3D Rendering on Apple Silicon, CPU&GPU

[jmho]

I have it hooked up to a Pro Display XDR and its performance astounds me on a daily basis.

This is a good analogy for what I'm saying.

You don't need a Pro Display XDR to do art, but if someone started yelling at you that 4k is all you need and you could do everything even professional work on a 4k screen, and absolutely nothing that most 3D artists do requires a Pro Display XDR!!! - uh, yes, that's all 100% correct, but I have a 6k display and it's nicer to use so I'll use that, thanks.

To be clear I'm 100% not saying that professionals can't use an M1 Max with Blender, they absolutely can. I'm just saying it's a minority (3D Professionals who use Blender) of a minority (3D Pros who use Macs) of a minority (3D Pros who use laptops).

 

[iPadified]

My main point, is in my real-world usage, my M1 MAX GPU runs about the same as my AMD 5500 did. This is of course my workload. If I were basing my expectations off of artificial benchmarks like 3Dmark and GFX bench (for example my GeekBench comparison https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/compare/1007762?baseline=3912042) I should expect the M1 MAX to be almost 50% faster, and I simply don't see it.

Don't get me wrong, I am very happy with my M1 MAX so far, but I do not think it is ready for any sort of 3D Rendering. For that, I'll stick with my 3080 equipped desktop . Once Blender is out of alpha/beta, I may give that a try, but I still expect my desktop to be an order of magnitude faster

Overall, I think benchmarks under Rosetta on software where we have no clue about the state of optimisation is, is a poor measure of M1/Pro/Max capabilities. Even if Blender get native support for cycles in 3.1, Cycles has been written (I think) from start for CUDA. I do not believe it is possible to squeeze in many years of optimisations in a couple of month and expect to be on par.

My expections are low: we get Metal support in the 3D industry!!! Looking back on the last decades(s), that is significant progress.

 

[jmho]

Sorry if my post seems aggressive to you, it was not my intention. The reason why I asked to see some of your works is because many people here are doing bold claims about what is good and what is bad for 3D without actually working on 3D stuff other than for hobby. Don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly fine to be an hobbyist (I think most 3D artist including me started like that) but claiming some machine isn't good for some tasks without actually having use it for real work is just silly.
Comparing your desktop to a laptop is pointless, MBP are laptop and you should compare price performance with similar systems. Also the price is not that important, many 3D artists I know can easily get 3/500$ a day, that means in about a week you can afford a MBP.
Also claiming that you don’t know personally any professional artist using Mac doesn’t mean that much.. I do know personally many professional who do use Macs, other use Windows, other Linux, again you should not take your personal experience like if the whole 3D world is not using Macs, personal experience may vary.
There’s nothing wrong in posting works here or elsewhere when needed, again you are making the mistake to think that everybody works for some employers and therefore can not show their stuff. Well, many people are self employed and can show their professional and personal works on their websites, social media, etc, actually that’s how many of them find new clients. From time to time I’ve posted some of my works here so if you are interested just look in my post history, the latest thing I’ve posted is a small video on page 12 of this topic, recorded on an M1 pro with 16core GPU (the machine is not mine and I not personally interested in one since I do not need a portable system).

You're in a completely different field to me, and tbh you need far more CPU / GPU power than I do. I'm not interested in arch-vis and mostly just do character sculpting as a hobby.

You're right about anecdotal evidence being worthless, but I still think the burden of proof is on you to prove that there are a large number of 3D artists who want to work on a MacBook Pro.

Also you're not using Blender, and as you say you are not interested in a portable system (presumably because while you don't NEED the extra power of a desktop, you appreciate it). I could sell my desktop PC today and be fine with my M1 Max, but I appreciate the extra power. Waiting 3x longer for a render or losing all your work to a crash is still frustrating even if you're a hobbyist and it isn't costing you money.

That said, with my 3D developer hat (which is my proper "professional" hat) on I probably need more horsepower than most artists, which is probably the main reason I'm so invested in Apple coming out with something that can crush both my desktop PC and my M1 Max.

 

[jujoje]

My desktop PC was cheaper than my M1 Max, and is faster and less buggy, so why would I want to use my M1 Max for 3D?

