Yes, he perfectly illustrated the painful truth for Mac Studio fans: NVidia cards with Cuda cores by the 1000's are *FAR* superior to even the M1 Ultra. And Ryzen 16 core 32 thread chip also obliterates M1, and for a lot less money.
@@CastaneArias I would leave for other reasons: -Mac is terrible for gaming -way overpriced -Apple Corp is hostile to consumers -M1 cannot run Windows properly
@@CastaneArias When going from Mac to Windows PC, a good rule of thumb is twice the performance, at half the price. And of course the HUGE Windows ecosystem that most Mac people are missing out on.
I think as a part time 3D modeler, macs are a no go for me. However, a tip I can give you all is switching from windows to linux if you don't use the adobe suite. I use Arch BTW (Sorry had to do it) and have noticed roughly a 20-40% improvement in performance for blender specifically and yes renders are faster too in case you're wondering. I think this singular switch is going to keep me from upgrading for an extra generation.
Blender performance on M1/Metal will continue to improve as it's still very early days on the optimization front. This first step is promising though and bodes well for the future... eventually, but anyone with serious 3D ambitions right now should just invest in a PC/Nvidia workstation.
@@ashishpatel350 Why? 3.1 was literally 5x faster in some cases and still there are many core components in Blender not yet optimized for either ARM64 or Metal. This is just the first, preliminary pass and there’s still way more to do before the potential is fully realized.
Excellent review. I am a blender user on PC running Linux Mint and it is faster than on Windows. I consider buying a mac studio, but after seeing your tests I don't see it as convenient. I will continue with PC. Thanks for the video, it's very useful. Greetings from Argentina
Mac Studio is great for Final Cut. For most other professional software apps, Intel/Ryzen + NVidia Geforce is going to *blow* *away* the M1 Ultra, and for much less money too.
This is one of the very few good Apple Silicon 3D performance videos! Hint: Always render preview animations small res and low samples. Or use a renderer that supports checkpoints like Pixar's RenderMan. ;) But yeah, as a professional 3D artist for 20 years also working for the big screen and having tested the M1 Max 32c - i totally agree - modelling/sculpting/texturing/rigging/animation/medium complex simulations will be the same experience as on a mid tier pc workstation. Also the viewport(not rendered) is smooth. But everything that involves rendering - so the whole LookDev part, shading, lighting is just bad on a mac. In reality it is as slow as a consumer pc from 6 years ago. It's basically the same speed as a 1080. Also even a 3090 will need less power for a rendering than the M1 Max. Even if the system power draw is 6x higher, the 3090 is most of the time 7x-8x faster in real world rendering. (ranges from 3,5x to 20x) What the benchmarks dont tell you: The mac is fastest on simple scenes with fewer samples because of the faster scene translation/time to first pixel. But the 3090 is way faster at rendering. And the higher the needed sample count is the further ahead a 3090 will be. Software optimization will not fix this! It is simply the lack of compute power and RT cores. But if you wanna be mobile and work on the go, i would choose a M1 Max macbook over every nvidia studio laptop.
Good review, and not surprised by the conclusion either. I'm still super excited for getting my new Mac Studio but I would never dream of getting it as a 3D workstation. I do plan on doing a bit of 3d on it, but mostly for some game dev and web GL (I'm a web dev by trade) and for that it will do me just fine. Like all things professional, these are tools, and you should really know your tools, and their strengths and weaknesses so you get the right one for a particular job. For me, Macs end up being the right tool for 90% of the stuff I do. The remaining 10% being 3D and some gaming when I have free time (at least I heard such a thing exists).
My $1100 PC, which I bought two years ago, renders a classroom demo in 41 seconds. But Apple's fanboys who bought the $4,000 Mac Studio say they almost caught up with Nvidia in two minutes to render the same demo with the Mac Studio, rationalizing, "Blender is not optimized for the M1 yet." It's really funny. I can't wait to see if they'll still win their minds shouting "more optimization" a few years later.
@@user-oi6ff3lg8d intel and nvidia together never will do an unified architecture. And they should do something with the power consumtion, the laptops take similar watts, than the desktop did years ago.
@@arncht6507Yes, you are right. In other words, Intel and NVIDIA overwhelm Apple with performance, even though they are not integrated architectures. In addition, for most 3D workers, higher performance is more important than less power consumption. Even if you pay $20 more a month for electricity, you can do more in less time.Time is money for professionals.
@@user-oi6ff3lg8d they use 2x more watts because of 5% performance increase. It is not ok. It is the problem, not the “makes sense” power consumption. Simply crazy, you can compare a 10-30w soc to a 250+350w gpu.
Thank you for your testing and reviews. I really appreciate them. You do real work vs simply running benchmarks. The major review channels have been disappointing IMO.
