Mac: M3 - *Hardware accelerated RT (Part 1)

[jamesbstudio (James)]

Added to the list.

[jamesbstudio (James)]

I’m not, sorry.

[zeealpal]

@cekuhnen

Yeah the thing I feel that is overlooked is that we are dealing here with the performance of Integrated Graphics Unites literally steamrolling years of Intel GPU work and getting close to NVIDIA RTX dedicated GPUs at a fraction of the heat and power consumption !

True, but an i7-11800H (8.2b) and RTX3070 (17.4b) total 26B transistors, plus 1 - 2b for chipsets. Thats a decent portion less than the M1 Pro (37b) and less than half of the M1 Max (57b) while somewhere between a 1 - 2 node advantage vs Intel 7 (10nm) and Samsung (8mm).

Chances are the M1 Max’s ‘integrated’ uses as many transistors as the RTX 3070 ‘dedicated’ GPU does looking at the shown die shots, so not really surprising. As a consumer chip, it is an incredible chip, especially performance vs power. Architecturally, it appears Apple is inefficient with their use of transistors (area) to gain on power and performance. A chips design is a trade-off of its PPA (Power vs Performance vs Area).

The memory bandwidth Apple has is a great achievement for a SOC, and will allow very quick handover of data between CPU/GPU/NPU/DSP that will definitely benefit users, Apples software/OS advantage coming to play here.

[anon80315389]

After useless youtubers videos finally something that makes sense:

M1 Pro vs Ryzen 9 5900HS Blender Simulations - Viewport Playback - CPU Render

Quite nice for a basic 16c GPU MacBook Pro config.

[Tiwaz (Steve)]

Yes they actually showed that they move data way less (in a WWDC presentation) then compared to the more traditional methods where you need to copy data back and forth all the time like you would have to with the nvidia or amd architecture.

[RobertLe (Robert Lechl)]

Competition is the key. You need at least 3 competitors to make the user benefit from it. Welcome M1.
I tested CPU between 8 core intel and 8 core M1 and the M1 was 23% faster (using V-Ray that is not even build for M1).
If you consider that most software need at least a year to be full adapted to a total new hardware and with the many optimization GPU developers have found and developed along CUDA or now AMD, Metal is pretty young and in no means equal yet.
So it probably need 1-2 years till benchmark become a fair deal. Best to see on the video editing performance that adjust much faster to Metal and already is crazy fast compare to all competitors. However, I’m still more interested in 3D performance.
That said, thanks to Blender Devs. to already have an M1 build for Blender. Runs smooths, hope that will affect CycleX soon.

[Remyglass (Remy)]

thanks thats my video…I just logged in here to post a thread with it but im new and not able to do that yet. thanks for posting

Description from video:
I ran some tests to compare the performance of 14in M1 Pro (10c CPU, 16c GPU) powered macbook against the Zephyrus g15 ryzen 9 5900hs 3070 laptop. I didnt do any GPU comparisons because metal isnt supported yet. For simulations and viewport playback, the m1 pro does very well. I also did a few tests on battery only to see if there were any differences. Both Laptops are running the latest builds of blender 3.0 alpha released today ( ARM version for mac)

The higher resolution the simulation, the further the m1 pro powered machines pull ahead. You can hear the fans spinning up on the windows machine during every test. On battery the performance on the m1 pro is the same as plugged in.

[anon55679826]

I know, I got what you were saying.

[anon55679826]

@claus

While there is something to be said about kernel loading times, that’s about it. I expect a lot from the Max, but there’s simply no point in doing comparisons like that until we get a Metal build. This is why we’re called fanboys or sheep. Let’s stay objective.

I was enjoying the Eevee comparison and animation playback like I posted about.
F-ing hell man, I really wish y’all would let me enjoy the parts of Blender I work with, and find the advantages of working with the M1.
Man y’all get stuck on cycles renders lol

Oh, and by the way, I touched on your points in his YouTube comment section. I’m “Dropbars” that’s my second account.

[cekuhnen]

@RobertLe

Best to see on the video editing performance

I think it is fair to say that this is the target market with the new mbp !

[anon55679826]

@claus

2 The playback on second and third test was better on the G15.

I don’t care about you playback with Eeve enabled. I work with standard viewport playback.

