Only when rendering in Cycles and Eevee. Pretty much everything else, the Mac laptops are faster.
3 weeks working on project.
10 to 30 minutes for rendering, if that.
Desktop PC gets you 2 to 3 minutes faster render.
PC saves you 3 minutes every three weeks. Lol 
Just ran 6 back to back 15 hrs sims and the time I saved running them on my Mini vs running on my Ryzen laptop would probably equal 2 of the 6 iteration.
I still have the Mac because of macOS. I hope Apple doesn’t forget that … 
Why ? For android smartphones they are good in business
Did anyone try this ?
The USD seems to import fine but the materials seem broken for me.
Also interesting blender 3.1 alpha imports it way faster than 3.0.
Qualcomm has a strangle hold on the industry and a lot of phone makers would love to move away from them but Qualcomm uses their patents to pretty much bang every phone maker that isn’t Apple on the head (they tried to do the same with Apple). Essentially for Android makers its just easier to put in a snapdragon into the phone so that they don’t have to deal with patent issues with the 3G and 4G chips etc. As 5G starts to gain adoption (though there are issues right now with the FAA in the US), that will give phone makers the opportunity to drop Qualcomm and support a real competitor in the space. Right now its Snapdragon or bust if you are an Android OEM.
They are trying to do the same in the race towards an ARM PC, but I don’t foresee them being as successful there, but who knows. My comment was tongue in cheek but I would hope that Qualcomm does not get a stranglehold on the Windows on ARM space.
Oh I am fully aware of how they have the industry in a vice - Qualcomm has a semi Monopol there.
But all the android phone makers were fine with using their tech instead of making their own.
With Apple supporting Blender, I’d love to see support added for ProRes as a rendering option in Blender. There was talk in 2013 about adding support through the FFMpeg libraries, but there was fear that Apple could come after Blender with lawsuits if they decided they didn’t like it. Not sure how an agreement would work, or if it would, but dang it would be nice if I didn’t have to transcode to ProRes after the fact all the time.
that is actually very true - Blender is fantastic also for commercials and it would make a lot of sense to support that format out of the box.
As a filmmaker and not strictly a CG artist, I work with multiple formats all the time, including ProRes as well as various brands of raw.
IMHO, image sequences are one of the best ideas that came into the world of CG and I don’t see a huge advantage to rendering straight into a format such as ProRes.
Let me elaborate – aside from the obvious reason that DCC’s have a tendency to crash during rendering, as well as the fact that a lot can happen during a render session which can go from several hours to several days (power outages, cat stepping on the power strip switch, etc.); there is a great deal of information that it’s often necessary to be carried out of the DCC and which most video formats don’t support such as separate passes for alpha, depth, specular, Cryptomatte, etc. There is also the possibility of having a few frames glitch for some reason, which in a ProRes scenario would mean needing to re-render the entire sequence, or at the very least re-render the problematic sections and then having to edit those in over the glitchy frames which can get rather complicated.
There is one last idea that I would bring forth as to why I think being forced to go an extra step before finishing the project is a good thing – some of the best looking CG renders you have ever seen online have been post-processed (in Photoshop for stills, and a compositing app and NLE for video) and this is a good thing IMHO. It forces one to look at the images within a different context and within a different mindset. When we’re working in a DCC, we’re hyper focused on the small detail such as lights, shadows, textures, scene placement, camera angle and focal length, etc. Once that footage is brought out into a NLE or compositing app, it becomes more about the overall image and the impact that it provides. Our brains switch from micro to macro, we stop focusing on the small little tweaks and start looking at the whole picture. This allows for a better flow of artistic ideas that can guide us toward the final image. We’re looking at overall framing, hue, saturation and luminance, etc.
Anyhoo…this is very OT, but I wanted to chime in as to why the ability to render in ProRes or other container formats might not be such a big necessity.
P.S.