I was really interested to see how the M1 Max in my new 16inch MBP fared for 3D in the real world. The stats aren’t everything as you say, and the question for me is not is it the fastest but is it fast enough. I’ve been quite surprised. I also have access to a 3090 system which in the past would be my only option for rendering in Cycles, I wasn’t really expecting that to change but actually - although it’s not ‘as’ quick as the 3090, I’ve been managing to do Cycles animation renders directly on my MBP including with tough scenarios such as glass (unheard of on previous Macs I’ve owned). The viewport resolves really quickly - enough to do lighting and shading and also to be able to check through for issues prior to rendering. The simple fact is that since I bought the computer I’ve completed a number of commercial 3D projects, and so for my case at least, these computers are sufficient for 3D work. I also found the M1 to be fantastic for Eevee, hardly much difference on most scenes between the 3090 and M1, and in some cases the Mac has rendered faster than PCs with dedicated GPU.
Uso il MBP M1Max per le produzioni video e qualcosa di 3D per i miei progetti. Il Signore del video vuole solo dimostrare che M1 non è in grado di superare certi flussi di lavoro; il suo grande ThreadRipper consuma almeno 500 Watt durante una sessione di rendering contro i 50/60 dell'M1Max. Doveva usare un M1 Ultra per rivaleggiare bene e che per la produzione è più che sufficiente rispetto alla centrale nucleare che possiede. Purtroppo, in questi video, non tengono nemmeno conto di quanto energia consumano le loro macchine e adesso che nVidia ha presentato la 4090 che mette gli alimentatori sotto enorme stress, saranno tutti corsi a comprare nuovi alimentatori a 1,5Kw per non cadere in disgrazia durante una fase di lavoro. Comunque non vedo MAI un video dove mentre un PC esegue il rendering pesante di una scena, lavorare contemporaneamente ad un altro progetto, tipo Photoshop o Illustrator o altra app. MacOsx lo permette, così facevo col mio G4 duale del 2002, sempre e facilmente senza paura di blocchi o schermate blu!
Apple got such a good PR boost for their SoCs by having it be strongest in video / photo editing workflows. Since that's what the majority of reviewers do for work, their perspective obviously made the machines seem way more game changing than they actually are in aggregate across more disciplines. I have a 16" M1 Pro, and do 3D, and I'll still take this over a PC laptop, since I can work for hours on battery without any fan noise, but for desktop stuff, I'll still probably be holding on to my 5800X and 3070 for a good while. Still, Cycles X and further optimization, plus Apple historically making massive strides generationally with their GPU cores, means this gap could narrow sharply in a generation or two. Not to mention it looks like you are gonna be able to run two Mac Studios with less power than just an RTX 4080 alone if the rumors are true...
There was never any real release of 3ds max for Mac. The only way you could run 3ds max on a Mac was via Boot Camp, Parallels or VMWare. This was never a serious option for professional 3d artists that had maximum performance as a priority.
i did mention in the other video and will say so here too.. incase others don’t see it. - Nothing is stopping you from using the mac for everything other than 3d rendering..BUT you can always put a barebones PC with a decent GPU in it. and then network render.. thus having the best of both worlds! - In my case i’m using Cinema 4d+Redshift. This can use Team Render or Deadline. This was all i need to interact with the pc is turn it on run the teamrender client and thats it. Octane should be able to do cross platform rendering in a few versions from now in the 2023.x release eventually.
Keep in mind the Mac in this video is using an M1 Max (same as in my laptop, in fact), not an M1 Ultra. The ultra has twice the CPU cores and would have done correspondingly better. The price would have been twice as much, of course, but I think it was mentioned that the workstation costs three as much as the studio and he's doing that comparison (though to be fair, his gaming PC costs half the Studio, and it does quite well).
Blender's a lot more dependent on GPU power rather than the CPU, and I can guarantee you that a 4000 euro workstation with an RTX 4090 would run circles around the Ultra
No doubt! That's why this video (and a couple other's he has done) are so useful! Not just a benchmark or final-render-showdown, but a better idea of working in the apps. :)
I rendered the Classroom demo file in 1min51s with the Mac Studio. It took me 33 min with the intel mac mini! So it's not the fastest in the world but I'm very happy I migrated to the Studio!
This video excellently demonstrates why render time matters. There are lots of times where the final render has glitches or issues so the fact that you can find those glitches and re-render a few times in the time it takes for Apple to render once matters. I have to wonder how a 5950x or 12900k would perform in terms of the simulation baking compared to an m1.
