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

But notice that it is Released on April 1, 2022. Maybe an April Fools joke?

Yes but that is the day when Blender 3.1.2 was released.

I donā€™t have an Android device to check what the message is there.

It would however make a lot of sense if Apple releases iPadOS which switches to something like Mac OS.

Also only makes sense to put ā€œkeyboardā€ as a requirement for Blender at least the way it is now.

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Hello all Iā€™m trying to do a video on Computers for Blender for beginners and to help Iā€™m looking at the blender benchmarks

with regards to MACs the new M1 Ultra seems to come out looking fairly average compared to the (high consumer end) AMD and Intel. Any thoughts as to why? I keep hearing reports about the m1 Ultra performing as well as an RTX 3090 but they seem to be greatly exaggerated if the benchmarks are correct or am I missing something? thanks for any info

This is a deep topic and we can only scratch the surface in this type of forumā€¦

  • The benchmarks are looking at CPU rendering so you cannot compare it to GPU rendering (e.g. an RTX 3090).
  • Application design, compiler-architecture and chip design go hand-in-handā€¦ if one is not optimized for the other then you wonā€™t get peak performanceā€¦ meaning the M1 is competing with more mature compiler optimizations.
  • The M1ā€™s big strength is memory throughput and Appleā€™s marketing are going to highlight those types of applications (e.g. Adobe Premiere)ā€¦ this benchmark tests computational throughput and the M1 is indeed only good-to-mediocre in that department.

Plenty more factors, but I hope I gave you enough to highlight that its not as 1 dimensional as the marketing would suggest.

Good luck.

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Thanks Zeroskilz, Yes certainly compared to GPUs like the RTX 3090 its not as good but i was surprised on the benchmarks that it was lower than the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. Iā€™m trying to judge it purely on its blender capability so I suppose the benchmarks make sense in that situation.

Thanks very much for your response

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M1 Ultra can be comparable to RTX 3090 but only for rasterisation and metal / unified memory optimised apps and not for raytracing. So M1 Max/Ultra probably will be very fast e.g. for Eevee Metal but it will never be able to compete with the RTX 3090 in Cycles, even in Metal optimised version. RTX 3090 is about 40 Tflops GPU and M1 Ultra about 20 Tflops. RTX 3090 has RT cores which makes raytracing a lot faster. But hey, we are talking about 100W integrated GPU from Apple vs 500W power sucker from Nvidia.

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Not sure if that is a standard message that would come for any
Mac Software Download when browsing from your iPad.

Is that message rendered by Apple via Safari or part of the Vendorā€™s
website code for its mobile version (?)

My inspiration of macOS on iPad comes more from this MaxTech Video :

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Hi blendest, Yes indeed. the thing i am shocked by is not the GPU comparison but the CPUs


the AMD Ryzen 9 3950 beats the M1 Ultra according to the benchmarks. With all i had heard about the Ultra i was expecting it to be much higher on the list

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It looks s definitely not a 3090 in speed.
It will get better how much is the question and it will never reach the 3090 in rendering I think.

That said the 3.3 alpha got a decent speed improvement in Cycles (about 10% compared to 3.1.2). Another 30% are in the works but no clue if we will see that in 3.3

The ultra seems quite nice for simulations from what I have seen in videos of blender and hudini.

One more thing, Cycles rendering is quite ā€œimpressiveā€ on my 14 Core considering it only uses about 8 Watts average (even with 3.3).

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Also keep in mind that the M1 has a GPU built in, e.g. the M1 Pro has a GPU which is equivalent to an AMD Radeon Pro 580.

Check the METAL benchmarks for comparison:

As mentioned by other users, the other consideration is power consumption, and the M1 does seem to do very well in that categoryā€¦ but for the cost you save in electricity youā€™ll need to ask if itā€™s worth the initial investment.

Good luck with your investigation.

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I will leave this here for you or anyone else who might find it interesting.
Mac OS 12.4, Blender 3.3 alpha, this is on 32 GPU cores, and Cycles GPU only.
It finished in 158 sec but considering the GPU at only average Ā± 16 Watt this is not bad.

Not sure you can find how much other cards use but when I see this most are 80 Watts on idle for the Complete PC :man_shrugging:

image

I could now say do you expect a 50 ps car to be faster than a 250 ps :wink:

Now it will be interesting to see how the game changes once Blender is fully optimized for Metal and when or if the M2 or 3 get RT cores.

a found one

So do I expect 16 W (ok I thing the 64 Ultra was like 30ish W) to beat something that is probably 220 W average no.

Now if you go by Blender Open Data 3080 gets 4892 and the Ultra 1041, so 4,7 times slower.
However 220 W / 4,7 = 46,8 W and the 64 core Ultra uses 30W I think or less I found the old screenshot from a youtube video of the 64 Core.

Now I do not expect a 50 PS car to beat a 250 PS one.
It will be interesting to see how it changes once Blender is fully Metal optimized and the M2 perhaps gets RT cores.

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Very impressive.

But when you need to get renders ready by the deadline, the savings in electricity probably wonā€™t comfort you.

For 3D rendering in Blender, isnā€™t the M1 Max about the same league as a GTX 1660 (around 130 watts peak, 300 dollars price) ?

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To me, the power per watt has significant importance for working mobile.
but it should be logical that a mobile laptop isnā€™t a render station.

And the lack of fan noise with the mac mini is just incredible

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As I just use blender as a hobby it does not matter to me personally.
Sometime I do some still images at work but there it does not matter much either.

Oh and if you do it professionally does it not make more sense to render in the cloud or build a PC with multiple GPUs for rendering?

And while it makes sense for mobile machines I wish Apple would have pushed the Studio further but perhaps they could not as it is a ā€œmobileā€ chip.

We will see what they do to the Mac Pro hopefully soon.

Somewhat annoying that they killed eGPUs that would have been an interesting test.

I will at with the current state of blender I think it is fine for ā€œdevelopmentā€ but not final renders if you need to go fast.

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Iā€™d say the Mac Mini would be a great computer for beginners. Like all the M1s, itā€™s not going to blow anyone away when it comes to rendering, but youā€™d be hard pressed to find a computer that can model, sculpt, and run simulations as well in the PC space for the same price.

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and Formfactor :wink:

Find me a PC in the size of a mini that does well ?

Perhaps with an AMD APU ?

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Here are a handful of other tests to get a bit of a larger view:

At the end of the day itā€™s really a more layered conversation. The effective bottom line is ā€“ how important is working in MacOS to you? For some of us that is the base determining factor.

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The 5900x could probably be a good equivalent. The problem is, I canā€™t think of a single company that provides prebuilt machines in a size similar to the Mini.

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I would dispute this. Compilers are optimized for chips, but the ARM ISA has been around for a long time and compilers have been optimized for it for years. The M1 isnā€™t competing with these. In fact, the M1 gets stellar performance for CPU heavy workloads.

Most people on this forum are concerned with GPU performance, not CPU. Many applications arenā€™t optimized for Metal. And we are seeing the first port of Cycles to Metal where the optimization has yet to be done.

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With integrated GPU yeah.

There are some like this
https://m.fr.aliexpress.com/item/1005001986322247.html?gatewayAdapt=gloPc2fraMsite

https://www.newegg.com/asus-pn50-business-desktops-workstations/p/1VK-001S-00CG6

But not Many it seems.

Nit sure wither how well those would work compared to a Mini for Blender.

I am not sure if anyone ever compared those AMD ā€œSOCā€ chips versus a Mini.

Edit: I guess so, no Blender however.

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