Mac: M2 Ultra - *VR (Part 2)

Glad you noticed. I’m sure that’s easy to do if you’re not looking carefully. At least we now know trying to run the X86 version on AS is over twice as slow. :slight_smile:

Bug reports are the official way to make developers aware of issues. They don’t exist to bother them, they the way to inform them.

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Hi followed this thread for sometime but first post. This might be of interest.

I have the m2 ultra studio with 128gb ram and 76 core gpu. Just ran the Blender benchmark on 4.0. It returned a score of 3315.

This is a slight regression on the 3.6 score (3420). The m3 max 40 core is 3014 so narrowing the gap considerably.

The m3 ultra studio should be something, if you can wait that long - but no regrets, this thing is great.

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Ooops. Was looking at the 3.6 results for m3 max 40 core. Actually using 4.0 it is 3417 - faster than my m2 studio ultra 76 core with a 3263 median score.

Still, no regrets.

Unless they release the m3 ultra in a couple of months - then I will be miffed - but only a little. Can’t wait for ever.

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i’ve got an m1 max and i’m thrilled by how much faster the new systems are. likely still won’t be looking to upgrade for another year or two, but its great to know there’ll be lots of improvements when i do.

its a way better problem to have than when i had my 2013 macbook pro and 5 years went by with almost no performance improvements and many regressions (too thin to cool properly, bad keyboards, etc). eventually gave in and got the 2018 and it was practically a worse laptop for all its issues. it was so bad i was about to give up on macs just before apple silicon arrived.

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This memory problem irritates me.
Even an 18GB M3 cannot render the sinosaurus scene, which poses no problems for my RTX 3060 and even works on my 8GB 2070 with child particles reduced to 90%.

Probably I’ll stay with my cheap MB Air and upgrade my PC instead.

I think it’s more of a cycles issue. Haven’t noticed problems with octane or unreal engine. Maybe rather change renderer of choice :smiley:

Even if it is a Cycles issue, will they solve it?
Currently everyone is occupied with the 4.0 release, we’ll have to wait and see.
But I’m not spending 2000+ bucks on a MBP on Black Friday in this situation.

I’m in a comfortable situation, I want a better Mac but I don’t need it :grin:

How did you get OctaneX to work, from the Apple store?

Nope, the free versions aren’t up to date. However you can get paid version for 1 year for free on any Mac Pro or MacBook Pro from otoy’s website.

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Brecht will kick me as I messed up yesterday but I still think there is a bug. It was already there in the last release of 3.6 however.

57GB on M1 vs 22 GB on M3 really?

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So there is a demo scene for geonodes, animal fur examples.

Windows blender reports 1.06 GB and task manager 1.6GB ram usage

Mac M3 blender reports 3.7GB and activity monitor 5.6!!

There is definitely a problem with hair rendering at least, and it’s over 3x memory usage over windows…

So yeah, 18GB feels more like 6 now :smiley:

This got nothing to do with how universal memory or apple silicon works. I have so far seen octane take even less memory than in windows and even massive unreal scenes fit even if it’s not too well optimised yet.

EDIT: So rendering with cpu on Mac takes 1.4GB in blender and about 2.5GB in activity monitor. This means that rendering on gpu needs probably a full copy of the whole shit. WTF is unified memory good for if it needs all the thing copied for gpu? Damn, and it looks it’s been like this for a while so how come no one caught it? Or is this supposed to be normal behaviour?

EDIT2: And if you disable metal rt then blender takes over 4.2 because why not? It’s just couple of hairstrands that could fit 12 times in a 12GB gpu on windows…

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I guess and I at least that is was with me, I never really paid attention to memory unless it runs out or crashes :wink:

Also never compared it memory wise with PC before.

But I agree something is up especially with hair.
As I made that error with the bug report yesterday I did reopen one because M1 taking over 57 GB for that scene is ridiculous if windows can do it with like 16 or M3 with 22.

I hope they notice something and fix it.

Now I would be curious if linux can do it with even less memory :thinking:

Yeah it definitely makes sense to go for 64+ ram on Mac in light of this situation. 64GB would maybe be around a 16+ 4080 Vram capacity :D… Dynamic caching my …

It’s been years since I’ve used linux and it always was using a little less than windows IIRC. However it wasn’t like suspiciously massive difference. This 3x difference in certain cases is absurd.

What are your thoughts about this? Would this enable running MagicaCSG on macOS?

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Not sure guess it all depends on your network connection.

Microsoft scares me, this and other stuff I read.
Windows 12 probably will be a subscription service :no_mouth:

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:sweat:

You might very well be right.

By the way, here’s a reminder that there’s a nice macOS discord channel with not many participants, so no noise, but fruitful discussions:

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I just thought if you do that you could as well run an remote desktop to a windows machine.

I fear VMware or Parallels might never get there.

If it only was using Vulkan or DX it probably would work.

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The new IBM and all personal computer manufacturers are joining in, including Apple.
Booting Linux …

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