There’s nothing to bench yet. Any comparative benches for Blender i.e. BMW, would just be Windows GPUs against the M1’s low core count CPU since Blender doesn’t have GPU rendering for Macs at this moment.
But, good news!!! Apple has just recently joined the Blender Fund and at the same time we found out from the Blender Devs that Apple developers in tandem with BF developers have been working on a new version of Blender “in secret” which has Metal support, so that Blender will render Cycles with Apple’s GPUs.
The new Metal backed Blender will be available starting with Blender 3.1
At that point we should start seeing better comparative Benches.
Like I said earlier, anything now is just GPUs vs a low core CPU.
Probably a good idea, unless you’re like some of us here and use Macs with other DCCs or would like to start using it in your 3D non-rendering workflow.
Don’t misunderstand me 3.1 is for Metal support in Blender. The current ARM versions already run daily non-rendering Blender task extremely well with the current M1 computers, and I expect even more so with the new Pro machines.
Also there are already other 3D DCCs out there that are utilizing Apple Silicon almost to it’s full potential.
You are extremely helpful. Thank you. The work I do as an artists is a lot of geometry animation and freestyle rendering…I would love to see how the M1 chip handles that
because Freestyle, from what I understand has always been single thread…so I dont get the speed advantage of multiple cores
No problem. I’m in the same boat myself with doing mostly animations… I see really great Playback FPS. I easily run scenes that my “comparative in price” other “Branded” machine couldn’t handle. The M1 has been a little dream machine for me.
And because of thousand plus frame animations, I mostly render on the cloud. But I also can’t wait for the performance of the new Apple GPUs for all that real-time viewport performance.
For me it looks more like Apple’s Support has the overall experience of Blender in mind.
Metall for CyclesX or even Eevee may be part of that.
For me it sounds like they already rewrote large parts of Blender. And cut everything
in small pieces now to make it suitable for code review process. They start with Metal
for CyclesX. But it may need years and lots of discussions to include that all finally
into Blender.
There maybe also things related to Mesh Editing speed, Animation or even new
Features that may make use of Apple’s ML cores or such.
These sound really interesting. Where do you get this information from? Can you follow what Apple contribute on developer.blender.org or somewhere else?
I hope so! I’ve been quietly thinking this too. I hope the Apple developers do like all developers of Blender before them have done, and make Blender their own. Adding the things that they would like to see and what the community needs. Can anyone say “multi-core” for every single task? Or GPU computing for all simulations!?
So I would not worry for now. If someone wants or needs a M1 Max MBP now,
buy it and enjoy the next half or full year with Blender 3.0 already, until more
fundamental updates may come in.
In this thread there were some links to the Dev Forum Threads, where
a responsible Apple Employee was present, behaving like a human being
and talking freely about these strategies.
Guys, now with the new pro and max M1, the initial M1 machines gonna be forgotten? Blender 3.1 should run much better on the M1 than last version right? How M1 base chip gonna perform after coming 3,1? Whats your thoughts? Better, same as now?
It surprises me how little info there is on M1 gpu rendering using Redshift. As far as I know its the only renderer out there that uses Metal and hardly a single comparative test out there? I’m personally really curious how the gpu performs against the cpu. Will we see rendering performance gains on M1 by using the gpu or will cpu be faster. Has anyone tested this? Thanks!
Octane Render is using Metal and is, from what is reported, almost fully ready for M1 and beyond. Radeon Pro Render also uses Metal; Bsavery and team are in the process of optimizing for ARM based M1s as from his last comment here.
Yeah I knew those were coming, but I dont think they are here yet…? Redshift is the only one I know has already been released. Regardless, I’m just wondering if anyone here has done any gpu rendering tests on M1 yet, and how does the gpu stack up against the cpu? I’ve had many laptops in the past with discrete gpus, but in most cases (with the exception of the most recent RTX mobile gpus) gpu rendering on those was not really any faster than cpu.
So who here is running Monterey? Is it running fine with Blender 3.0? Do you have Daz Studio and is running fine under Monterey? Any Add-ons glitching that weren’t under Big Sur?
I know Monterey is around the corner and downgrading OSs on Macs isn’t a huge deal, but I would like to avoid downgrading back to Big Sur if at all possible.
If there is any specific software you want me to test let me know.
Since you mentioned it: is Daz Studio any good?
I am asking because I would like to let my students have access to human models for posing them into ergonomic studies for furniture and product design
It is very good, if you’re importing with the diffimorphic add-on.
Daz Studio just recently got updated to work on Big Sur and beyond (It was incompatible with any Mac running Big Sur for almost a year). I use the Install Manager for instead of Daz Central for now; Daz Central last I check still wasn’t playing nicely with M1s. That may have been fixed already though. Install Manager is more like a File Browser and Daz Central is like an Asset Browser.
It runs under Rosetta for now, but runs well enough to design characters and bring them into Blender. The stock characters are free in Daz including the latest 8.1 upgrades, at which you can design your own look or purchase already designed characters and clothing.
From what I see in Daz tuts, a lot of designers bring the base model Daz character into Blender perform sculpting here and then import back into Daz to then sale on their market place.
An ARM version of Daz Studio is in the works as from developers posting in their forum.
3.1 is for Metal support in Blender. The current ARM versions already run daily non-rendering Blender task extremely well with the current M1 computers, and I expect even more so with the new Pro machines.
Proper Above.