there will be quite some pros who might depend on the PCI Express slots… And maybe Apple will build some nice cards as well… And for big studios etc. the price should not matter. As long as they get things done much faster, or even get things done which a standard PC is not capable, of even the extreme price tag will pay off in the end.
Wow! Apple bastards really delivered!
Even the low end M1 Macs probably will be nice gaming machines now.
I’m ready to order Ultra Studio, but am on holiday It’ll be the first thing I do upon returning home, even before I sort my mailbox.
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It shows also how Apple is still considering gaming. They just slowly unroll the carpet.
(I had to use 10 of those to reach the 10 character minimum)
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I’m not sure if you sub to it, but in the last 24hrs the MacGaming sub-reddit has blown up with tons of AAA games running on Macs. Was surprising to see base M1s getting above 40fps on a lot of them.
Edit: I just watched the video you posted and it talks about all the games people are posting on Reddit. 
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I’ve flat out decided to make the M2 Max Studio my next computer. Yeah, it isn’t going to be as fast at rendering as a Geforce equipped PC, but hey, I don’t do this professionally. If the M2 Max takes a 2:30 to render out a scene a 4080 could do is 30 seconds, that doesn’t matter to me, because I’m in no rush. That’s just more time for me to sit around and scratch my nuts.
If I’m honest about it, the biggest time sink for me isn’t rendering, it’s when I’m trying to do something in a scene with hundreds of thousands or millions of polygons, be it compiling a new shader, moving vertices, manipulating geonodes, or running a quick simulation loop. These are the tasks the M2 chips excel at, being AT LEAST as good as an equivalently priced PC on that front. Even considering the time deficit incurred due to slower rendering, I’d still probably end up with an overall surplus when I consider all the other bottlenecks that go into creating a scene.
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That is honestly very true!
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You know, I really should consider proofreading my posts sometimes.
hahaha my own daily experience with writing in a foreign language 
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I don’t have that excuse, unfortunately. I’m butchering my native tongue over here. 
One thing I’ve wondered for a while… everyone slams Apple silicon gpus for not being as fast as NVIDIA at compute tasks like cycles rendering, but has anyone been able to benchmark its actual real-time 3d performance when it’s optimized for metal? Surprised I haven’t seen any direct comparisons using games like Resident Evil Village compared to an NVIDIA pc. In my personal experience I’m finding that eevee simply flies on my M1 Max compared to my 6 year old Xeon + GeForce 3060. Not sure how it would stack up if I combined it with a more modern i7 cpu though.
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Dude, you have an M1 max and a desktop with a 3060. So you tell us why there isn’t a direct comparison 
That old xeon might be a problem though. From experience even 2 gen old cpu can become a bottleneck for a good performing gpu that is more recent. My cheap 13600K with ddr5 is (according to cinebench results) pretty much as powerful as M1 ultra, maybe little faster, and I too have extremely fast shader compilation in eeve or even unreal(Mac will be more power efficient though). EEVEE is just not that great to gauge GPU performance.
I wish they got the M3 with raytracing and better price for performance done already. But seeing the useless dystopian eye displays in apple’s new “one more thing” I’m starting to doubt that apple knows what features are important
There aren’t any objective Eevee benchmarks out there: the renderer isn’t included in Blender OpenData. From what I read and the frame rates people have been posting, the M2 max was close to 4080 or 4090 performance in Eevee with the Metal backend (3.5). The gap isn’t as wide as with Cycles. The M2 Ultra should be even better.