Mac: M2 Ultra - *VR (Part 2)

I’ve installed the Game Porting Toolkit and installed Cyberpunk 2077. Works well on my M1 Max, at around 2K resolution, high settings and 30fps.

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I left myself a PC with one RTX 3090 (I sold the other two) after I bought a MacBook M2 Max, but I haven’t run it for a few weeks and I don’t know if there’s any point in keeping it under my desk. Even if I have a project in Cycles, it’s usually quite simple and I do it on the MacBook anyway. The viewport preview is repsponsive enough, and when rendering - as you wrote - I have a bit more time to scratch my nuts or make coffee. Most my projects are Eevee but occasionally I have a larger project - an animation in Cycles and then the MacBook would certainly be too slow. It’s just that this could happen in one month or two years. If at least cryptos were more expensive, then this PC would be good for something, but at the moment - I don’t know… I think I’ll get rid of this junk in the hope that if I ever need the RTX, the prices won’t be cosmic again. I don’t like rendering in the cloud.

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Uhm that is if true fricken amazing!

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nice! and if i’m understanding correctly, this game porting toolkit is still running things in rosetta, so this actually represents a lower bound for potential performance for these games, right?

Apple showed “The Medium” game as an example that developers can expect double the performance by doing a full port to Metal.

For context here is the developer video showing those gains.

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Yes. It is translating the x86 instructions with Rosetta 2 and Wine and translating Direct3D 12 to Metal. If the people at Projekt Red decide to port it to Mac, you would expect ~double the performance.

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Future macPro cards :wink:

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on the one hand i hope they don’t limit it to a mac pro expansion card, but also it would be nice if they made a standalone accelerator that worked with the m2 ultra mac pro (wasn’t locked to m3 etc)

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I wouldn’t show any older previous M2 Ultra interest,
if I would not fear the M3, 3 nm, RT cores, …
(Something we all expected for M2 already),
if Corona, Post Corona, World Situation, Climate Disater, …
likely is going on and the final M3,
I wait since 2012 for,
May not come in an Ultra version before a mid 2024 or so.

So like forced upgrade/buy of a disliked Trash Can in 2015,
I have to buy another stop gap (?) M2 Studio.

Means base or at least upper stock model version (?) or invest
in a maxed out Studio model for a longer life time and hope for
Apple’s ongoing hardware delay by something jamming
Tim Cooks’s pipeline ?

:face_with_thermometer:

…Or we can make the most of the hardware that’s available to us? There is always a better model on the horizon and every Mac we buy is a stopgap to the next Mac we will inevitable buy :slight_smile:

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The new Mac Pro is a bloody scam:
https://youtu.be/k54PERVtRks?t=580

This is simply embarrassing. No wonder it doesn’t support the GPU.
Why did they even show this shit? Just because they felt pressure because they gave the promise three years ago?
After all these years, after all failures, Apple still doesn’t know what a ‘Workstation’ is.

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i agree, and add that its always dicey to get too hung up on rumors and predictions for future products. it remains to be seen if this whole 3nm thing results in substantially faster peformance, or if apple goes the other route and uses it to make devices consume less power so they can get away with putting in smaller batteries or something.

or for that matter, if 3nm gave a 30% performance boost, they might decide thats enough of a differentiator for that generation and wait until m4 before considering dedicated raytracing acceleration.

not trying to be positive or negative about their future plans, but more to suggest looking at whats available now and decide if it meets your needs or not.

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while i don’t find the new mac pro particularly compelling either, i’d wager the overlap between its intended audience and the type of people who watch max tech to make purchasing decisions is probably near zero. :stuck_out_tongue:

that said i’m not the target market for it either, so i’ll still defer to those people for a final determination on its value. apple crowed about 22 streams of 8k in realtime or something - so a real test will be if that claim works or falls flat with this bandwidth architecture.

What would a montage using 22 concurrent video streams even look like? I can only think of a CIA agent watching CCTV footage in a TV show. I feel a little embarrassed that my video montages use only 2 to 4 HD streams concurrently.

For me it feels different.

That was also true for me until 2012.
But since Trash Can in 2013 (2014 for real), as a before happy Mac Pro user
I always felt there is not the real desktop I would want and waited at least
for an upgrade to current components that never happened.
I just had to buy it in a hurry in 2015 as I really had to upgrade.
It was ok in the ende but always very far from what I really wanted.

Was shy of buying the 2020 (?) iMac but it was already clear that
Apple SoCs are coming.
Mac Pro 2019 presentation felt just like an arrogant statement.
Can’t afford it, you’re no Pro.

M1 Ultra Studio, OK, I am no more Pro but Prosumer, will buy,
until I realized the bad scaling.

M2 Mini Pro, by far not what I need, but I can do basically 95%
on my 16GB M1 Mini anyway. Again another definite stop gap
device now for $2500 ?

Yes, I would have got really angry with Apple if they allowed to
(like in the past) to degrade the Studio to Max only to help
marketing the Mx Mac Pro.
They did not do that iniquity but what they did with M2 Mac Pro
is also ridiculous. Since 2012 I am no more target group of a Mac Pro
obviously, but beside tons of (pragmatic) creatives switched to Windows,
there are still people that rely on such 2019 Mac Pros.
And now M2 Mac Pro is even worse.

Why don’t companies like Apple (or in general) have feelings like shame,
bad conscience or just feel bad for what the did and will do …

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I did some calculations: if the M2 Ultra scales linearly from the Max (it probably won’t be 200%), we can expect OpenData GPU entries

2456 M2 Ultra 60 cores
3028 M2 Ultra 72 cores

That’s 5x and 6x faster than my iMac Pro Vega 56! Eagerly awaiting real data on Tuesday (?)

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Take this with a HUGE grain of salt!

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Early Metal Geekbench scores are popping up and the M2 Ultra just smashed the M1 Ultra scores.

M2 Ultra: 281948

M1 Ultra: 150463

https://browser.geekbench.com/metal-benchmarks

Edit: I see the Tom’s Hardware article above is mentioning this… :nerd_face:
If RT cores ever get added to these chips it’s going to be lights out. Already crazy strong in non-RT task.

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Please Apple, please scare Nvidia. I need them to double vram per card

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Haha, NVIDIA users are wanting more VRAM and Mac users are begging for RT cores. Who’s going to give first? :slight_smile:

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