Arnold was originally created by Solid Angle for exclusive use by big studios like ILM and Sony Imageworks before it was commercially available, like it was forged in the fires of production. Redshift is great and can't wait to see where it goes now that Maxon owns it, but like all GPU-first renderers it started as more of a small studio / hobbyist tool. As it gets used more it'll probably get closer to the stability of Arnold.
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Arnold was originally created by Solid Angle for exclusive use by big studios like ILM and Sony Imageworks before it was commercially available, like it was forged in the fires of production. Redshift is great and can't wait to see where it goes now that Maxon owns it, but like all GPU-first renderers it started as more of a small studio / hobbyist tool. As it gets used more it'll probably get closer to the stability of Arnold.
Following on from what @awkward_eagle posted, this is a great video that explains why Framestore chose Arnold for rendering the movie Gravity:
If you're working on heavy, demanding scenes with a *lot* of geometry, Redshift and Octane will eventually hold you back and just flat-out fail to render. GPU renderers have a serious bottleneck when transferring your scene and textures to the render. Eventually they will choke and fail, but Arnold will just keep on chewing through as much data as you can throw at it. So whilst Redshift is initially faster and impressive, in the long run Arnold will always win the race. And I *love* Redshift. Octane, I love its look but only just about tolerate its instability and unpredictability.
With regard to Arnold's IPR, something that you might be noticing that's slowing things down is the default setting of "auto convert textures to .tx" in Arnold Render>Settings. You should absolutely convert to .tx for final render, but for lookdev feel free to disable this.
Also, in your Arnold >Sampling settings, you can turn to 0 all the samples that you don't need. So if you're not using SSS, Volumes or any materials that need Transmission values (glass, water etc) you can dial these down to zero.
If you're working on heavy, demanding scenes with a *lot* of geometry, Redshift and Octane will eventually hold you back and just flat-out fail to render. GPU renderers have a serious bottleneck when transferring your scene and textures to the render. Eventually they will choke and fail, but Arnold will just keep on chewing through as much data as you can throw at it. So whilst Redshift is initially faster and impressive, in the long run Arnold will always win the race. And I *love* Redshift. Octane, I love its look but only just about tolerate its instability and unpredictability.
With regard to Arnold's IPR, something that you might be noticing that's slowing things down is the default setting of "auto convert textures to .tx" in Arnold Render>Settings. You should absolutely convert to .tx for final render, but for lookdev feel free to disable this.
Also, in your Arnold >Sampling settings, you can turn to 0 all the samples that you don't need. So if you're not using SSS, Volumes or any materials that need Transmission values (glass, water etc) you can dial these down to zero.
Spotted on CG Talk's C4D forum.
Future versions of Cinema 4D will require the AVX instruction set and support for Metal on Mac systems."
A brand new Mac Pro is finally here, and as we announced with Apple at WWDC we're working hard to take advantage of the incredible power it offers. We're dedicated to make certain Cinema 4D performs great on not just the new Mac, but as many Mac systems as possible. In order to achieve that, we've been hard at work porting Cinema 4D's viewport to Metal. It's a necessary step, because Apple has announced that they're deprecating OpenGL in macOS. This step also provides us a much more powerful framework for future development.
The only downside is that this means some older Macs and macOS versions will no longer be supported. To run future releases of Cinema 4D on Mac, you’ll need at least a supported Mac system with a processor from the GPU 1_v3 range and macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 installed. You can check the Metal compatibility in the macOS System Information, Graphics tab.
We want you to have the best experience possible running Cinema 4D, and to ensure that we'd recommend updating to macOS Catalina 10.15.x. There are several enhancements to Metal in the latest macOS which will improve the performance and interaction with the viewport in future versions."
Future versions of Cinema 4D will require the AVX instruction set and support for Metal on Mac systems."
A brand new Mac Pro is finally here, and as we announced with Apple at WWDC we're working hard to take advantage of the incredible power it offers. We're dedicated to make certain Cinema 4D performs great on not just the new Mac, but as many Mac systems as possible. In order to achieve that, we've been hard at work porting Cinema 4D's viewport to Metal. It's a necessary step, because Apple has announced that they're deprecating OpenGL in macOS. This step also provides us a much more powerful framework for future development.