It is amazing what Apple made.. this thing lacks power ar this moment, but lets appreciate it that it sips power from the wall compared with a pc. I dont see the table turnes soon for Apple, but there can be a lot improved on Blender side to get everything from the ARM CPU
Thank you. This was exactly the test I wanted to see. As I mentioned in your previous video, I was shocked that my M1 Max MacBook Pro ran circles around my 3-year-old 10-core i9 IN SIMULATIONS. Rendering was not even close when running Redshift and my 3090+3080s. So in my own test, I can completely back up your results. This is very disappointing. I Hoped that Apple's investment into the blender foundation would leave the blender to show off some secret sauce that would make Metal Shine... but it looked like all we go was better compatibility with the mac. As I feared, PC hardware and software are way ahead of Apple in this first get M1. And even with the M2 right around the corner, I just don't see Apple being able to make up this much ground against the PC hardware. If anything these results should be seen by Apple that their fight with Nvidia is a liability in the 3d rendering space. Until that performance gap is overcome...we will still be buying PCs.
Curious how the apple development on blender will go. Hope they can get to be more optimized. I mean the machine isn't that old so I guess it has not reached its full potential for blender yet
The M1 simply has no RT cores. But still is too slow in blender. Go to the blender benchmarks and compare equal cards (theoretical 10 tflops): 6600 XT, 1080Ti , 2080, 3060, M1 Max 32c Make sure to uncheck OptiX to have benchmarks without the RT cores involved. You will see that the M1 Max underperforms compared to the other architectures.
Interesting stats, especially the Mac being quite speedy with caching the timeline. I suspect over time the speed will increase as native M1 support in the code increases. Would love you to do the same thing with C4D
Thank you for this. I have been using Mac and PC for 3D development (Maya, Modo, Zbrush, substance...) for over 2 decades. When Apple dropped support for Nvidia, that it was all downhill for 3D art. In 2020 I replaced my heavily upgraded 12 Core 2010 Mac pro w a Ryzen/Nvidia PC as my main 3D dev hardware. I do have 14" 2021 Macbook M1 that I use for non-production work, and it is fine for what it is, aka not a production tool. IMHO using a Mac for professional 2D/3D works is a waste of time and money. These days, apple only cares about is selling iPhones. Sad as I have been using Apple computers since 1995. FU Apple. Good idea including a PC part list. IMHO tho any decent mid-range Laptop such as the Razer will work very just as well for 90% of people but wo software/ hardware trouble shooting.
I really gotta disagree with you. M1 is their first go at putting their own chips in their computers and they're already blowing competition out of the water. The M1 Max fits inside of a MacBook and it almost competes with high end desktops. In a few more years I won't be surprised if the fastest "graphics card" you can get is in some kind of Mac Pro
Excellent video and analysis. I'm watching all this stuff closely, as I hoped the Apple Studio was my long-time dream-machine. But, it is kind of looking like some broken dreams are in my future from Apple. I really hope we find something out in June (WWDC) that counters this (like eGPUs are back!), but we might have to wait for an M2, M3, M4, etc. until we get more realistic GPU performance. The good news, is that for certain tasks, they might perform fairly well. I'm trying to work back into BIM & ArchViz, for which the large amount of video RAM might make the Studio perform well at least in scene creation. But, those viewports and render-times look problematic, and I'm not sure how much software optimization is going to solve some of that. It's probably just brute hardware coming in to play in the nVIdia system. For now, I guess I stick with my i7 mini and eGPU and try to hold out a bit longer (or, buy a lower end Apple Silicon model if I need to get into one sooner). Thanks for all the work!
For audio work the M1 Ultra has been my long-time dream machine and I couldn’t be happier. As a 3D hobbyist I’ve been pleased by the significant performance boost with Blender 3.1, but it’s obvious there is still a long ways to go yet.
@@tronam I looks like my dream-machine, but it just isn't there yet. I fear I'll be waiting for eGPU support (which might never come), or a few more M-iterations until we start getting specialized capabilities for the GPU cores, like ray-tracing. If their plan is to stay 100% Apple, they'll do it, but we might be waiting a few years.
@@cgWerks The problem is that Apple puts a large premium on low power consumption, as most of its devices are thin and / or battery powered. Monster GPU cores, great for 3D rendering, fly in the face of that. They're not going to go to great expense to make something special for a small part of their user base; they'll just let those customers go. Especially as they have no interest in catering to gamers, who would be the other beneficiaries of decent GPUs. Fundamentally, the iPhone is their core product, and everything else is scaled from the latest A-series core. Massive GPUs are too much of a step away from that; the economies of scale just aren't there.
@@axi0matic I somewhat agree, though there is a massive difference between an iPhone and a Studio Ultra. Yes, same core tech, but the customization and scale is also rather incredible. I think the main issue is they need to add some of the special silicon nVidia and AMD GPUs have, especially around RT. They are otherwise starting to get competitive, or even better. That said, I'd like to have the choice (as I do with my Intel Mac, with GPU/eGPU). Having the Apple Silicon GPU (with access to massive RAM) and eGPU ability to access an AMD, for example, would be best of both worlds. But, I kind of doubt they'll do that at this point. Hope I'm wrong.
