oh your using the older one, I thought you compiled a newer version, nevermind then sorry for the ping.
Turns out that a 32-thread CPU is faster than a 4-performance core/4-economy core one ā go figure!
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I am not sure what went wrong.
I also thought it rendered faster but did not find any Classroom numbers
in this thread anymore.
Usually you have some Hardware Selection in Blender Settings.
These donāt appear in my M1 Mini, no matter if standard Intel or M1 build.
And Classroom defaults to Cycles GPU Rendering.
AFAIK that makes about 750% CPU (out of 800 ?) and up to 57% GPU
usage in Activity Monitor.
AFAIR I also tried CPU and saw only up to 5% GPU usage that way.
You can switch but the Dropdown lookes grayed out though and I donāt
think it was any faster.
EDIT :
Looks like 6 core Trash Can with 292 is even slower.
About 20 Minutes for a F12 Render.
I also donāt see Hardware options in Settings>System.
No worries. Stefan mentioned that the official version is right around the corner.
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Oh, official around the corner ā¦
But I am so proud now that I compiled my first Blender myself.
I feel like a real developer now ā¦ nearly.
But still donāt really get the CPU render time differences between
16 core Ryzen and 4+4 core M1.
In Cinebench R23, both native, Ryzen is only 2,93 times faster ā¦
Still happy that my lowest spec device M1 Mini is a little bit faster
anywhere compared to the 6 core Trash Can I replaced.
It may be that youāre trying to compare a benchmark that is optimized for an ARM M1 chip where there is an legit full running official ARM version of C4D, against a incomplete ported branch for the ARM version of Blender.
If you go to developer.blender.org and look at the task that are still needed to finish the ARM version of Blender it will read like a grocery list. Some of those task are to get cycles running on the M1. Iām surprised Cycles even works on an M1 right now.
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Yeah obviously - hence also my last line stating that the M1 is just the entry level CPU.
Performance improvement and scalability with more cores will be interesting to see in the upcoming designs and the time it takes Apple to get the CPU into the work station grade performance level.
Seems to me that for entry level and mid range CPUs the M1 is pretty much a solid competitor aleady.
But I have a Mac.
I thought Macs are always better.
2 Likes
There seems to be still a lot of work to to catch up for years
of neglacting Mac. Neglecting for valid reasons though.
To make Cycles and Blender for Mac competitive again.
I mean that M1 16 GB Mini is already faster and more capable
than my 6core 24 GB Trash Can with 2 D700 6GB VRAM
in almost any circumstances.
And Cinebench R20 was already very optimized for my Trash Can.
3950X was only 4.2 times faster.
When running M1 with CB R23, but in Rosetta emulation mode,
3950X is also only 4.4 times faster.
M1 being more than 10 times slower in Classroom is far from
being impressive.
Are there any other suitable, relevant demo scenes,
maybe using Eevee, that make more sense to compare machines ?
BTW
I find it also interesting that Cycles is faster on that 3950X CPU than on
a RX6800 GPU ā¦
eeVee M1 ? hahahaha
I thought so too. Until I started using Blender and I did some research and I learned the truth.
there is a lot that can be said about macOS - while windows10 caught up a lot.
for hardware ? PC can always give you more bang for the buck thats simply a fact and with kicking away CUDA Apple also put themselves into the corner.
If Metal API can be a serious alternative time will tell.
When RTX cards are more affordable I will swap out the GTX 1070Ti or get a gaming PC anyway for the rendering task.
But I would say that Macs as a hardware are on a good track again to gain market.
Comes down to what you need a PC for.
For some of my graphic applications macOS beats windows in 2D acceleration like Affiniti Photo and the overall ease of use of windows still lacks.
well the truth is that it really depends on what you want to do and what environment you are in.
I can say for a fact that the majority of hardware issues my PC laptop students have while Apples track record also took a serious beating in recent time.
Who ever thought that Macs were going to be better for CAD work? For development sure, the unix nature of macOS makes it much easier to develop compared to windows, but windows has always had the upper hand on cad. Mainly better OpenCL/OpenGL performance, as well as Nvidia gpuās.
Macs arenāt always better, just like luxury cars arenāt always better. They might be better in some areas, but worse in others.
