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3D Rendering on Apple Silicon, CPU&GPU
- Thread starter vel0city
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Steam Survey shows that less than a half percent (0.47%) owns a Geforce RTX 3090 as of September 2022. Which is honestly more than I expected.
I will be getting the 4090 but no games touch that PC - it’s purely for rendering.
Oh no question, the numbers are still slanted heavily towards so called legacy cards.
Given the price point, 4090s (and before that, 3090s) were clearly for a niche group of hobbyists. This is why Apple has opportunities. They're not competing against the 4090s, but the masses who need something competent.
I am also wondering how many 4090 will actually be produced. The size of the chip is absolutely bonkers and rivals the largest server-class CPUs. Another question is whether this GPU will actually be able to maintain the advertised clock rate. I have a suspicion that the actual FP32 throughout in sustained use will be closer to 60TFLOPs and not 82TFLOPs as advertised.
Are you going for a founders card, or a AIB model?
As long as it is properly cooled it will hold boost clocks all day long.
Not at 450W I bet 😁
Besides, 1TBs RAM bandwidth is not much at all for 16K compute units. Nvidia did massively increase the cache size, so we’ll see. Definitely looking forward to benchmarks!
The nice thing is that nVidia is using the USD format for their Omniverse tool, and Apple has been heavily pushing USD too and you can already preview USD files directly in macOS, and Apple have a bunch of USD supporting tools like Reality Composer (although it's not even close to being as good as nVidia's Omniverse stuff)
As skeptical as I am of the "metaverse" it's really nice that everyone seems to be actually pushing for a single open standard instead of pushing their own proprietary one.
I wish apple would add to their pro sw lineup a renderer like blender in terms of capability. It fits in the creative professional line that has $ like pro video and audio.
-d
Apple could use Blender's renderer. Why would they need to develop another renderer? What features is Cycles missing?
not sure I understand the point. Apple doesn't have to make pages either, whats wrong with word.
Why should Apple create a new renderer while supporting Cycles? Unlike Word, Cycles is open source, so Apple can improve it as much as it wants.
Steam survey is incomplete since people opt out. GTX1060 being the top card is proof how incomplete it is. I haven't owned that GPU for ages and it wasn't even memorable. Perhaps Steam should rethink their survey to get a more complete picture. Instead of opting in once for eternity which is a turn off for most people they should do an annual one-time opt-in poll. Then, you'll see the desirables like 3060ti, 3080, 6800xt, etc. higher on the list.
there are open source audio tools, why make logic x. Again, not sure what you mean. there are professional renderers, why not one from apple. That way they can show us their way, fully making use of their architecture from the ground up.
Pretty much the same on this; think the idea of the metaverse is a pretty poor one, and see it going much the way of VR; very cool for some niche uses but can't see it expanding beyond that. The adoption of USD has been pretty great at standardising thing and increasing interoperability. Plus USDz for AR is pretty neat. I'd hope that Apple will release some authoring tools closer to omniverse if they expect AR to go anywhere - Reality Composer is a bit of a toy, but has a lot of potential (hopefully this is what Brad Peebler is working on
).The area where I could see Apple using Cycles is with Preview / Quicklook for USD files which would be really nice (although still puzzled by how they implemented USD into Preview in the first place). This would require Cycles to ingest USD nicely and Blender's USD support is somewhat hit and miss still - not sure how tied together the two are. The other option would be to base it off moon ray, which would be awesome.
Building a new 'Apple Renderer' sounds like a bit of a waste of resources; it's relatively trivial to build a basic path tracer, but supporting all the edge cases and geometry types is a bit of a time sink. Could see them building something that would support polygons and PBR materials for previewing AR assets - would cover a majority of use cases.
If you have not already checked it out, this is a very good place to get unbiased rendering benchmarks to understand the current situation on the Mac. https://opendata.blender.org/benchm...AL&blender_version=3.3.0&group_by=device_name
As can be seen, the M1 Ultra scales horribly (about 1300 points) and can not touch even a single 6800 card. Current MacPro might be stuffed with 1-4 GPUs so best case scenario would be a dual 6800 duo that would give about 5500 points . And if the Ultra is compared to nvidia stuff, it is worse than a single rtx 3050 card.
Can Apple solve this problem?
As can be seen, the M1 Ultra scales horribly (about 1300 points) and can not touch even a single 6800 card. Current MacPro might be stuffed with 1-4 GPUs so best case scenario would be a dual 6800 duo that would give about 5500 points . And if the Ultra is compared to nvidia stuff, it is worse than a single rtx 3050 card.
Can Apple solve this problem?
I am sure they will, although I do wonder why the scaling is so bad. If I remember correctly there were other benchmarks (redshift etc.) that showed much better performance?
Anyway, Apple Silicon is currently not a good choice for Blender. This might change in future.
Fairly certain it will be a lot better once we get the Metal Viewport and Eevee, plus they are still tuning Cycles too.
M1 ultra improved 300 points going from 3.1 to 3.3 which is already a bit more optimized.
I guess by 3.5 most things will be implemented. Was hoping 3.4 but I don’t think it will be ready in time.
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For Redshift3D, scaling is actually worse. My m1 max does the bench in 10 min flat. A full Ultra about 7m 30s. To be honest, I (and others) hoped that the Ultra would have scaled better than linear in RS due to increased bandwidth etc so it was quite sad to see the numbers trickle in. Octane and Cycles seems to be best in class right now and giving about the same perf as a single 6800 (not XT!) for the Ultra. I guess we have been through this before in this long thread but extrapolating from rumours etc gives that we need something more than just an evolution of the Apple silicon series in the GPU department. Heck, all other gpu, even Intels Arc, have RT cores now. Macs have gone from having GPUS (from AMD) with ballpark specs of the windows competition (or maybe 50% at worst?) to being at least 2 full generations behind. The CPU is really nice so it is sad that it cannot be matched with an equally impressive GPU. Let's assume we get RT cores on the Max and Ultra chips and they solve the scaling to be linear or at least 90%. Best case improvement for the M2 Max would then be 40% increase due to 4x10 cores with slightly higher clocks giving us about the same perf as a current 48 GPU core m1 ultra. Doubling that (requires good scaling!) for the m2 ultra we are at about 2500 point in the linked blender bench. Or about the same perf as as nvidia 3060. If Apple can add RT cores for a 2x perf boost and some "extra fixes and optimisations " the Mac might be relevant again considering power draw. Let's hope.
Only Nvidia has proper hardware RT, Intel and AMD just slapped-on some intersection acceleration. Making RT GPU-fiendly is much more tricky than that. Apple likes to do things properly, so let's hope that the delays means that they are working on a comprehensive solution.
For rendering workloads, sure, but in many other areas the Apple GPU is a huge improvement. For rasterisation they are just as good as dGPUs running at 2-3 times higher power, the GPU compute they are okish, and for photo/video cutting edge.
Out of curiousity I run the Blender benchmark (v3.3.0) under Ventura and got roughly 833 points, that's in line with the results on https://opendata.blender.org/
What's striking is that the GPU power consumption never went over 20 watts! That's on a GPU fully capable of sustaining 40 watts. This shows that there is a lot of stalling and overall bad compute utilisation. The GPU clock was maxed out though.
What's striking is that the GPU power consumption never went over 20 watts! That's on a GPU fully capable of sustaining 40 watts. This shows that there is a lot of stalling and overall bad compute utilisation. The GPU clock was maxed out though.
Key part of what makes a dGPU fast is high bandwidth GDDR or HBM. DDR can't keep up. For $4K starting Apple should equip Mac Studio with GDDR or HBM instead of DDR.