If raw gpu rendering horsepower is the most important thing, then nothing, not even one of the new quad-M1Max Mac Pros is going to beat the price/performance of an RTX equipped PC. As a strong all-around workstation though, I’ll be snagging either an M1Max mac mini or a lower end Mac Pro and keep my RTX PC in the refrigerator for background rendering. 
5 Likes
sorry, honest question: but how does m1 max gpu performs as top end nvidia cards, when at the moment it’s on par with my 1660ti mobile?
I was really interested in those macbooks, but to be honest I was a bit let down by the performance after apple claims. The efficiency is still great for that performance as is the amount of shared ram, don’t get me wrong. Still, I don’t see the performance near the top end nvidia cards, RT cores or not.
3 Likes
Lots of Metal-related entries in the daily Blender Master build history. I expect release 3.1 to precede Apple’s rumored March event, or coincide with it.
6 Likes
I’ve been trying to get a sense for the actual performance of the m1 max: From what I found so far in the current beta state, the m1 max 32 cores / 16 inch, in cycles performs roughly like a 1080 ti, sometimes a bit faster, sometimes a bit slower. A 1660ti is a pretty fast card, even without RT cores, I guess upgrading to an m1 max, for performance might only give a marginal improvement based on current metal beta speeds.
A few posts back I ran a numbers experiment with the m1 max and 3080, both have a certain performance in the much better optimised redshift renderer in cinema. Taking those numbers there’s about a 3.3x difference in speed. As such, we can then take the numbers of cycles optix with a 3080 and divide that time by 3.3 to get a rough estimate how much faster the m1 max could be, if cycles is like redshift when optimised. Not very accurate, but there’s probably room for improvement in the 20-30% range.
Basicly, for a laptop the m1 max isnt the fastest or close to it in cycles, but in power usage its quite efficient. That said, thanks to the RT cores, a 3080 is so fast that even though it uses way more power, its also quite efficient in cycles because it just has hardware raytracing cores.
Bottomline it comes down to: what do you want and need.
For a laptop: noise, battery life and ease of use, for me, far outweigh the slower performance, and even the alderlake laptops with a 3080 ti aren;t very appealing to me.
For a workstation, its a different story as performance becomes a critical metric for me.
Lastly, for rendering large sequences of animation in cycles its great to have a renderfarm with a few 3090’s to get production level speeds.
Hmm did I sctually do justice to your question? I hope I did.
5 Likes
Well thats pretty much most. Leaving just one point behind. The artistic workflow, when lighting and shading a scene. Here I use the 3080 over my Mac. Its just a huge difference. Main problem is, that Apple needs an RT core along 3 times more GPU cores, just on the Laptop side. So roughly 128 to 256 GPU cores needed. Problem is the price tag. They could build such a system, but it currently would cost approx. 8k. Most likely its comes in the form of MacPro.
3 Likes
This is definitely good approach. You can not expect from laptop to be rendering machine. But this is also why I decided not to jump into Apple wagon again, for at least this year. I have Lenovo, with Nvidia 2060, 6core AMD CPU, 32GB RAM and 512 TB SSD, and got it for 1000 euros. Added one more 512 GB SSD. Had some issues with overheating, but did repaste it and now works really great. Even for 1h rendering CPU never goes over 80C. Typical day to day work do not hear fans at all. I did tests on ARM macbooks and to be able to match speed I get from this laptop, storage and RAM I need to pay at least 2.5x that. Screen is of course on MBP side, but price tag is still nifty, especially if you know that at the end you will end up sending final scene to desktop tower or render farm anyway. So my idea is to wait a year or more, and than hope prices of current MBP will drop.
3 Likes
This is interesting not sure when they added this.
I made a quick test (M1 Pro 14core GPU)
BMW with metal RT off = 99 sec
BMW with metal RT on = 86 sec
Looks like it is the same as going back to the pre BVH2 patch.
Classroom is 17 sec slower with Metal RT on.