Out of idle curiosity, what are you finding significantly more buggy? I've only been noodling around on a m1 MBA but find it pretty good for the apps I've tried (3D Coat, Houdini, Blender). TBH I find that, due to complexity, most 3D apps are a little buggy, particularly if mulitplatform. Often run into a bug, get grumpy and blame Mac OS and the find the exact same bug on Linux or Windows. Each platform has it's own flavour of bugginess.

Apple Silicon systems do not have any OpenGL drivers, they implement OpenGL as a compatibility library on top of Metal (plus some undocumented extensions for implementing things that Metal does not officially expose). It is also my experience that OpenGL games run much better on ARM Macs than they ever did with native OpenGL drivers.

The viewport responsiveness is significantly better on my MacBook compared to my iMac Pro in Houdini and a lot of the GL bugs are gone. Which is slightly infuriating given what I paid for the iMac.

that's the problem with this topic, here almost nobody seems to do serious 3D stuff in real life, just a bunch of people more interested in benchmarks or hypothetical features of future softwares rather than use what it works now. That tells me that many here are mostly hobbyist.

Personally usually end up using studio hardware for work (which falls under nda and is just a faff to share), with my iMac for personal rnd and testing, which doesn't really lend itself to final frame renders. Always cool to see people post their work though.

More generally I think people are looking towards the future and at benchmarks as Apples support for 3D has been lacklustre and while they'd like to use a Mac for work the onus is on Apple to make the argument that this time their actually going to deliver (it doesn't make them hobbyists though).

 

[jmho]

Out of idle curiosity, what are you finding significantly more buggy? I've only been noodling around on a m1 MBA but find it pretty good for the apps I've tried (3D Coat, Houdini, Blender). TBH I find that, due to complexity, most 3D apps are a little buggy, particularly if mulitplatform. Often run into a bug, get grumpy and blame Mac OS and the find the exact same bug on Linux or Windows. Each platform has it's own flavour of bugginess.

Hehe, you may have a point there.

The main issues I've found with Blender are the regular crashing with Metal Cycles, which is to be expected because it's an alpha build. But even with the release version of Blender I've found that EEVEE crashes consistently with complex scenes - particularly if you use the screen space effects like depth of field. Scenes also can look slightly different when using EEVEE on Mac vs PC which is not very reassuring.

Also there are lots of minor annoyances like certain things and plug-ins expecting to have a keyboard with a numpad and a mouse with a wheel. Then for some reason when I connect my Logitech keyboard and mouse to my M1 Max is tends to work for an hour before I need to re-connect the receivers because it's stopped working. Not to mention the fact that the MBP doesn't have USB-A so I need two dongles. Minor frustration but it adds up.

Then there are weird things like Blender not supporting certain keys. The key next to 1 on a Mac is "§", not tilde like Windows. For some reason you are unable to remap all of the tilde functionality to § - blender just cannot see this key.

Also a few pages back somebody posted a complex production Laboratory test scene, which I couldn't load on mac because there is a bug in the macOS UDIM loading code.

Also there is some kind of weird bug with Blender on macOS where the app will be running great - I go and do something else, and when I come back everything is running at 5 fps and the only solution is to reboot the machine and reopen the scene and suddenly it's back at 60fps. It looks like some kind of memory leak.

Outside of Blender:

I've found ZBrush runs nicely but occasionally just has these massive long pauses that aren't there on Windows, presumably caused by Rosetta.
Marvelous Designer is completely unusable and simulations run literally 100x slower than on windows.
Substance Painter is very laggy and slow and I find it hard to paint with a tablet compared to windows where it's nice and responsive (especially at 6k on a Pro Display XDR)
Keyshot doesn't support GPU rendering on macOS - Also fur rendering crashes almost every time on Mac for some reason.
Houdini has a bunch of weird UI bugs on Mac (although Houdini itself runs great)

This is also excluding stuff that doesn't work at all on Mac because it uses CUDA, or for example the new "AI enhanced" material scanning in Substance.

I mean none of this stuff is "show stopping" but it's annoying.

 

[JMacHack]

Blender on Mac is basically exclusively for hobbyists at the moment.

Which is why the thread is about this changing, as blender support improves.

 

[sirio76]

This thread is about every 3D software running on AS not just Blender

 

[LinkRS]

Overall, I think benchmarks under Rosetta on software where we have no clue about the state of optimisation is, is a poor measure of M1/Pro/Max capabilities. Even if Blender get native support for cycles in 3.1, Cycles has been written (I think) from start for CUDA. I do not believe it is possible to squeeze in many years of optimisations in a couple of month and expect to be on par.

