This means itās essential to use all the Cycles render speed-up tricks available when rendering on Mac, like Denoiser, Noise Threshold (adaptive sampling), Fast GI approximation, the works.
Yeah, or improve their own GPUs and Metal efficiency, to compete with Optix.
Same here. At the moment I really hope that Apple will have improved the GPU / Metal area when the next generation Apple Silicon is released. I donāt need my Mac to be as fast as the latest NVIDIA card, but if you look at the speed comparisons @Tiwaz has posted (see quote above), that just sucks for Blenderheads wanting to use Cycles on Mac.
Wondering how much speedier Octane X performs on Mac though.
What do you expect? The GPU from Apple is simply weak in terms of pure compute power, and the lack of support for hardware raytracing hurts. Also, I donāt think anyone knows what the people at OTOY have in mind. Theyāve been bragging about Octane X for a few years now, and the reality is that this renderer doesnāt work.
Of course Apple Silicon can shine when it comes to rasterisation (Eevee Next!!!).
It was without denoiser as I wanted to denoise it manually in Davinchi Resolve.
I thought I had fast GI on but I guess I messed it ip with the crashes I had before going from Win 11 to 10. I was struggling a week trying to render the animation on windows 11 and finally decided to go to 10 which seems fine.
Who knows, I might change it into a remote Linux render machine at some point
Ok it finised 11:14 min on the 32 core instead 14:42 min (with fast GI and scrambling distance). No clue how much it would change on the PC as I am at work
My guess is as it should improve too it will still stay at like 10x faster.
Maybe Mac Pro will be just kind of a unit from 2 stacks of Mac Studio
Maybe they will extend such a Hyper Fiber directly from their M3 SoC arrays
to the Back as an External Port, with a SCSI looking flat cable running
into an extra Case - containing all old school PCI and RAM Slots for
Audio Hardware and CUDA GPUs ā¦
Would be āmodularā and somehow Retro-Pro.
While the $12,000 double Studio Pro burger unit is what you will replace
every 1-2 years to keep your workstation recent.
Or lets say you but an M1 studio if you could connect it with some special link to the M2 studio later and use the combined power of both. Like an NV Link but for studio machines
I met with someone from Apple yesterday, and while they didnāt actually say this, they seemed to heavily imply that there could be a Mac Pro announcement coming in as the āone more thingā at the September event. Take it for what itās worth, and with a huge grain of salt.
I still donāt see Apple Silicon catching up to Nvidia regardless of how many optimizations they make. Itās a bit like having Prius ā itās not going to match a F-1 racer no matter how much they tinker under the hood.
I am also still unsure how expansion would work with out-of-SoC peripherals like PCI cards, RAM and Storage. Apple has been hammering in how beneficial their everything-on-the-same-silicon is, and I just canāt see them scrapping all of that in favor of re-adopting what they had before.
My theory is that they will attempt to introduce a new high-speed internal interface bus that they will praise as being the next best thing, and way faster than PCI/RAM/SATA. Unfortunately I bet this will mean being limited to Apple-branded peripherals. So yeah, a new Mac Pro will be expandable and user-customizable ā but only within the ecosystem of Apple expansion options.
But as Apple ARM currently is, all upgrades in CPU, GPU, RAM, ā¦
just work by duplicating and connecting SoCs.
And as it is only a 2D array, a powerful Mac Pro may end more like
an array of 16 or 32 Mac Minis beside each other.
(like a Gaming Table with alu top instead of RGB and glass top ?)
And still the problem, someone who needs large amounts of memory
will have to buy unwanted CPUs, GPUs and video accelerators.
I think it is unlikely that Apple would any time offer 2 or more SoC choice
options, like M5 Ultra Entertainment with more Video Decoders,
M5 Ultra 3D/CAD/BIM with RTX accelerators, more CPU instead of ā¦
And so I doubt Apple SoCs will get reasonable render accelerators.
A single jack of all trades SoC version where the largest target group will
the most goodies.
I donāt think Appleās goal is to compete with Nvidia or anyone else for that matter. They will continue adding accelerators to make certain tasks faster for their core audience. Raytracing isnāt their core audience. I can see them adding a more generic accelerator that could maybe be used for raytracing acceleration as well, otherwise imo its a waste of silicon space when Apple doesnāt really focus on games or 3DCC very much. Not saying it wonāt happen just seems unlikely.
Reading all this has got me to the conclusion that if you want to do any serious 3D on a Mac, the only real option is the Mac Pro with an AMD card. Not that it would be a bargain, but it would be an actual 3D workstation. Well, you could get an intel Mac Mini with an e-GPU as well.
Youād think that would be odd given the fact that Appleās AR / VR glasses / headset will have to be very strong in real-time 3D, so the 3D tech will be available, and might as well be used in Mac Studio grade desktop hardware, which would be beneficial to AR / VR developers as well.
The rendering phase is just a small small small part of the 3D industry. The serious work is all done before you hit the render button and Macs actually handle parts of the 3D industry better than a lot of Windows machines.
Lighting techs could of course use a better rendered viewport experience but Macs can still handle viewport renders decently enough.
I can tell you there are plenty of 3D artist who are using Macs for all of the serious parts of their 3D workflow and either burn a few more minutes when rendering (maybe take a dump during that render) or send it to their Windows tower in the next room or send to a server farm. The later only really applies to animation projects.
Iāve been a little surprised to find out during zoom calls that the Mac my fellow artist are on during the meeting is also their work machine. The industry is literally changing as we speak and I think the only ones saying āMacs are useless for 3Dā are the Reddit and Facebook trolls. If there wasnāt the demand or desire the owners/developers of the top 3D DCCs wouldnāt be waisting time on AS ports.
Top level employees also probably realize how insignificant the render phase of a project is in the grand scheme.
That is my point.
Does not matter if it is just ignorance, arrogance or different interests.
But somehowApple decided that they will support an open source software like Blender.
Which has some commercial disadvantages ā¦
But Apple will not do so for pure humanity. They will do so if they have any profit.
The only reason I can think of Apple to use that public playing field is just own
3D ambitions - like AR and maybe want to selling Classes.
So they invest in strengthening their 3D capabilities.
So we 3D and Blender users can hope for further Apple help and development
as long as Apple sees a real 3D market. If that changes we may be left alone
easily.
E.g. if Apple Marketing decides that they will not able to competitively compete
with Meta at expected costs, they may call back Michael Jones for developing
video codecs or Emojis faster than we are able to imagine.
So my hope is that still sees a great market in AR to get my 3D content creator
devices availability.
(Although I may not personally want AR intruding into my personal supermarket
walking between the shelfes experience9
You ranged? Unfortunately I have the same information as you do. I donāt follow the Apple stuff much, too expensive for my tastes, and Iām imbedded into Linux far too deep.
Idea. Apple is in the entertainment industry through Apple TV, who is to say that they wonāt go into content creation. Blender offers potentially away in for less money, if they support it heavily. AR, VR, and animation in tv or film could all be done with proper support
Or a Hackintosh which is what I have. But yes, by far I have one of the fastest MacOS based machines for rendering than most other users. I can render fairly complex scenes in UHD with acceptable levels of noise in about a minute per frame or less. For me the 6900XT GPU was a total game-changer in Blender. I would trade my Hackintosh for a Mac Studio tomorrow if I could still access the power of the 6900XT!
Iāve read over at the Octane Discord that the latest free tier version of Octane X works fine inside the custom Blender build on Mac. 