Purchasing assistance for heavy 3d, vfx workflows.

[Standard]

Hi everyone,

I would like to ask you all for your opinions on a potential hardware upgrade. I'll try to provide as much information as possible up front to help better understand my workflow.

I am using my workstation for vfx and game art, specifically high quality character modelling, grooming, and surfacing. Maya with Arnold, Houdini, Mudbox, zBrush, Mari, Substance Painter, Marmoset Toolbag 4, and exploring Redshift. Most of the images I use are 8k and 4k for textures, with UDIM counts up to 100. Project files can be large depending on the software, 100mb-500mb Maya scenes, 10gb+ Mudbox/Mari/Zbrush files, 10-20gb for specific textures, etc.

Currently I am using a Windows machine with a Ryzen 3900x 12 core, 64GB RAM and a GTX 1080. My storage is low at 1TB, and I am constantly fighting with this. My ram is nearly always maxed out, and rendering with my CPU is starting to slow down, especially with hair.

Mac OS is my preferred platform, and with the refresh with Apple Silicon, I'd really like to investigate using an Apple machine for my work. I know that software is still being written/ported to AS. zBrush is native now and Houdini is going to release soon with a production build for AS, and hopefully Maya follows suit. If not, I can be fine using Houdini. Substance Suite is already AS ready, and performs quite well, (I have a M2 MacBook Air and played around with Substance Painter--it performs better than my current workstation with VFX assets).

I've been shopping out a new PC build which looks like this:

Risen 7950x 16 core, 128GB ram, 4TB storage, RTX 4090, and everything else, case, psu, etc.

What I want to know is, would a Mac Studio M1 Ultra with Max ram, or a 16" MacBook Pro with Max Ram be suitable for this work? And how would it compare to a custom PC build? I understand there is not a direct comparison with the RTX 4090. I'm not just looking for rendering speed increases, but actual every day use (probably more so), working and building the models/textures/scenes/hair, etc. My understanding with AS being unified, is that transferring and calculating data can be faster than non ARM based chips.

If either of those machines are not recommended, then I would assume it would be best to wait and see what the M2 Ultra brings in form of a new Mac Pro or potentially a refreshed Mac Studio?

Thank you!

edit: I forgot to mention that it has been somewhat hard for me to assess performance with all the latest reviews on Youtube, as most of them are geared towards video editing. At most, they run a benchmark with Blender, which doesn't really provide enough insight.

 

[cupcakes2000]

Hi everyone,

I would like to ask you all for your opinions on a potential hardware upgrade. I'll try to provide as much information as possible up front to help better understand my workflow.

I am using my workstation for vfx and game art, specifically high quality character modelling, grooming, and surfacing. Maya with Arnold, Houdini, Mudbox, zBrush, Mari, Substance Painter, Marmoset Toolbag 4, and exploring Redshift. Most of the images I use are 8k and 4k for textures, with UDIM counts up to 100. Project files can be large depending on the software, 100mb-500mb Maya scenes, 10gb+ Mudbox/Mari/Zbrush files, 10-20gb for specific textures, etc.

Currently I am using a Windows machine with a Ryzen 3900x 12 core, 64GB RAM and a GTX 1080. My storage is low at 1TB, and I am constantly fighting with this. My ram is nearly always maxed out, and rendering with my CPU is starting to slow down, especially with hair.

Mac OS is my preferred platform, and with the refresh with Apple Silicon, I'd really like to investigate using an Apple machine for my work. I know that software is still being written/ported to AS. zBrush is native now and Houdini is going to release soon with a production build for AS, and hopefully Maya follows suit. If not, I can be fine using Houdini. Substance Suite is already AS ready, and performs quite well, (I have a M2 MacBook Air and played around with Substance Painter--it performs better than my current workstation with VFX assets).

I've been shopping out a new PC build which looks like this:

Risen 7950x 16 core, 128GB ram, 4TB storage, RTX 4090, and everything else, case, psu, etc.

What I want to know is, would a Mac Studio M1 Ultra with Max ram, or a 16" MacBook Pro with Max Ram be suitable for this work? And how would it compare to a custom PC build? I understand there is not a direct comparison with the RTX 4090. I'm not just looking for rendering speed increases, but actual every day use (probably more so), working and building the models/textures/scenes/hair, etc. My understanding with AS being unified, is that transferring and calculating data can be faster than non ARM based chips.