My expections are low: we get Metal support in the 3D industry!!! Looking back on the last decades(s), that is significant progress.

I agree that applications under Rosetta probably do not represent the best potential performance of the M1 Max/Pro, but it is (unfortunately) the reality right now. Until vendors update their software to take advantage of the M1 Max/Pro SOC, you will be leaving potential performance on the table. It is also possible for an application to be released as a universal binary, and still not take advantage of the features of M1 Pro/Max, and still leave performance on the table. I think the biggest advantages of the Apple Silicon effort have yet to be seen. It is going to be the synergy between all of the components in the SOC, all working together. Once developers start to embrace the SOC, rather than porting older apps, I imagine we will see great things! Could you imagine, if a 3D rendering program leveraged both the ARM cores AND the GPU cores at the same time? That would potentially be a significant boost to the M1 Max/Pro performance in those workloads. Right now, one of the biggest features of this SOC (very high memory bandwidth) seems to be underutilized. From what I have read, the CPU cores barely scratch it, and even the current GPU cores don't saturate it. We are still waiting for software to catch up

 

[crazy dave]

Just want to say that as someone outside this field, reading all of your guys' posts about 3D modeling and its approaches, CPU vs GPU, different programs, pros and cons, has been most ... illuminating.

But seriously, this thread has been very informative and fun to read!

 

[JMacHack]

This thread is about every 3D software running on AS not just Blender

My bad, you’re correct.

 

[LymeChips]

I’m lurking but I also do 3D for a living (@james_conkle) and hoping to get the next Mac Pro when it’s released and if Octane supports it natively in cinema (sounds probable). Houdini would be nice to have native does anyone know anything about that?

 

[sirio76]

Don't know about the plans for a native version, but even running via Rosetta seems already fast in Houdini:

 

[iPadified]

The MBP 16 inch base model finally arrived and some benchmarks with renders that are related to my scientific work. This involves various transparent structures with a limited number of of light sources (10-ish).

3.1 Alpha Blender

M1 Pro 10/16, 16 Gb RAM
2:52 GPU experimental (metal)
2:53 CPU supported
1:21 CPU+GPU combined experimental (metal)
1:23 CPU+GPU combined supported (metal)
Silent

MBP 2013 i7 2.3 GHz
7:42 CPU supported
Fan full speed

iMac 2020 i7 8core+5700
2:11 CPU supported
2:15 GPU experimental
Fan are running full speed

The M1 Pro CPU seem to be as fast as the GPU on this scene and combining them approximately halves the render time. Not surprised really. CPU wins the performance per core and performance /mm2 chip seem to be very similar. Not sure about performance/W for GPU and CPU respectively.

A laptop chip that is competitive with desktop chips and doing the job silently is in my book impressive.

Happy modelling and rendering everyone!

 

[Boil]

A laptop chip that is competitive with desktop chips and doing the job silently is in my book impressive.

I see (MacBook Pro) what you did there...! ;^p

 

[singhs.apps]

Loaded an old 400 MB Maya scene in the new m1 max mbp and Bam ! The scene opened so fast. Seems the SOC synergy is in effect. Editing such a heavy scene was ok too (even if running in Rosetta mode). Can’t wait for the native version of Maya+Modo.

That said Arnold’s render was awfully slow, never mind the Cinebench scores. My 7980xe is much faster than the scores would have you believe.

 

[vel0city]

Loaded an old 400 MB Maya scene in the new m1 max mbp and Bam ! The scene opened so fast. Seems the SOC synergy is in effect. Editing such a heavy scene was ok too (even if running in Rosetta mode). Can’t wait for the native version of Maya+Modo.

That said Arnold’s render was awfully slow, never mind the Cinebench scores. My 7980xe is much faster than the scores would have you believe.

The reduced loading times in Cinema 4D impress me every day, especially opening large, high-poly scenes that have beachballed or even crashed every Mac I've previously owned. The M1 Max just chews through them and makes editing and general workflow of even massive scenes an absolute pleasure.

