Hi Mi7chy,
There is a common theme to this post (and other posts that you have made) when the M1 Pro/Max were announced.
I tried to help you at the time during the launch of the M1 Pro/Max my post got lost in the sea of responses that you previously received that you didn’t get around to / forgot to respond to me so I’ll ask again here.
Blender:
Would you mind sharing some samples of your professional/hobbyist 3d work that is dependent on Blender and perhaps share with us regarding how flexible your workflow is?
I ask for a number of reasons…. there are some ’small’ details omitted from your original post suggesting that you may/may not be aware that blender on M1 may not be an ideal platform for you…
1. Apple only started to fund development of a Metal Apple Silicon port in October 2021. This is a very recent thing relatively speaking, even against the life span of the M1 chip itself. It’s a very very early days optimization build. An expectation for performance parity even at this stage is IMHO quite unrealistic especially given how different the architecture is between RTX and M1 at a rendering level (immediate rendering vs tile based, dedicated ray trace light ray intersection hardware VS no dedicated hardware etc…).
2. Based on the release notes for blender 3.1 and comments from Brecht Van Lommel, the cycles metal backend still has a ways to go in terms of bug fixes and performance optimizations. I.e. Blender 3.1 is somewhat of a performance baseline but already showing more than 3X improvement over the initial M1 CPU only rendering. Will it ever close the gap with rtx dedicated ray trace hardware - unlikely in my opinion on current generation silicon, not until IMG CXT ray tracing IP makes it’s way into future M1/M2/Mx apple silicon chips. Similarly I don’t see x86 Intel/Amd and Nvidia RTX catching up on the video side of things on a Red Raw 8k footage handling, h.265, pro-res export until dedicated hardware is provided.
3. Many of the 3d benchmarks used to convey the superiority of x86 in Blender are actually evidencing the NVidia proprietary CUDA or Optix code paths.
If you could share some samples of your professional (or even better) your hobbyist work the community here may be able to help you find a faster, better optimized alternative for your needs that is available today VS blender
Stockfish:
I‘d sincerely never heard of this chess engine before the forum around here. Clearly this is also very important to your workflow. I’ve never seen any of the mainstream review sites utilize it as a metric for general mainstream compute performance in the same way that H.265 export, ‘can it run crysis’, etc.. are utilized.
Nevertheless, whether mainstream review sites use it or not is really irrelevant if your workflow is heavily depended on this chess engine and stock fish will be used to determine your purchasing decisions.
From what I have seen and comments online, I cannot help you here. Stockfish looks to be heavily dependent on handtuned x86 SIMD. I can see from this thread that there have been huge performance gains already since the original complaints from Leifi and yourself :
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...-performance-on-m1-by-up-to-80.2326552/page-6
Given the very niche nature of such an engine however, I think that you would be better served staying with x86 or at the very least owning both x86 and Apple silicon and use both for the software where each can show their legs.
General commentary in the interests of assisting you:
I have observed a common theme to these threads (quite repetitive) around here especially when there are many many many many other more mainstream utilities applications that we could be discussing that are
actually used in a production capacity by professionals in the target demographic for a MBP or Mac Studio.
I’m getting an impression that you are very committed to finding a solution/justification for the purchase of an M1 for your specific use cases and keep finding it very difficult to justify the cost/performance/benefit over your AMD/Nvidia laptop as it stands immediately today. That is cool - different platforms suit different use cases. I really don’t think the Apple platform is for you. Personally I have an Intel Xeon workstation with Quadro graphics and an M1 max in the home office. I use each for tasks where they are both best suited. The majority of the time (from a performance perspective) I’m on the Mac but I do still have a need to spend time on the Xeon/Quadro for certain niche use cases where the time savings more than justify the cost of having both.
However if you really are interested in staying on the Mac OS ecosystem, then I think you really need to:
1. get involved over at blender and stockfish (if you have the coding competencies) and contribute to a Mac OS optimized build.
This is a nice introduction to ray trace acceleration on metal
https://developer.apple.com/documen...ceshaders/metal_for_accelerating_ray_tracing/
2. Could you make use of any native Use Mac OS M1 optimized apps where it leaves alderlake/Ryzen + NVidis in the dust e.g. video editing 8k h265 content in FCP / Resolve, Red Raw footage timeline handling, music production in Logic Logic, Affinity Photo for photo editing/graphic design, Compilation speed e.g. use x86 where it excels - gaming, stock fish, blender. The last two are two of my personal big drivers for utilizing M1 over x86.
3. Consider a different workflow (different renderer to blender cycles if that is an option for you) - hence the ask to see samples of your work?
If this still is not helpful to you… it might be best to take a break from the Apple Silicon forum because I think your points have been made, heard and debated ad-nauseum by the community with increasing regularity.
This could be perceived by some as gaslighting however giving the benefit of the doubt that actually this is not intended as a gaslighting post, then maybe check in again on the forum downstream in 6 months to a year and see if the state of play has changed on stockfish and blender?
At this juncture based on what you have shared with us here, I don’t think that Apple Silicon and the software ecosystem is for you… and possibly also not this forum, but that is ultimately for you to decide (or a mod
).
Best Regards and stay healthy and happy.
Tom.
