Moved from a fully maxed out 5,1 Mac Pro with an Nvdia 1080ti GPU to a 16GB/2TB Mac Mini.
Overall the Mini is noticeably and enjoyably faster for everything apart from final rendering - so that includes Photoshop, working in C4D, Zbrush, Final Cut Pro. I've kept my 5,1 in my studio for final rendering/team rendering.
Thought I'd post my findings with C4D and third party renderers so far using C4D R23. R23 because that's the last version I can run on my 5,1 and I'm using Team Rendering so both versions need to be the same. My main work is stills and short loops so be aware I'm not outputting movies. My render settings are usually 4000x4000px and I always utilise AOVs for masks, depth and lighting. My images usually make use of displacement maps, PBR textures, particles, Megascans assets and Substances.
Onto the renderers.
C4DtoA (Arnold) Running in Rosetta. this is a CPU renderer but thought I'd throw it in here. Absolutely usable and workable on the M1 Mini. IPR speed is not far off my 5,1 though that was never what you'd call fast. Using it for lookdev and setting up scenes is absolutely fine. Rendering speed is actually faster than my 5,1 using the same scene and settings. Team rendering works as expected and it's nice to see all those additional buckets helping out.
Octane Running in Rosetta. Exciting to run Octane on a Mac without an Nvidia card, but it crashed so often I can't give much of an opinion on this. A real bummer because I love Octane's look, but even on a basic, basic scene, Octane brings C4D down needing a force quit. This has been my experience of Octane on the 5,1 under CUDA as well. Moving on.
Redshift running natively. Been using it a lot and found it absolutely stable, responsive and reliable. I've created two render settings to flick between, one very low quality for positional/setting up, then a medium quality setting for a better look at how things are looking. This is working out well and I'm getting some proper work done. It's all about optimise, optimise, optimise. Make use of freezing tessellation, turn on IPR undersampling, crank up your Unified Sampling Threshold to a level that's not too noisy and just eyeball it until you have something you can work with.
Final rendering in Redshift is of course slower than using a dedicated GPU. But the M1 Min remains silent and cool and just renders in the background with no impact on the responsiveness of the system, leaving plenty of resources free to work in Photoshop or Zbrush. Full disclosure - I wouldn't rely on this workflow 100% and am using my 5,1 for final rendering in most cases. I've created a workflow using Dropbox and working from a synced folder so that assets are shared across both machines which is working out well so far. Because you need a Redshift license for both machines, I'm just using the Redshift demo on my M1 and my licensed version on the 5,1 which gives me final renders with no watermark.
Looking forward to the Pro machines and will be all over them day one. But for now this is a workable transition (would be even better if we could use an eGPU but so it goes) that will get me through until the Apple Silicon Pro is available.