That m1 Mac is a low TDP laptop chip, with effectively 6 cores (4 performance and 4 efficiency), what did you expect? for it to fry a 16 core 32 thread desktop beast, hell no. Off course its going to be slower
On top of that its being emulated, and the native version you have doesnāt have sse2neon and the other optimizations that greatly improve performance on the native m1 Macs.
In terms of the results you got with cpu vs gpu, this site says that the gpu should almost be twice as fast as the cpu: https://techgage.com/article/blender-2-90-best-cpus-gpus-for-rendering-viewport/
Make sure to set the tile size for 256x256 for the gpu cycles benchmark as higher tile sizes usually perform better on gpuās than cpus
Lastly, Eevee should use the gpu of the m1 chip, and should be somewhat native, so I would give it a shot. Of course from what Iāve heard, the m1 chip performs the same as around a 1050ti or a 1660, so its going to get smoked either way by the 6800
Hooooh, Sorry,
I didnāt want to add an Irony Smiley because it looked
so obvious for me.
No, I am aware that my M1 Mac Mini is a very low specced low
power machine. The weakest level of machine that Appleās offers.
Nevertheless it has exceeded my expectations and I love it.
But these Blender Classroom Tests are so sub par to any other
Tests in any other comparable Software.
I am aware that (Appleās) OpenCL support and so Cycles Support
for Mac went away soon after Blender 28x.
But so far I thought Eevee with OpenGL still was running reasonably
on Macs - and so should with M1 Macs via Rosetta 2 (?)
In my seldom trials I didnāt notice anything negative with Eevee.
EEVEE does quite well on my M1 Mac Book Air based on my initial impressions. This is running under Rosetta.
Waiting for 2.92 to be released on Wednesday to keep running more tests. Itād be great to get an ARM build of the official 2.92 release.
EEVEE renders about 1 frame about every 15-28 seconds at 1080p, 64 cycles depending on how complex the scene is, which is pretty good. My friend with a 2070 can render it at about 4-6 seconds/frame for comparison, on the same scene
My bad, English isnāt my native language so its quite hard for me to interpret sarcasm over text lol, sorry about that post then. OpenGL is fine on Macs, but usually from what Ive heard windows usually has either newer OpenGL drivers, and also allows 3rd party support for cards.
DirectX is also pretty well adopted within cad applications, as well as Optix and cuda, compared to the metal api which isnāt used much. I believe a 3rd party company was working on support but not sure where that ended up
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I couldnāt careless about render speeds for my type of workš which is animation. The amount of time I spend on animations and simulations are probably 30 fold what I spend on renderingā¦ probably even like 50 fold.
So far with the different machines Iāve tried: 2020 Dell laptop (8 core ryzen 7), 2017 iMac (maxed out specs), Dell desktop intel i7 Nividia 1080.
The M1 is by far the fastest with playback in the viewport, and able to handle multiple characters on screen at the same time all while keeping the FPS well over 30 while inside the working setās environment. 60fps is easily obtainable with a single character. This is using Daz characters with 100ās of shape keys that tend to be extremely heavy for Blender.
Simulation baking is also twice as fast as either comps Iāve used. 
So for me the M1 is literally the fastest machine for animations inside of Blender. I literally have the proper machine for the task Iām doing. 
I render on servers so faster rendering is one of those things I would enjoy but not a priority.
3 Likes
Me too.
I saw all those disappointed students on Vectorworks forums with their 13" MBPs
with problems when you have to say that, no your integrated graphics is not within
the min specs to run such a CAD.
And now you can run such demanding Apps beautifully even on Apples lowest
specced machines for $800-2000.
That is great.
And I see lots of Bricscad and especially many Blender users still running quite
outdated and low spec machines. For very valid reasons. Like many FreeCAD
users in Afrika or southern America doing great really stuff with limited equipment.
So I think that Apple Silicon will finally be an interesting platform for Blender again.
(I donāt het why Apple hasnāt already sent 5-10 M1 Minis to Ton in Amsterdam,
maybe to not disappoint some proprietary players)
Yes, I expect that the coming, more interesting Apple Silicon Machines will be
really expensive again. Maybe not as ridiculously overpriced as the 2019
Mac Pro, which was just a slab in the face of freelancers and 3D artists.
I think you did some mistake benchmarking the 3950X:
My 3900X takes 4ā 55" to render the classroom scene.