If either of those machines are not recommended, then I would assume it would be best to wait and see what the M2 Ultra brings in form of a new Mac Pro or potentially a refreshed Mac Studio?

Thank you!

edit: I forgot to mention that it has been somewhat hard for me to assess performance with all the latest reviews on Youtube, as most of them are geared towards video editing. At most, they run a benchmark with Blender, which doesn't really provide enough insight.

Considering how specific your usages are, I would go down the route of either purchasing one with the intent to return or renting one. That way you can just see for yourself whether it will fit.

 

[rm5]

Yes, I agree with @cupcakes2000 — you should get one, use it for a few days, and if you need to return it because you feel it doesn't fit your needs, you can do that. That makes the most sense to me. You have a very specific workload, so you need to be sure of what you are getting.

Personally, I'd recommend for your use case, an M1 Ultra Mac Studio with 128 GB of RAM. It's gonna be VERY EXPENSIVE, but 128 GB of RAM seems like a requirement for you, given that your programs suck up 64 GB very quickly.

If you don't have that kind of money, go with the PC. The 4090 is gonna be way faster regardless, and the Ryzen CPU is gonna be pretty close, if not faster, than the M1 Ultra.

 

[Homy]

Maybe these videos can be of some assistance:

Houdini in Rosetta

H19 Apple Silicon Tech Preview

 

[Standard]

Considering how specific your usages are, I would go down the route of either purchasing one with the intent to return or renting one. That way you can just see for yourself whether it will fit.

Yes, I agree with @cupcakes2000 — you should get one, use it for a few days, and if you need to return it because you feel it doesn't fit your needs, you can do that. That makes the most sense to me. You have a very specific workload, so you need to be sure of what you are getting.

Personally, I'd recommend for your use case, an M1 Ultra Mac Studio with 128 GB of RAM. It's gonna be VERY EXPENSIVE, but 128 GB of RAM seems like a requirement for you, given that your programs suck up 64 GB very quickly.

If you don't have that kind of money, go with the PC. The 4090 is gonna be way faster regardless, and the Ryzen CPU is gonna be pretty close, if not faster, than the M1 Ultra.

Thanks for the great suggestions. I thought about ordering one to test, and then returning it. A rental never crossed my mind. I’ll need to do a bit of research first to see where I could potentially rent one from.

Yes, in terms of cost the machines are nearly identical, with the custom pc nudging ahead by a little. However, that quickly changes when purchasing warranty on a per part basis.

I understand that there will be a significant difference in GPU power, but it’s nice to know that the M1 Ultra and the Ryzen would be close in performance. Makes me wonder if it would be ideal to wait and see what the M2 Ultra brings.

Maybe these videos can be of some assistance:

Houdini in Rosetta

H19 Apple Silicon Tech Preview

Thank you for sharing these. I am going to try and research on the Autodesk / SideFX and Maxon forums to see if there are any users with a similar workflow to mind. It’s hard to judge off some of those videos as they are in a different area than what I am doing.

If there are any 3D users here, I’d be interested in hearing about your use and performance.

Thanks again.

 

[120FPS]

Hi everyone,

I would like to ask you all for your opinions on a potential hardware upgrade. I'll try to provide as much information as possible up front to help better understand my workflow.

I am using my workstation for vfx and game art, specifically high quality character modelling, grooming, and surfacing. Maya with Arnold, Houdini, Mudbox, zBrush, Mari, Substance Painter, Marmoset Toolbag 4, and exploring Redshift. Most of the images I use are 8k and 4k for textures, with UDIM counts up to 100. Project files can be large depending on the software, 100mb-500mb Maya scenes, 10gb+ Mudbox/Mari/Zbrush files, 10-20gb for specific textures, etc.

Currently I am using a Windows machine with a Ryzen 3900x 12 core, 64GB RAM and a GTX 1080. My storage is low at 1TB, and I am constantly fighting with this. My ram is nearly always maxed out, and rendering with my CPU is starting to slow down, especially with hair.