@@cgWerks The disadvantage with their SoC approach is that if you want lots of GPU, you have to get loads of CPU as well (and vice versa). If the Mac Pro gets 2x Ultras, you’d get a comical amount of CPU cores for only a about an RTX3070’s worth of GPU cores. When some people might want an Ultra’s worth of CPUs with 2x RTX3090 worth of GPU.
thank you for the video, as impressive as those mac are, GPU powers is heavily limiting them. The moment apple hopefully allows us to connect external gpus again, the game will change and I'll probably switch to a mac for work.
My understanding is that while Blender is native for M1 processors, it’s not yet optimized. Other reviewers suggest that most GPU work in Blender has substantial bottlenecks, and the graphics cores actually sit idle for most of the render times. Of course, Apple is working with Blender and a fully optimized version should land in late 2022. So this review is more than fair, but not the final story.
That only really applies to the M1 Ultra and the 32 core M1 Max to a much lesser extent. The 24 core GPU is fully utilized in rendering workloads. I saw no drastic dips in frequency, power draw or utilization.
I read a bunch of images/screengrabs about that on a Max Tech video recently and tried to understand. The problem is (if I understand correctly), it would take some substantial core re-write to address, not just porting and optimization and converting to Metal. It was an issue around how CPUs/GPUs work together to keep each other 'fed' and how dramatically different Apple's new approach is. Apps designed ground-up for Apple's architecture (ie. SoC) should fly, but how many apps will get a complete re-write?
Great stuff here! I'm likely getting the mac mini, but that's mostly because I live in a tiny condo. Right now I have a giant PC and the constant whiring of fans is driving me crazy.
Yeah, that's the other side of the coin. We're in a small condo here too and I have very limited 'desk' space. Having a big PC box isn't idea, space or noise-wise. But, it isn't looking like these machines are quite going to cut it either, depending on one's needs.
@@funnyberries4017 Oh yeah, at final-render time, there are lots of options, especially these days (or, even distributing it to cloud services). I come from Electric Image days, and the quick render times were a key selling point, as well as the distributed rendering engine. There are also a lot of 'old school' techniques to bring render time down. (ex. the falling-knife from the original Mission Impossible was image-mapped, not ray-traced. A big aspect of being a 3D pro in those days was knowing how to cheat effects and save minutes or hours per frame.) So many options these days and so much for me to learn.
@@cgWerks it looks like the mac mini m2 is coming out in june, and it's going to have 2 more gpu cores. Still won't be as fast as the mac studio, but I think for me it'll get the job done
@@funnyberries4017 I think we're going to need some specialized cores/engines before it will compete more across the board. Currently, it seems it will be quite fast at some things, and not so fast at others (GPU-wise). Not sure if we'll see those in the M2, M3, etc.
Thank you for this video as is very scientific and informative about the Mac Studio and running Blender on it. I am a hobby PC builder. I own and use a 2019 4K iMac.
Thanks so much for this review. I have a 24-core M1 Max and only need to make stills in DAZ to create panels in comics. I appreciate you telling us it should be fine for that, but anything animated would take much longer to render. Exactly what I needed to know. 🙂
Wow best video on this subject I’ve seen! Amazing coverage of all aspects I was interested in, like you read my mind! Thank you so much, this expertise couldn’t have come at a better time. I have a deadline coming up to render out a hyper real animation, 3k to invest in a new computer. Was going to buy the Mac studio but after seeing this am thinking windows for faster render times. Even if it was the upgraded M1 Max or ultra, do you still think the 3080 would beat it?
Render speed is clearly an issue. But what about the volume? I assume the two PCs become "vacuum cleaners" during rendering. And how loud will the Mac Studio be?
It’s not the fact it is an integrated gpu, it’s a lack of ray tracing hardware in the gpu and a lack of Blender being able to utilise that - it’s essentially CPU vs GPU rendering
Thank you for this review. Would love to see a review with the new MacBook Pro 16 inch max at 128 core. It’s my understanding you can order one from Apple and return it for any reason.
Hmmm it would be more interesting to just see Blender being used as most people use it, modelling, shading, some animation, how quickly the viewport optimises itself with various lights and Cycles, rather than simulations and renders etc,, I've used Blender for years now and simulations are not my thing and most Blender Pros would be on a PC still, I think the Mac Studios are great for beginners and Intermediate Blender users and once Metal is properly optimised, things can only get better....
Compared to my Mac mini (late 2018 i7, w/external Radeon RX 580 GPU), my Mac Studio M1 Max is a significant jump in viewport and render performance. But it's still significantly less performance than my PC with a RTX 3080.