This is the key for me. Whilst final render times are not as fast as whatever Nvidia card, the day to day usage and speed of everything else is so seamless and fluid. C4D, Photoshop, Illustrator, Zbrush (even in Rosetta) and FCP just fly on this machine. When the day-to-day experience is this amazing (and silent) I really don't mind throwing my final frames on a farm. Total no brainier for me. And the biggest bonus of all, it's not Windows.

 

[singhs.apps]

And the biggest bonus of all, it's not Windows.

This ??

I tried the renderfarm route, but I test renders so often that it made sense for me to invest in a local powerhouse system, even if it would be windows based. Win10 isn’t bad actually if you give it a well built system with quality components.

The renderfarm option ended up more expensive in the long run (3+ years) for me.
Hence eagerly awaiting the Mac Pro…

 

[vel0city]

@singhs.apps have you seen a timeline for the native version of Arnold? Or any CPU renderers at all? I love Arnold, easily my favorite renderer, be amazing to see how it performs natively on the Max. Corona would be great to see native as well.

 

[singhs.apps]

@singhs.apps have you seen a timeline for the native version of Arnold? Or any CPU renderers at all? I love Arnold, easily my favorite renderer, be amazing to see how it performs natively on the Max. Corona would be great to see native as well.

No idea, but I hope Maya will be available natively on AS by the time the Mac Pro hits (they showed off Maya on the m1 during the AS launch promo but that may have been a Rosetta variety)…but if Maya goes native , Arnold would launch native by that time… Plugins for Houdini/C4D too I guess.
Not sure the GPU render will work at first because every developer hooked their GPU band wagon to the Nvidia/cuda train.

I would be just as excited if Substance painter launches native too by then.

I am liking this SOC approach already. Very promising.

 

[vel0city]

I am liking this SOC approach already. Very promising.

Best thing that could have happened to Apple, I'm convinced of it. I was using C4D and its Sketch and Toon renderer for a futuristic/arch-viz project today, frames that would stall and beachball indefinitely on my other Macs were rendering out with instant visual feedback with the Render Region selected in the viewport. Absolutely zero calculation time, straight to first pixel. Mac completely silent.

This computer encourages me to be more creative because the limits have been lifted, the fear of beachballs, crashes and ramping up fans have all gone. It's liberating to have a machine that responds instantly and produces results so quickly and in beautiful accurate colour on the best screen I've ever used. Apple completely nailed it with this one.

 

[hifimac]

@singhs.apps have you seen a timeline for the native version of Arnold? Or any CPU renderers at all? I love Arnold, easily my favorite renderer, be amazing to see how it performs natively on the Max. Corona would be great to see native as well.

There is a daily build M1 native version of Corona.

https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=34088.0

 

[Xiao_Xi]

Blender is asking for short videos (20s - 30s) comparing rendering performance on Apple machines (Blender 3.0 without metal / Blender 3.1 with Metal).

Images and videos for 3.1 release notes

Hi everyone, We’re finishing the release notes for Blender 3.1 and need a few images and videos. https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/3.1/Cycles Anyone is welcome to help out. Ideas: Short videos (20s - 30s) comparing rendering performance on Apple machines (Blender 3.0...

devtalk.blender.org

 

[jujoje]

Tangentially related to the to the thread but it was cool to see another 3D App pop up on the iPad:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1478451809144479751

Between this, nomad sculpt and procreate the iPads starting to look a bit more compelling for 3D. Wish there was a traditional modelling app, along the lines of Modo or Silo, but you can’t have everything, I suppose…

 

[ed.]

Wish there was a traditional modelling app, along the lines of Modo or Silo, but you can’t have everything, I suppose…

check out Shapr3d. It has a (heavy) mechanical / product design slant (and it’s missing quite a bit of complexity of a traditional 3d modeling desktop app), so it might not be what you need… but I think they nailed the interaction for 3d modeling on the iPad with Apple Pencil. It feels so natural that when the desktop version came out I thought “ugh, who would want to use it with a mouse!”
So I think there is a the possibility that someone builds on that to deliver a more comprehensive modeling app for the iPad.

 

[vel0city]

There is a daily build M1 native version of Corona.

https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=34088.0

Has anyone tried this?

Edit: Initial impressions are positive on their forum: https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=33540.30

That vegetation image posted by user frv looks great. Redshift would really struggle with that kind of realism.

Nice, their 45 day demo works with the M1 build, installed and will report back.