The only downside is that this means some older Macs and macOS versions will no longer be supported. To run future releases of Cinema 4D on Mac, you’ll need at least a supported Mac system with a processor from the GPU 1_v3 range and macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 installed. You can check the Metal compatibility in the macOS System Information, Graphics tab.
We want you to have the best experience possible running Cinema 4D, and to ensure that we'd recommend updating to macOS Catalina 10.15.x. There are several enhancements to Metal in the latest macOS which will improve the performance and interaction with the viewport in future versions."
Yes, will be incompatible. Processors EOL'd by Intel, machines "officially" are not compatible with Catalina (through Apple), and this is the eventual result. It really is time to move/transition MP5,1 and previous to legacy operations.
See this report for ProTools users:
AVX And How This Issue Spells The End For Older Mac Pro Cheese-Graters | Production Expert
If you own or rely heavily on a Mac Pro cheese-grater in your studio then this issue may affect you in the near future as it’s down to something called AVX support.
www.pro-tools-expert.com
Can't wait to see the improved viewport, that is one area of C4D that desperately needed improving, it holds back the entire app. Would also love to see multithreaded mograph tools including dynamics/simulations/particles all getting a boost too. I've lost count of the amount of times I've abandoned using dynamics because of the horrible performance. That along with Redshift on Metal would be an extremely compelling upgrade.
I was just watching Quixel's stream of the new Mixer 2020 features (amazing, bye bye Substance) and noticed this flash up for a second at the end of the stream when they were saying stay tuned for more news on Friday:
Quixel's Mixer and Bridge already run on the Mac, I use and love both, so this might be nothing, but maybe some Metal/Mac specific features are about to get revealed.
Quixel's Mixer and Bridge already run on the Mac, I use and love both, so this might be nothing, but maybe some Metal/Mac specific features are about to get revealed.
Really curious if Maxon will back up their "The Mac Pro is the best platform for C4D" statement. Obviously they are committing to macOS by porting the Open GL stuff to Metal. Will the PC version stay on Open GL and how will it compare to Metal? They were doing C4D demos in Germany on a Mac Pro, and it doesn't even run Red Shift yet, so I think that says something. I'm really trying to resist pulling the trigger on a Threadripper build and holding tight, but those benchmarks better come soon.
Someone asked again about the Redshift Metal port today, the devs responded with "When we start getting closer to release, we’ll make a “Dev Announcements” thread with up-to-date info. So we recommend checking that one from time to time."
Not holding my breath, especially for a production ready release. I can easily see myself running my 5,1 into 2021.
With regard to a Threadripper build, there's another thread on the RS forum which seems to indicate that RS much prefers high single core performance, someone is getting much better results on an i7 than a 12 core 2920X ryzen.
Man, I would kill for an Apple tower with i9 and Nvidia support. I still feel like there is no viable option for my next Mac without making massive compromises.
Tweet from OTOY - “Octane X on this #MacPro - vs. the BOXX PC tested by @Verge below - could end up being faster on the MacPro (as measured in standard OctaneBench 4 test). Subject to change & based on some VERY early testing we have done internally. That’s with RTX off of course!“
I wonder if this is Metal vs CUDA optimization or just the Vega II’s?
I wonder if this is Metal vs CUDA optimization or just the Vega II’s?
Man, Twitter is just soooo annoying. Why in 2020 do people think the character limit is cool? Because I felt like I was trying to interpret hieroglyphics just to find a link to a review. But I digress.
The crux of the review to me was two-fold: First, and foremost, Adobe's apps still just suck. They try to put that on Adobe needing to optimize for the Mac Pro, and excuse Adobe because it's so new but that's giving Adobe a huge pass. High-end hardware has been around for years, and Adobe has done little to *nothing* to take advantage of it. IMO, the subscription model promised more continuous investment by Adobe because of continuous revenue, but instead led to them just sitting back and taking payments without any need to invest in anything, because as a consumer you're trapped. Apple has no responsibility for how absolutely terribly their apps run, because that's not just a Mac/Mac Pro issue. It's an Adobe issue.