Does RTX 3080 play a big role in 3D rendering tho? I thought that the most important is how powerful your CPU is when it comes to rendering. Please correct me if Im wrong 🙈 Im just asking and would love to get a clear say on this from anyone that works with more complex 3D animations etc 😊
@@bonndell The GPU is the most important part in my experience as it speeds up the rendering in Cycles over CPU. For example. A model I created takes about ~45 seconds per frame to render by CPU, and this is an i9-9900K. The same model with my RTX 3080 takes ~7 seconds per frame. Rendering is what the GPUs are for, but you would also benefit from a powerful CPU for other tasks, such as cloth sims.
Thanks for the in-depth review. I’m interested in Blender3D mostly for modeling solid objects into USDZ for use in Motion 5 projects. I think the base M1 Max should be able to handle this fairly well.
It'll be interesting to see the direction Apple takes regarding GPU's. Will they continue to integreate GPUs with their CPU's or will they embracer GPU expansion?
Interesting, I would definitely be curious to see the performance of the other pro 3D apps you mentioned (especially on M1 Ultra) as I've heard Blender isn't particularly well-optimized for M1 Max/Ultra yet. Especially if any of those apps do release more optimized versions in the future...
Blender and Cinema 4D are the only two I know of that run natively on Apple silicon as of now. I saw no hardware performance problems with the M1 Max GPU as it ran at full speed and utilization while rendering in Blender. I think the problems are limited to the M1 Ultra and it's architectural limitations.
a "GPU" is a bundle of specific computational hardware that each task uses a different (set of) part of the GPU, and a different proportion of composition (architecture) of course would give different performance scaling in different tasks and not a single number for everything.
This video is specifically focused on 3D rendering which basically all applications use some evolution of the Monte Carlo Path Tracing algorithms. The only significant difference is if the application is able to utilize specialized hardware rendering cores or not to do the calculations.
@@ElevatedSystems "if the application is able to utilize specialized hardware rendering cores or not" and "if the specialized cores are capable of doing the calculations meaningfully faster than the CPU or not"
Hardware accelerated rendering has been "meaningfully" faster than software rendering since the '60s. I don't think it's going to change any time soon.
@@josir1994 Are you talking about accelerating ray tracing on the GPU (versus CPU/software), or are you talking about specific RT functionality on newer GPUs? Compute shaders have been around since ~2006, CUDA was initially released in 2007.
Thank you for this great video! I'm coming from graphic design and illustration but slowly getting more and more into Blender. I'm currently working on a Macbook m1 Max 32 core and it is enough for everything i do at the moment. But i also get tempted to try out more realistic things. So my question is, if i would invest in a desktop pc for heavier workloads in Blender, would i have problems with moving around files betweens mac and pc? Or does a Blender file work on every system, no matter where you created it? (Still a beginner, sorry if it's a stupid question haha) Thanks in advance!
Hi! I'm set on a Mac since I mostly use Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects for simple stuff, and Blender for occasional 3D typography (not huge environments at all). Do you think the Mac Studio is good enough, or would the Mac Mini M2 be better?? Thanks a lot for your reviews!!
Hi CJ, does Blender on the M1 Max play nice with your PC's when it comes to network rendering, can your Nvidia cards be utilized in this way using your PC's as a render farm?
Should I buy the new MacbookPro M3 Max or the Mac Studio M2 Ultra for general use with Blender 3D and Xcode? In some Geekbench tests, I've read that the new M3 achieves similar results to the M2 Ultra. What makes more sense at the moment? Portability doesn't matter, speed and performance are crucial. I'm looking forward to your recommendations. Thank you.
Don’t worry, I think the new M1 Mac Pro will support external GPU. I don’t think Mac Mini is designed for 3D rendering, it’s more for video and photo editing. Wait for the WWDC.
Very helpful video! I have a question: when the m1 max gpu is rendering a blender project in the background under full load, can i work in Photoshop, Capture One or Davinci Resolve simultaneously? Or is it getting laggy? Any experiences in it? Thank you :)
I think the Macs are power limited because they are focusing on “silent” operation instead of performance. The GPU is huge in the Mac, even the M1 Max has a more transistors for the GPU than a 3090, if they allowed it more power it should perform better. Maybe they will do better with the Mac Pro, but I am so sick of the “Mac Tech tubers” pushing for quite operation instead of better performance.
11:35. No, pcs with nvidia did not replace macs in hollywood 3D studios because macs were never an option in hollywood for any serious vfx work. And apparently never will be due to the closed system apple is forcing. Just look at their promotional videos. They brag about rendering massive 3D worlds and yet they show a few young hipster kids, probably social media creators. They will never show 20+ vfx artist with wacom tablets and 3D mouses doing VFX for the next Marvel movie.