5 Likes
Interesting, I can definitely see a case where a 3080 would be a fantastic improvement over the m1 max, especially in cycles while tweaking lights. Hadn’t thought of that but its a live situation where any extra speed could come kn handy. Tnx!
Speaking of that, Apple could have let the door for eGPU open.
Meaning, if there would be chance to have a RTX3080 running external for a MBP, Apple would still have a reason for the cheaper M1 Pro and could invest more time in. max version. I wouldn’t have to use PC at all and maybe bought the new MBP. So actually Apple loosing money and clients by going a dangerous route. Its time to deliver.
PS I’m just using an XMG Neo for testing running a 3080 rtx with 16 GB. Results are great for a laptop.
2 Likes
Thanks for ghe answer. As a disclaimer, i have a 3090 for rendering, but sometimes i am on the move so I have a laptop for that. I can remote connect to my 3090 desktop but I still like to have a somewhat usable machine, hence the interest in something like the macbook. However, I see from the current benchmarks that performance in rendering in blender is on par or inferior to my 1660ti laptop. While I’d love to have the portability and design of the macbook, it doesn’t honestly justify the 4x price tag compared to my lenovo legion 5, for me
We’ll see what happens, but I have the feeling that it’s gonna be tough to gain raw performance for the mac: the competition isn’t sitting still.
But we’ll see!
2 Likes
I honestly don’t really care about having the topmost possible rendering speed, as @anon55679826 pointed out many times, most users tend to spend far more time on general scene layout, modeling, animation and texturing than the rendering part and I agree with that.
What I mostly have an issue with is when there is no feature parity. Blender is pretty good about it, but for instance Unreal is pretty terrible at it, effectively forcing users to either go Nvidia or be locked out of new features.
I’ve been waiting for a performance focused Mac Mini option, and there is a pretty good chance that it’s what I will buy in a few months. I wish I could hold off for a Mac Pro but I don’t feel like being insulted by an insane price tag which is the part of Apple that I really dislike. I hope that the market can send a clear message to them that they need to tone down their pricing a bit, but so far they’re reporting record quarters so the market appears to be rewarding them for it.
3 Likes
Myeah thats a good point, its not like the m1 max is particularly slow.
From using it for several jobs now, I can say that its a powerful machine that zips through blender with ease. Its pretty effective while running physics simulations on it and its quite an enjoyable match with blender.
2 Likes
Cycles Metal enabled for AMD GPUs (Monterey 12.3+):
https://developer.blender.org/rB40fce61a6abe79508022d3e0cd3a29e187f18e74
What’s more, Monterey 12.3 includes 14 brand new Emoji !
6 Likes
Hmmh,
does that mean I now have to upgrade my Trash Can to Monterey,
just to test AMD GPU support ???
I only went until Big Sur with my Trash Can.
But since then, all those deprecated Printer/Scan Devices Drivers,
I still kept Trash Can for, stopped working anyway.
(I have to scan on Windows 
since then)
So why not …
First thing that came to mind when I saw that was “now re-enable eGPUs in 12.3 on M1” 
In all seriousness wondering how it would be to use the AMD and M1 Gpu together.
1 Like
Why with a 2060 you use CPU for render? I have the next generation 3060 and the difference is like 12 secs GPU to 90 sec CPU and i have an 5800H 8 core not a 6 core.
And another big advantage of Optix render is that the GPU never passes 69-70ºC while the CPU is at 13 watts contributing almost nothing to heat.
Regarding eGPU, looking at issues that Blender has with different card configurations and CPU+GPU i think an eventual eGPU will only work well if it is the only part of the machine doing the work.
The advantage of a fast render is that is very comfortable to not only iterate but work as if it is the viewport. I can put objects in the scene with cycles working, in a recent external architectural work i was putting objects and in 2-3 seconds i had everything i needed to get a good feedback. It is really a game change.
1 Like
maybe I’ll try the beta on my old laptop +egpu setup. I might cringe a bit if the vega64 ends up being similar to the m1 max (although not too much since the egpu was such a paint to maintain)
AFAIK I also install 12.2 only currently on my Trash Can.
Will also need to enable PB first …