And there’s nothing flamboyant about my post with the video I posted so don’t read in to it, it was literally the first video of anyone comparing the M1PM and a 3070 with Blender; so I shared in our M1 thread, here. If you don’t like it don’t watch. Not sure how you got so triggered by a video. That’s actually what’s wrong with the so-called “fanboys”… getting trigged so easy. Lol.

[anon55679826]

Love seeing the simulation test. Thanks for posting.

[shteeve]

btw not intending to poo-poo on anything (including people kind enough to be doing benchmarks), just pointing out there is a lot of incorrect conclusions that often get drawn from people hastily testing stuff they don’t understand.

i’ve been using eevee more than cycles as well for the past year or so, and i’m also excited if the M1 Pro/Max can deliver gains in that area, specifically over my Vega 64 (which is already taking a performance hit due to egpu setup).

believe me i want nothing more than to be able to justify tossing this 2018 macbook pro and getting a new one. its been the worst apple product i’ve owned in almost 20 years.

[anon55679826]

@shteeve

btw not intending to poo-poo on anything (including people kind enough to be doing benchmarks), just pointing out there is a lot of incorrect conclusions that often get drawn from people hastily testing stuff they don’t understand.

No worries. I feel like most of us here are skilled enough in 3D and Blender to watch these videos and pull certain bits of valuable info we need. We can see the glaring mistakes that get made by beginner presenters, but can disregarded those to, like I said, pull what we need.

Like I said before, I pretty much stay in my lane with Apple post, really only posting here in this thread. I don’t hit up every CG group with, “OMG Apple is so cool!!!” lol

[Renzatic (Professor Emeritus Billy H. Wafflesmith XIV Esq.)]

@amartinezch

My biggest pet peeve is the windows management, it’s overall good, it’s smooth, but there’s something about who or what is in front or goes behind a pile of windows… for this I have learned to embrace the trackpad: I use a mouse on the right hand and have a trackpad handy left to my keyboard for everything gestures (the laptop would have it built in already). It enhances navigation since scrolling with two fingers is ultra smooth (compared to mouse scroll wheel), triple finger swipes navigates between “desktops” (basically screens with apps already opened grouped in them), three fingers swipe up (to see all apps grouped this is called mission control) or three fingers swipe down (puts all windows of the current focused app next to each other).

One of the things that’ll help my transition considerably is that I use Linux regularly (exclusively, as of writing), and Gnome 40 is very, VERY similar to MacOS when it comes to window management.

One of the very first things I did while playing with those Macs was set the Hot Corner at the top left to call Mission Control, mimicking my setup in Fedora.

[anon55679826]

Awesome thanks for the quick benchmarks. Really cool to see the animation playback maxing out at 60 fps with that true 4K screen (3456 x 2234) lots of pixels to push. What’s the screen resolution on the PC laptop, 1920 x 1080p?

Can you load the “Rain” animation test from the Blender site, and test? Collapse the far left viewport" I think it’s the Eevee viewport and switch the right viewport to standard view, and then play it? Oh and don’t forget to change the playback speed to 120 to see what it maxes out on.
Thanks!

[Remyglass (Remy)]

It looks like I cant dowload that without being subscribed to blender studio which I am not currently.

[shteeve]

i’m also excessively wary because i got burned by getting caught up in the hype back when all the youtubers were declaring an egpu would solve all my macbook pro woes, but barely a month later blender discontinued gpu rendering on the mac

egpu has been useful for eevee at least (plus some bootcamp work in unreal), but i’d love it if the m1 max gives me equal or better eevee performance without the temperamental external box. and of course some cycles metal benchmarks soon would be great in helping me justify these new machines

[Renzatic (Professor Emeritus Billy H. Wafflesmith XIV Esq.)]

You don’t need a subscription, just a blender.org account to grab it.

[Renzatic (Professor Emeritus Billy H. Wafflesmith XIV Esq.)]

@shteeve

egpu has been useful for eevee at least (plus some bootcamp work in unreal), but i’d love it if the m1 max gives me equal or better eevee performance without the temperamental external box. and of course some cycles metal benchmarks soon would be great in helping me justify these new machines

I’m expecting the Max to perform fairly closely to a 3060 under Eevee once the Vulkan refactor is complete, and MoltenVK is implemented. There will be some performance penalties due to running through a translation layer, but provided it’s done well, it should be barely noticeable.