@@ElevatedSystems Oh you really need to get your facts straight. Pixar started (as a part of Disney) long before Mac even existed let alone Mac Pro that debuted in 2006 after Apple adopted Intel CPUs. Then Jobs invested in Pixar 1986 about the time Mac II came out. So, again 20 years before Mac Pro. Mac was never ever part of the CGI industry. In the late 80s to the late 90s Silicon Graphics dominated the industry and after that PCs took over. When trashcan Mac Pro came out in 2013 they briefly showed a Pixar texture artist working on trashcan in Foundry Mari texturing an asset. Since the trashcan flopped few years afterwards nobody ever considered macs for CGI and animation work any more. Macs are to closed as a system which by default excludes them from any workflow were GPU and CPU power, expandability and user repairability are a must. As for M1 macs... M1 is out for like year and a half and only a few VFX apps are apple silicon native at this point. Still no Nuke, no Houdini (only beta) no Maya and the ones that are ported are still way slower than on PC with NVidia. There is slim to no chance Apple will make their way into VFX CGI industry and when they get bored they will drop it altogether.
@@doctorkj5640 So I need to get my facts straight? Pixar started as part of LucasArts, not Disney. Steve Jobs didn't just invest he bought Pixar from Lucas. The first 3 to 5 films were created on a mix of Mac and Linux systems before finally selling the Company to Disney in the late '00s.
@@ElevatedSystems For Lucasfilm yes, my typo from the top of my head, you re-typed it correctly from wiki. :-) But for Macs you are utterly wrong. Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems workstations were used because none of the PCs and Macs of that period were powerful enough. They also used NeXT workstations to some extent because they were far more powerful than Mac then (Since Jobs wasn't even in Apple any more and started NeXT) But, again, these were not Macs. By the time Jobs returned to Apple and NeXT died, SGI was the standard. After that Jobs shaped MacOS to be like NeXT but lost interest in that field and steered Apple in some other direction. No VFX and animation studio in Hollywood (or anywhere else) is using Mac for anything other than editing or maybe color grading. Linux is like 60% and Windows 40%. Give or take.
I wonder if the upcoming Mac Pro will have dedicated GPUs dedicated to 3D graphics so it could compete with Nvidia/AMD dedicated GPUs. So they maybe can win back former customers on high end when it comes to 3D graphics.
Well, just as Nvidia put its own physical core for ray tracing for 3D, Apple put its media engine for video editing. I don't think Apple is going to put anything else in for 3D. Apple seems to have taken a firm line on video editing.
@@user-oi6ff3lg8d For the package they have in the computer (M1 for current releases), sure. But I am talking about separate (dedicated) GPU, there they could have other special purpose cores than just media engine, like for ray tracing in 3D.
hello friend! excellent video as always! I would like you to use Sketchup 2022 (optimized for m1) together with the plugin V-Ray 5.02 (optimized for m1)! and render some interior design! it is very important in my purchase decision, because I only use these two softwares! V-Ray is very good at rendering on CPU, so I believe it will perform well! I see many forums and many people with the same question, I believe it would be a good video! thank you very much and congratulations for your content! 👏🏻
This video make me try to redo the water scene with the monkey head replaced with my own head as model. Do you have the monkey scene available for download? Or a tutorial to build it myself. I’m just a very beginner with blender.
What about a production scene that requires 80 GB of VRAM? Tutorial scenes don't really cut it when trying to compare to a production scene. Productions houses routinely render on CPU-only render farms because the RAM usage is so high. Can you do a test on a complex scene that uses over 30 GB of VRAM?
Great video and efforts. I’d appreciate a similar comparison using Cinema 4D as it’s more popular in production. Thanks a lot 👍 You do deserve much more subs!
The problem is the money, with the same money for a "m1 something" i can build a powefull pc that can do Everything (Video AND 3d Rendering), so PC is better deal
Great comparison. I really wonder if this is a software thing though, since in Unity for example the M1s compare quite well to Nvidia in the same project.
Not sure how any software optimisation is going to close such a huge gap. Blender runs natively on M1 and uses the metal API. It has been doing so for almost 6 months. The harsh reality is that M1 isn't going to be the best option for 3D/animation work. This is evidenced by pro 3D/animation studios using only PCs
@@FunFactsAboutTech That is not true, M1 CPU is supported since 6 Months, but Metal / GPU only for 1 Month. I also doubt that it will fully catch up to Nvidia, however I still think there is room for massive improvements.
@@tobi6758 I mean he is comparing it to a 2080 that is from a lot of years ago. Even 3080 is like 2 years old now. So the "real gap" between NVIDIA and Apple Silicon is pretty big. The only reason to buy the Mac Studio is for Adobe Suite and video editing as stated in this video I am afraid.
Great and informative. All your testvideos with the M1 Max. Maybe you can estimate the following question out of your experience. Most of my work is with Blackmagic Fusion My system now: AMD Ryzen 9 3900xt 12 core with 128 GB Ram / Nvidia GTX 2080 TI Do you think the M1 Ultra with 128 GB of Ram will beat this system ? Your opinion on this could help me a lot to decide Thank you very much Holger
Thank you for making a decent Mac 3D video. Everyone else just runs the benchmarks and has no idea how to use blender. You did an amazing job here
Yes, he perfectly illustrated the painful truth for Mac Studio fans: NVidia cards with Cuda cores by the 1000's are *FAR* superior to even the M1 Ultra. And Ryzen 16 core 32 thread chip also obliterates M1, and for a lot less money.