Second, it's a pro machine, and designed for heavy workloads. A bunch of the folks they gave it to do pretty light levels of work, and surprise, surprise they didn't see much benefit. The one quote that made me literally laugh out loud? "I was working off a server via VPN, so it’s possible that was slowing things down." Ummm, yes!
On their benchmark side...hard to really assess what was going on there. The Xeon is not an ideal processor for some of those types of test/activities. The bulk of the tests are Adobe Premiere related, which we know is an issue--and interestingly enough there's not a compelling advantage to either machine in those results--some swing one way, some the other. More an Adobe issue again, no matter what hardware you buy. The Cinebench score is not surprising, that's an area that the Ryzen is known to do well and there's no sense rehashing the limitations of that as a useful benchmark for anything besides Cinebench. It does seem to address your question that there is a question on whether Apple/AMD will be able to get better performance with the Vega II's with better drivers, or whether they just don't have the power to match the Nvidia cards; the Vega II is based on an older architecture.
I laughed so hard when I heard this. It was 1am and my wife was sleeping, I kinda woke her up.
BTW just yesterday I was working remotely on RDP and the Mac Pro was slow as hell. What a POS hardware. ?
Computer performance is super easy to understand if you know what component does what, and you leave emotions out of it.
If you have a bench like Cinebench that scales almost perfectly and utilises all cores (both in benchmark and real rendering, btw), the Mac Pro will do great. 12 cores? Good. 16, 24 or 28? Even better. And you get increased performance (more or less linear) with each new tier. Even 28 cores makes sense in some environments.
OK, so what if you have a 32 or 64 core CPU? More of the same. Even better still. It should be ZERO surprise that a 32 or 64 core CPU outclasses a 16 core CPU in this scenario. Easy to understand.
Take an app like DaVinci Resolve. It typically relies on CPU for realtime decode of raw and long GOP compressed video formats and GPU for the actual video signal chain, including some GPU accelerated Resolve and OFX effects. Adding a second GPU might double playback fps. A third will boost another 60-70%. Pretty good.
Since you will have to go through the video chain no matter what, a dual GPU config is always good for Resolve. Especially if you do some actual grading with secondaries, qualifiers or tools like noise reduction.
Only shooting ProRes? 8 cores and an Afterburner card and you're good to go.
No ProRes? 16 cores is a good start and probably sweet spot for high resolution footage.
NOTHING will help if your software is 8 years behind the cycle. The usual suspects on YouTube show comparisons between FCPX, Resolve and Premiere Pro where Premiere might turn in a result of 28 seconds in a test where the other apps only need 4-6 seconds. If that isn't a warning/indication, I don't know what is.
And I bet you could drag vector images around in Affinity Designer or even Pixelmator Pro all day without blurring or stuttering.
For a lot of the tasks in the Verge video, people are already using the sweet spot machine: a 2019 iMac. A modern iMac will be snappy in most if not all graphics/photo related tasks.
The Verge video misses a huge opportunity to explain why they get the results they get. I assume someone involved in it should know exactly why. They do touch upon it, but it's too much shoulder shrugging for my taste.
If you have a bench like Cinebench that scales almost perfectly and utilises all cores (both in benchmark and real rendering, btw), the Mac Pro will do great. 12 cores? Good. 16, 24 or 28? Even better. And you get increased performance (more or less linear) with each new tier. Even 28 cores makes sense in some environments.
OK, so what if you have a 32 or 64 core CPU? More of the same. Even better still. It should be ZERO surprise that a 32 or 64 core CPU outclasses a 16 core CPU in this scenario. Easy to understand.
Take an app like DaVinci Resolve. It typically relies on CPU for realtime decode of raw and long GOP compressed video formats and GPU for the actual video signal chain, including some GPU accelerated Resolve and OFX effects. Adding a second GPU might double playback fps. A third will boost another 60-70%. Pretty good.