Mac OS is my preferred platform, and with the refresh with Apple Silicon, I'd really like to investigate using an Apple machine for my work. I know that software is still being written/ported to AS. zBrush is native now and Houdini is going to release soon with a production build for AS, and hopefully Maya follows suit. If not, I can be fine using Houdini. Substance Suite is already AS ready, and performs quite well, (I have a M2 MacBook Air and played around with Substance Painter--it performs better than my current workstation with VFX assets).

I've been shopping out a new PC build which looks like this:

Risen 7950x 16 core, 128GB ram, 4TB storage, RTX 4090, and everything else, case, psu, etc.

What I want to know is, would a Mac Studio M1 Ultra with Max ram, or a 16" MacBook Pro with Max Ram be suitable for this work? And how would it compare to a custom PC build? I understand there is not a direct comparison with the RTX 4090. I'm not just looking for rendering speed increases, but actual every day use (probably more so), working and building the models/textures/scenes/hair, etc. My understanding with AS being unified, is that transferring and calculating data can be faster than non ARM based chips.

If either of those machines are not recommended, then I would assume it would be best to wait and see what the M2 Ultra brings in form of a new Mac Pro or potentially a refreshed Mac Studio?

Thank you!

edit: I forgot to mention that it has been somewhat hard for me to assess performance with all the latest reviews on Youtube, as most of them are geared towards video editing. At most, they run a benchmark with Blender, which doesn't really provide enough insight.

With the PC build (it sounds like you will be building it yourself), you will be able to upgrade it with faster and larger storage (when gen 5.0 drives come out), GPU and CPU (for however long AMD decide to support the AM5 platform). Most motherboards have space for two SSD drives, so you could divide the storage space with two 2TB drives or add another later if going for a 4TB drive.

To echo others, I would find out if you can rent one for testing. I think the GPU on AS would be a letdown compared to a 4090, as most 3D workflows would have CUDA support which is just a standard now.

I also prefer macOS, but (to me at least) it doesn't make sense to pay so much and be stuck with it as it is.

 

[jujoje]

Have 14" M1 Max and Houdini runs pretty great on it.

In general terms:

• CPU wise it's pretty strong; no real complaints.
• It's nearly silent when rendering on the CPU - GPU rendering causes fans to spin up a bit but still infinitely quieter than the iMac Pro it replaced.
• GPU wise, all that memory is awesome; you can do reasonable resolution simulations, albeit slower than Nvidia cards.
• Stability wise finding the AS build of Houdini on MacOS more stable than the Linux version. Largely put this down to Nvidia drivers being flaky. Always found windows the worst of OS's for 3D work.
• Compared to Houdini on Linux, finding the apple silicon build more responsive and ... snappy (M1 Max vs 32core thread ripper + Nvdidia card with 24GB). I'm assuming a lot of this is down to SSD speeds.

And for Houdini specific stuff

• The viewport performance is... ok, but not as good as I'd hoped. Usable, but scenes with a lot of geo and textures perform poorly (less an AS thing than a MacOS and it's ancient OpenGL version).
• The OS and machine is super responsive when rendering, simulating, or just loading heavy geometry.
• FLIP seems pretty well optimised and runs great.
• Vellum is decent - vellum fluids appears slower than expected. Vellum Pressure Constraint uses CUDA and the fallback is pretty slow as is the Vellum Brush.
• Pyro is a mixed bag; last time I checked the solvers still need to be optimised. Theoretically you should be able to do some high res simulations on the openCL minimal solver. Haven't really checked - been using axiom for simulations which runs great. .
• Generally RBD stuff is all good, as is general noodling around in the viewport / network editor. There are still a few nodes that need to be optimised, but haven't run into anything that's particularly annoying.
• Karma CPU runs well; Karma xpu is not supported (other than the embree fallback). Still no word from sidefx as to if/when it will be supported on the GPU.

All said, if I was using it for production I'd be tempted to either wait and see what the M2 Ultra looks although to be honest the PC is probably a safer bet. Also, SideFX hinted at a new viewport coming in H20; would this make the Mac Viewport on par with the PC version, and will it be Metal or Vulkan? There's a fair few unknowns. Finally on the Apple Silicon front, definitely go for the ultra for the extra GPU and CPU cores. Hopefully the M2 will fix the GPU scaling...