@@DerekDavis213 slowly buying my PC part by Part for this reason. If it weren’t for 3D I wouldn’t leave.
@@CastaneArias I would leave for other reasons:
-Mac is terrible for gaming
-way overpriced
-Apple Corp is hostile to consumers
-M1 cannot run Windows properly
@@DerekDavis213 I’ve actually been very happy with it for all the work I do. The only issue was 3D. But I’m switching over soon and excited
@@CastaneArias When going from Mac to Windows PC, a good rule of thumb is twice the performance, at half the price.
And of course the HUGE Windows ecosystem that most Mac people are missing out on.
I think as a part time 3D modeler, macs are a no go for me. However, a tip I can give you all is switching from windows to linux if you don't use the adobe suite. I use Arch BTW (Sorry had to do it) and have noticed roughly a 20-40% improvement in performance for blender specifically and yes renders are faster too in case you're wondering. I think this singular switch is going to keep me from upgrading for an extra generation.
Blender performance on M1/Metal will continue to improve as it's still very early days on the optimization front. This first step is promising though and bodes well for the future... eventually, but anyone with serious 3D ambitions right now should just invest in a PC/Nvidia workstation.
Doubt it.
@@ashishpatel350 it won't improve? Not a bit?
Improve, yes, match dedicated hardware, I really doubt it. I fully believe the full mac pro tower will have a dedicated gpu option.
@@ashishpatel350 Why? 3.1 was literally 5x faster in some cases and still there are many core components in Blender not yet optimized for either ARM64 or Metal. This is just the first, preliminary pass and there’s still way more to do before the potential is fully realized.
Excellent review. I am a blender user on PC running Linux Mint and it is faster than on Windows. I consider buying a mac studio, but after seeing your tests I don't see it as convenient. I will continue with PC. Thanks for the video, it's very useful. Greetings from Argentina
Mac Studio is great for Final Cut. For most other professional software apps, Intel/Ryzen + NVidia Geforce is going to *blow* *away* the M1 Ultra, and for much less money too.
This is one of the very few good Apple Silicon 3D performance videos!
Hint: Always render preview animations small res and low samples. Or use a renderer that supports checkpoints like Pixar's RenderMan. ;)
But yeah, as a professional 3D artist for 20 years also working for the big screen and having tested the M1 Max 32c - i totally agree - modelling/sculpting/texturing/rigging/animation/medium complex simulations will be the same experience as on a mid tier pc workstation. Also the viewport(not rendered) is smooth. But everything that involves rendering - so the whole LookDev part, shading, lighting is just bad on a mac. In reality it is as slow as a consumer pc from 6 years ago. It's basically the same speed as a 1080. Also even a 3090 will need less power for a rendering than the M1 Max. Even if the system power draw is 6x higher, the 3090 is most of the time 7x-8x faster in real world rendering. (ranges from 3,5x to 20x)
What the benchmarks dont tell you: The mac is fastest on simple scenes with fewer samples because of the faster scene translation/time to first pixel. But the 3090 is way faster at rendering. And the higher the needed sample count is the further ahead a 3090 will be. Software optimization will not fix this! It is simply the lack of compute power and RT cores.
But if you wanna be mobile and work on the go, i would choose a M1 Max macbook over every nvidia studio laptop.
This is a great comment too.
Very many thanks. I won’t be investing into Mac Studio for 3D work, at least not until some miracle optimization takes place.
Really wish this channel was more popular. Unlike the popular TH-camrs, you actually take the time to make these reviews and videos quality.
I always enjoy your balanced and objective reviews and comparisons.
Good review, and not surprised by the conclusion either. I'm still super excited for getting my new Mac Studio but I would never dream of getting it as a 3D workstation. I do plan on doing a bit of 3d on it, but mostly for some game dev and web GL (I'm a web dev by trade) and for that it will do me just fine. Like all things professional, these are tools, and you should really know your tools, and their strengths and weaknesses so you get the right one for a particular job. For me, Macs end up being the right tool for 90% of the stuff I do. The remaining 10% being 3D and some gaming when I have free time (at least I heard such a thing exists).
My $1100 PC, which I bought two years ago, renders a classroom demo in 41 seconds. But Apple's fanboys who bought the $4,000 Mac Studio say they almost caught up with Nvidia in two minutes to render the same demo with the Mac Studio, rationalizing, "Blender is not optimized for the M1 yet." It's really funny.
I can't wait to see if they'll still win their minds shouting "more optimization" a few years later.