Since you will have to go through the video chain no matter what, a dual GPU config is always good for Resolve. Especially if you do some actual grading with secondaries, qualifiers or tools like noise reduction.
Only shooting ProRes? 8 cores and an Afterburner card and you're good to go.
No ProRes? 16 cores is a good start and probably sweet spot for high resolution footage.
NOTHING will help if your software is 8 years behind the cycle. The usual suspects on YouTube show comparisons between FCPX, Resolve and Premiere Pro where Premiere might turn in a result of 28 seconds in a test where the other apps only need 4-6 seconds. If that isn't a warning/indication, I don't know what is.
And I bet you could drag vector images around in Affinity Designer or even Pixelmator Pro all day without blurring or stuttering.
For a lot of the tasks in the Verge video, people are already using the sweet spot machine: a 2019 iMac. A modern iMac will be snappy in most if not all graphics/photo related tasks.
The Verge video misses a huge opportunity to explain why they get the results they get. I assume someone involved in it should know exactly why. They do touch upon it, but it's too much shoulder shrugging for my taste.
I was already taking The Verge review with a grain of salt. I was mostly surprised OTOY said Octane X is running faster on a Mac Pro with Vega II’s than the BOXX system with dual 2080ti’s (*without RTX). I hope this means we’ll see some decent performance in GPU rendering on macOS when they finally ship.
The Redshift devs closed the thread about the Metal version, with a "it will be ready when its ready" statement:
"When we have more news on Metal, we’ll be making an announcement in “Dev Announcements”. We’re working hard to make it happen."
Previously they posted this:
"I’m afraid there’s not ETA yet. We want to iron out all known issues and performance bottlenecks before releasing. Otherwise you’ll get something that’s unstable or slow. Would such a release make you happy?
There’s simply no good way to know exactly when all this work will be “done”. It could be anywhere between a few weeks and a few months from now. We hope it’s the former, of course, but such is the nature of this project where we can’t really predict accurately."
They took some heat over that with posters saying that OTOY are releasing preview builds of Octane X, so why not Redshift? The mods deleted anything to do with Octane and locked the thread. Their house, their rules I guess. But I came away from that feeling not very optimistic or hopeful about seeing anything anytime soon.
Glad I didn't buy a new Mac Pro for this at least. My trusty 5,1 and GTX1080ti is going to be my workhouse for the near future and beyond.
"When we have more news on Metal, we’ll be making an announcement in “Dev Announcements”. We’re working hard to make it happen."
Previously they posted this:
"I’m afraid there’s not ETA yet. We want to iron out all known issues and performance bottlenecks before releasing. Otherwise you’ll get something that’s unstable or slow. Would such a release make you happy?
There’s simply no good way to know exactly when all this work will be “done”. It could be anywhere between a few weeks and a few months from now. We hope it’s the former, of course, but such is the nature of this project where we can’t really predict accurately."
They took some heat over that with posters saying that OTOY are releasing preview builds of Octane X, so why not Redshift? The mods deleted anything to do with Octane and locked the thread. Their house, their rules I guess. But I came away from that feeling not very optimistic or hopeful about seeing anything anytime soon.
Glad I didn't buy a new Mac Pro for this at least. My trusty 5,1 and GTX1080ti is going to be my workhouse for the near future and beyond.
the main problem is that apple can't accept to simply support an established technology like cuda.
this is some strange war against nvidia which is completely useless.
with this they just drive away a lot of users.
it simple does not make sense (for redshift and octane)
to invest that energy in supporting metal for just a hand full of mac pro users.
Yeah totally agree. Nothing would make me happier than Nvidia support on the Mac, it's frustrating and completely anti-consumer what Apple are enforcing on us. I'm beyond sick of the ifs and whens surrounding Metal. Bored to death of it.