For my priorities, as the M1 is currently my on the go machine for noodling away at things, it works great as it's silent can handle mid range work and prototyping with final sims and renders going to the farm. If I was freelancing and rendering final sims/frames locally the PC would probably be better (although I can't really speak to PC specs, as haven't been following them much lately).

 

[ChrisA]

The Mac Studio has 10 GB Ethernet. So the network can be faster than the speed of an SSD.

You are without doubt one of the people thay made the Mac Studio for. Get as much RAM as you can but I'd not go with more then 512GB storage.

What you should consider is a Synology NAS, like perhaps the DS923+ The new 923+ can have 10 GB Ethernet and can hold over 50 TB of data. That is enough to keep multiple revisions of your work. You can also centeralize backups and it will make your data available anyplace, in your office or in the world.

So the Mac (or PC if you go that route) only needs enough storage for the files you are working with at the moment, if even that (10 GB is fast)

Synology is the "Apple" of the NAS world in that you pay a little more but gain quality and ease of use and better software.

 

[dmccloud]

With the PC build (it sounds like you will be building it yourself), you will be able to upgrade it with faster and larger storage (when gen 5.0 drives come out), GPU and CPU (for however long AMD decide to support the AM5 platform). Most motherboards have space for two SSD drives, so you could divide the storage space with two 2TB drives or add another later if going for a 4TB drive.

To echo others, I would find out if you can rent one for testing. I think the GPU on AS would be a letdown compared to a 4090, as most 3D workflows would have CUDA support which is just a standard now.

I also prefer macOS, but (to me at least) it doesn't make sense to pay so much and be stuck with it as it is.

I would clarify that the "two SSD drives" part only applies to the M.2 SSDs. You could connect as many SATA SSDs as you have available ports on the motherboard. For the PC I built last fall, I installed two M.2 SSDs and then two 2TB SATA SSDs and two 8TB Seagate Barracuda HDDs, the latter for storing games. I do have a lot of data on my drives, so having multiple allows me to keep things organized (i.e., all of my music, movies, etc. are on one drive, all media and website production assets are on another, etc.). But that's my use case, and not everyone would benefit from that type of setup.

 

[singhs.apps]

Have you considered the Threadripper pro series ? Or the upcoming Xeon W series from Intel ?

Considering the high density of your assets (therefore more memory)… these two may offer you more benefits than the ryzen platform.

With regards to GPU, the 4090 is a beast, but considering the size of your textures etc, maybe the Nvidia A series pro cards with high vram may be beneficial. Cost can be an issue, but last gen might come in cheaper.

On the other hand, if you can afford to wait, maybe see what Apple comes up with this year ? By which time AMD may release the TR pro 7 series (around Sept ) and you can take a call ?

Storage :
I tend to separate my OS and live projects drives = fastest 2 TB and 4 TB m.2 respectively for the two categories.

 

[dmccloud]

Have you considered the Threadripper pro series ? Or the upcoming Xeon W series from Intel ?

Considering the high density of your assets (therefore more memory)… these two may offer you more benefits than the ryzen platform.

With regards to GPU, the 4090 is a beast, but considering the size of your textures etc, maybe the Nvidia A series pro cards with high vram may be beneficial. Cost can be an issue, but last gen might come in cheaper.

On the other hand, if you can afford to wait, maybe see what Apple comes up with this year ? By which time AMD may release the TR pro 7 series (around Sept ) and you can take a call ?

Storage :
I tend to separate my OS and live projects drives = fastest 2 TB and 4 TB m.2 respectively for the two categories.

Even if the OP went with a RTX series card, they could use the NVIDIA Studio Driver for their specific model instead of the gaming drivers, so there's multiple options available. AMD also has both gaming focused (Adrenalin) and Pro versions of their GPU drivers as well, so either manufacturer's cards should meet their needs.

 

[singhs.apps]

Even if the OP went with a RTX series card, they could use the NVIDIA Studio Driver for their specific model instead of the gaming drivers, so there's multiple options available. AMD also has both gaming focused (Adrenalin) and Pro versions of their GPU drivers as well, so either manufacturer's cards should meet their needs.

Yeah. Studio drivers are good. I just thought trying to get a 48 GB last gen A series Nvidia might help in Mari/painter considering he isn’t going for rendering on the GPU but has hi res textures.
A 32 core Threadripper pro might help in rendering out character tests, no need for GPUs for final renders.