I would recommend cycles to get started off, then either LuxCore or Octane X
Octane seems promising but it doesn’t have a blender plugin for m1 yet, LuxCore works well with the rosetta build. Not sure about Radeon ProRender, I haven’t seen it be used for mac before
Pink, yes. Old mac 2014, Blender 2.91, Catalina
Always love it when people ask highly speculative questions about products that don’t exist.
Here’s the thing – ARM technology is many things, but a competitor to a dedicated high-performance GPU it’s not. So right off the bat that takes out everything on your list except for Cycles CPU. Even if Blender gets up to speed with Metal and Cycles starts taking advantage of GPU co-processing, it won’t match what even an aging 1080ti can do.
Guessing that M1x processors on upcoming iMacs are 16-core CPU machines, then Cycles will be your best option hands down. It is by far not the prettiest or most efficient CPU render engine out there (prettiest would be Arnold, and most efficient would be 3Delight), but it works, it’s incredibly well integrated, and can yield professional results.
Wouldn’t the gpu still render faster than the cpu on that machine, assuming they scale up the igpu as well? (assuming cycles gpu is available)
I don’t think so. Then again I’m no render processing expert. People seem to assume that GPU’s are this amazing, almost magical technology that makes rendering almost instantaneous – but the truth is that in some cases CPU rendering can be considerably faster and without the memory constraints of GPU’s.
In some render tests in Houdini between 3Delight on a 16-thread machine vs. Redshift running on two 1080ti’s, Redshift ended up being only marginally faster than 3Delight. A 16-core/32-thread CPU would have easily beaten it.
I think part of the problem is that users tend to compare a lowly i7 with 4 or 6 cores to a 2080ti and see that effectively the GPU rendering blows the CPU out of the water. What they’re not considering is that they spent $1200 on that 2080ti and about $300 on the CPU.
I’m seeing people blowing thousands of dollars on building a multi-GPU machine, yet very few are considering a 32 or even 64 core Threadripper as an equivalent cost option. There is a reason why the majority of studio VFX houses still rely on traditional CPU rendering like Arnold or V-Ray.
Hahaha. 
Well, I guess we can extrapolate the known M1 systems performance to the M1X-based systems, so we can already speculate reasonably well which renderer will be most suitable, unless the new iMacs turn out to come with radically new specs.
So in conclusion the M1 / Apple Silicon systems, and thus probably the new iMacs as well, perform best on the CPU level, meaning Cycles will do just fine?
I’m also wondering: as Octane X and RPR are fully Metal-compliant, don’t they fully utilize the Apple Silicon GPU power as well?
yes the GPU spins up when I run Octane on the M1.
the issue is that for octane and luxcore to run on m1 they need to be recompiled for apple silicon. Atm cycles would be the best solution but time will tell about the alternatives.
Thanks. I know that Luxcore for ARM Macs is in the making currently. The developer is present at the Luxcore Discord channel.
I think so far I see my GPU cores seldom used on my M1 Mini.
Nevertheless Vectorworks 3D Viewport meanwhile works great.
Bricscad so far not so much.
Pro Render on C4D R21 doesn’t run at all, I think Modo same.
But Vectorworks and Blender users experiences make me very
confident that the M1 experience will get better and better as more
Apps will adapt and even optimize for ASi at one point.
I was always a workstation guy
(PCs and than Mac Pro 2.1 and unfortunately Trash Can Mac Pro
during the poor times)
and was never interested ever in buying low level devices like a Mini
or worse a Macbook AIR. M1 Mini was just out of curiosity and as I
wanted to prticipate the new architecture.
But it looks like it may run more than a year and give enough time
for me until the really interesting products will launch.
Apple said it will convert their whole line up to ASi during the next 2 years.
This includes the Mac Pro !
Vapor Ware or not. Why shouldn’t Apple already have ideas how to offer
1024 GB RAM in anyway, maybe not all on ASi die with a slight speed penalty,
or offer optional GPU core cards, CPU or Raytrace core cards over a high speed
bus in the future.
What your saying is everything in Blender is ran off the GPU, and that’s just not true. Most task in Blender are CPU task and most of them are single core so…
Your statement should read the M1 can’t render as fast as a computer with a high-end GPU. And I would answer by saying, well of course. 
Only in Rendering task. But things like, Baking, Animation, Simulations etc… I can bet the M1 will beat it, cause I’ve already tried it.
Well tbf for the price of my MacBook Pro I could get a Asus g14 with a 2060 and a 4900hs
Off course the m1 has its benefits, and unix is much better for software dev which is what I mainly do, but im pretty sure the cpu and gpu on the g14 would run blender and other cad software much quicker
Well I can get a Mac Mini for $699
Not if it’s relying on non-rendering single core CPU task… it’s not even close. And I can verify this with a similar chip, I have a 4700U that I’m literality typing this out on right now, and I can tell you that for non-rendering task, these mobile Ryzen chip aren’t anywhere close to the M1.
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m1-1804-vs-amd_ryzen_9_4900hs-1285
Not sure why some in 3D industry is having a hard time believing what the entire tech world is saying about the M1… just because Blender isn’t working well with Macs doesn’t mean the reported gains from all the programs (industry or not) that have optimized for Apple’s ARM architecture aren’t being truthful about the spike in significant spike performance.
I’ll stand by what I have said in this entire thread. I purchased an $900 computer that is running circles around anything around, and higher, than that price range while working in Blender. (I don’t really need GPU task minus the viewport)
And I’ll say it again 
I’m not concerned about rendering times, I don’t do final animation renders on my M1; I send them all to an Amazon server. Any lighting adjustments I need to do in the viewport and the M1 is more than capable, at the workload I’m dealing with.
Sculpting and rendering performance would be the most important things for me. Looking at what I’ve read about viewport performance on M1, I guess sculpting will perform nicely.
For rendering I’ll need to keep an eye on the developments in that area for macOS. I’m confident the new iMacs will boost overall performance compared to the current M1 devices.
By the way, does anyone know how ZBrush performs on an Apple Silicon system? As its performance is mainly CPU-based, I’m very curious how it runs, even though it’s via Rosetta 2.
How about native Blender compilation for iPad Pro M1? Is it easy to do?
There are native Affinity Photo and Designer available. Coupled with Blender, this could be a cool modeling, sculpting, grease pencil animation etc. tool.
I can imagine that such an iPad Pro with Thunderbolt dock could be an main work tool for some designers. Crazy.
Don’t count on fast raytracing rendering on M1(x). It would need eGPU (I hope Apple will unlock this soon).
I think the only reasonable option is OctaneX at the moment.
Could you send a link?
No, it’s not easy. To a large degree, it is would be porting Blender to a new operating system. iPadOS is not macOS.
This is the URL of the macOS sub-channel in the Luxcore Discord. Hope it works.
My M1 will not get more powerful in the future hardware wise.
I also think that the next iteration (M1x ?) won’t be targeted to
3D people and Raytracing.
But for the following generations I think it is obvious that Apple
will also offer RT Acceleration cores or any other special cores
that are needed.
I don’t think there will be ever any traditional eGPU solution anymore.