Definitely seems like there is a bit more enthusiasm from OTOY on the project. James seems pretty stoked to have it up and running and can't wait to share it with users. This wait would be easier if there was going to be huge performance gains in Metal over CUDA. Right now sounds like we'll be lucky if we get close to similar performance WITHOUT RTX. Really hope AMD can bring similar success to GPUs as they are having with CPUs and overtake Nvidia. If that happens, there will be some advantage to doing 3D work on the Mac platform, but right now it's just a frustrating mess.
@hifimac :
still those render companies have to maintain two code bases, one for cuda and one for metal.
and even if there is an advantage to work with macs, they are costly and the mass wont use them.
how many professional viz people using GPU renderers do work with a mac pro 2019?
there would have to change a lot until this makes sense from a financial point of view for otoy or redshift.
now they are pushed and supported by apple for publicity reasons, but we'll see what happens if that wears off.
still those render companies have to maintain two code bases, one for cuda and one for metal.
and even if there is an advantage to work with macs, they are costly and the mass wont use them.
how many professional viz people using GPU renderers do work with a mac pro 2019?
there would have to change a lot until this makes sense from a financial point of view for otoy or redshift.
now they are pushed and supported by apple for publicity reasons, but we'll see what happens if that wears off.
Anybody can share some experiences with Multi GPU performance in Unreal Engine on the new Mac Pro? Might be interesting for virtual production. I'm seeing decent performance with my VEGA II, but since they recently implemented multi GPu at least on paper, does anyone know if it has any meaningful effect?
Of course it still leaves the problem of lacking VR controller and headset support on OSX
Of course it still leaves the problem of lacking VR controller and headset support on OSX
Now that things are the way they are, we should AT LEAST have some nice Threadripper options with the new Mac Pro...
I'm all for paying a bit more for a legit Mac Pro, but when you can assemble a sub $5K Hackintosh with a 32 core Threadripper that is almost twice as fast(!) in Cinebench R20 and 28% faster in Geekbench5 as Apple's 28 core Intel for $14K... well, something has got to give.
My Mac Pro is the best computer I've own (and the best experience), but when I look at what I need/want for Resolve and Blender going forward, I'm not sure it makes financial sense to stay with Apple for my workstation. Sad times.
Perhaps a few years in the grey zone, and then re-enter when the 2019 Mac Pro is readily available in the used market.
Quite honestly the price isn't what bothers me most about this machine, I would've bought one at launch if Octane and Redshift ran on it. I'm actually boring myself thinking and moaning about it all the time. It just feels like Apple are so far behind in what has become a crucial aspect of visuals and design. 3D and GPU rendering is not niche or a dark art, plenty of hobbyists and enthusiasts are creating staggeringly great work on gaming laptops with C4D and Octane just for fun and insta likes, yet here were are discussing Apple's flagship pro machine and it cannot deliver the features that are readily available on a modest gaming PC. It's not just pathetic, it's offensive and goes against everything that Apple used to stand for, that is enabling creativity and providing artists with the tools to create their visions.
Sorry for the rant. Lockdown blues. Back to my 5,1 30" ACD and Redshift.
Sorry for the rant. Lockdown blues. Back to my 5,1 30" ACD and Redshift.
I’ve been keeping pretty positive about my Mac Pro myself, but lately it’s turnt more and more into a disappointment. I’ve basically maxed it out for 3D and design work, but because of the severe lack of Metal optimized software I ended up only browsing the web. And this Pro Display with watercolor-like image?! What a joke for the price! If I had the option to return both, I’d probably be long onto it.
I'm still glad I got the Pro, because in the absence of Octane (I've given up on Redshift), at least I have lot of CPU cores to render with. But I have to say that Apple has been a disappointment yet again. Pro support in the shape of new drivers and improvements to Metal are long overdue; the new W5700 MPX still hasn't been released; and macOS Catalina is still misbehaving. Throw in the permanently exhorbitant level of pricing and, well, this will probably be my last Mac. With the general level of PC performance, the lack of Nvidia support, plus things like U-Render for C4D probably never coming to Mac, I've never felt so far from the cutting edge when it comes to CG.