The thought did occur to me that some people like to do their compositing, final grading and even editing in Blender, and in such a scenario I can see why they would want to spit out a final final render in a publishable format such as ProRes. I personally would highly advise to still consider using another app for your finishing pass such as the free version of Resolve. It will help rewire the brain toward this other portion of the creative process that I described above.
As you stated while it is advisable to render in image sequences for obvious reasons, after processing in the compositor I then want to send it into a movie format. For that the export function would be very beneficial.
While I am not sure how much the blender compositor is or would be used vs FCP Motion Adobe After Effects or DaVinci.
True all this, solid post…
Maybe one use case would be using it as an input video texture, higher resolution videos would load and play faster plus all the other benefits of using ProRes decoders on Mac.
Don’t think it would be that useful though except if there are many video feeds being used as textures.
Very true. Image sequence is the preferred method, and using the EXR format gives you basically what a RAW image would be in film.
while I agree in theory that image sequences are ‘the best’, I would still like the option for rendering to a high quality intermediate format. options are a good thing. that said, I’m not holding my breath for ProRes if there are licensing issues. just some sort of equivalent format would be nice.
more on topic, I’ve been having issues with my m1 max where it is very inconsistent with frame rates. I get frequent random issues where the computer can’t even maintain a steady 60fps, to the point where the default startup scene in blender runs at ~30fps or worse, even in solid or wireframe mode. battery/plugged in makes no difference. with or without anything displays or peripherals plugged in. rebooting can often fix it, but only temporarily. anyone else having these sorts of issues? 
I was playing with the Italian flat demo file at
Blender 3 takes a long time to load it and 3.1 even more . 3.1 Even shuts down the macmini
Seems to me that this file pushes the 8BG Ram macmini to the limits
They weren’t fine, they have no choice. The smaller Android phone makers don’t have the resources to make their own chip nor deal with the double dipping patent licensing practices of Qualcomm if they want to include 3G/4G in their phones. Qualcomm conveniently licenses those patents at a discount if you buy their SoC.
For OEMS making their own silicon is expensive and time consuming and if they include 3G/4G they would have to pay double dip fees of Qualcomm. Apple was able to do it with years or iteration, planning, a vast war chest of patents, money, lawyers, and supply chain savvy. Samsung has their own chip but it’s only really sold in South Korea and some regions where Qualcomm’s patents won’t cause issues for them. Making your own chip is not easy and most OEMs are selling their devices at razor thin margins just to be able to compete. Spending money on custom chips is not in the cards, it’s a sunk cost where they would have to keep spending money just to keep up in terms of performance with the major manufacturers (Apple for one).
I absolutely agree with you that EXR image sequences is the way to go for final renders.
The main reason I want to use ProRes is mostly for my pre-vis work. Quick renders that I can slot directly into my NLE and use to edit. I used to do viewport renders with shading, but now Eevee makes a fantastic pre-vis tool. Fairly realistic renders in a fast time. Is it that much work to convert my image sequences to prores? No, but it takes some time, and when you’re rendering out sequences a lot, that time adds up in a hurry, as it just adds an extra conversion program/step.
@blazer003 do you work in arch viz or product viz?
@apoclypse Thats pretty true today - when I wrote my reply I was thinking also about the beginning of smartphones. There was Nokia Motorola and so forth. Today it is all pretty consolidated.
No wonder Apple bought Intels Modem decision to get rid of Qualcomm completely and develop the chip as they want.
I do commercials, and then personal VFX for short films. I’m working on a big Star Wars short film now, and am doing rough animatics for pre-vis of all the VFX right now.
I can see why, as it uses about 9 GB most of the time while rendering (shortly jumped to 11 Gb at the start), that probably does not leave a lot for the gpu unless it swaps like crazy.
Seems to work fine one 16Gb.
Now that the age of GPU rendering is coming to Mac again I would not recommend less than 16GB.
If you CPU render you probably can get away with it?
I guess it should work as it only uses about 5 GB when rendering on CPU.
Ah I see that’s pretty cool