The m1 is the first desktop used arm cpu, it takes time. The current situation is clear, buy an rtx.
@@arncht6507 Well, taking time doesn't mean things are going to change. Because Intel and NVIDIA will continue to develop while Apple develops.
@@user-oi6ff3lg8d intel and nvidia together never will do an unified architecture. And they should do something with the power consumtion, the laptops take similar watts, than the desktop did years ago.
@@arncht6507Yes, you are right. In other words, Intel and NVIDIA overwhelm Apple with performance, even though they are not integrated architectures. In addition, for most 3D workers, higher performance is more important than less power consumption. Even if you pay $20 more a month for electricity, you can do more in less time.Time is money for professionals.
@@user-oi6ff3lg8d they use 2x more watts because of 5% performance increase. It is not ok. It is the problem, not the “makes sense” power consumption. Simply crazy, you can compare a 10-30w soc to a 250+350w gpu.
Thank you for your testing and reviews. I really appreciate them. You do real work vs simply running benchmarks. The major review channels have been disappointing IMO.
I was really interested to see how the M1 Max in my new 16inch MBP fared for 3D in the real world. The stats aren’t everything as you say, and the question for me is not is it the fastest but is it fast enough. I’ve been quite surprised. I also have access to a 3090 system which in the past would be my only option for rendering in Cycles, I wasn’t really expecting that to change but actually - although it’s not ‘as’ quick as the 3090, I’ve been managing to do Cycles animation renders directly on my MBP including with tough scenarios such as glass (unheard of on previous Macs I’ve owned). The viewport resolves really quickly - enough to do lighting and shading and also to be able to check through for issues prior to rendering. The simple fact is that since I bought the computer I’ve completed a number of commercial 3D projects, and so for my case at least, these computers are sufficient for 3D work. I also found the M1 to be fantastic for Eevee, hardly much difference on most scenes between the 3090 and M1, and in some cases the Mac has rendered faster than PCs with dedicated GPU.
Uso il MBP M1Max per le produzioni video e qualcosa di 3D per i miei progetti. Il Signore del video vuole solo dimostrare che M1 non è in grado di superare certi flussi di lavoro; il suo grande ThreadRipper consuma almeno 500 Watt durante una sessione di rendering contro i 50/60 dell'M1Max. Doveva usare un M1 Ultra per rivaleggiare bene e che per la produzione è più che sufficiente rispetto alla centrale nucleare che possiede. Purtroppo, in questi video, non tengono nemmeno conto di quanto energia consumano le loro macchine e adesso che nVidia ha presentato la 4090 che mette gli alimentatori sotto enorme stress, saranno tutti corsi a comprare nuovi alimentatori a 1,5Kw per non cadere in disgrazia durante una fase di lavoro. Comunque non vedo MAI un video dove mentre un PC esegue il rendering pesante di una scena, lavorare contemporaneamente ad un altro progetto, tipo Photoshop o Illustrator o altra app. MacOsx lo permette, così facevo col mio G4 duale del 2002, sempre e facilmente senza paura di blocchi o schermate blu!
This comment gave me hope lol I want to get the Mac Studio for blender so I’m glad to hear someone else is finding success with it
Apple got such a good PR boost for their SoCs by having it be strongest in video / photo editing workflows. Since that's what the majority of reviewers do for work, their perspective obviously made the machines seem way more game changing than they actually are in aggregate across more disciplines.
I have a 16" M1 Pro, and do 3D, and I'll still take this over a PC laptop, since I can work for hours on battery without any fan noise, but for desktop stuff, I'll still probably be holding on to my 5800X and 3070 for a good while.
Still, Cycles X and further optimization, plus Apple historically making massive strides generationally with their GPU cores, means this gap could narrow sharply in a generation or two.
Not to mention it looks like you are gonna be able to run two Mac Studios with less power than just an RTX 4080 alone if the rumors are true...
Thanks for the video mate. I was gonna get a M2 Ultra but I'm sticking with AMD and Nvidia pack
There was never any real release of 3ds max for Mac. The only way you could run 3ds max on a Mac was via Boot Camp, Parallels or VMWare. This was never a serious option for professional 3d artists that had maximum performance as a priority.
Yeah, I thought that was an odd statement. There was never a 3DS Max for MacOS. Max is way too tied to the NT core for it to be on Mac..
AMAZING AMAZING VIDEO!!
Your analysis is so through, and to the point. Thank you so much for this. Blessings.
Would be interesting to see how the ultra actually scales …. my understanding is that the gpu cores wont do well .. but the cpu cores scale well …
i did mention in the other video and will say so here too.. incase others don’t see it. - Nothing is stopping you from using the mac for everything other than 3d rendering..BUT you can always put a barebones PC with a decent GPU in it. and then network render.. thus having the best of both worlds! - In my case i’m using Cinema 4d+Redshift. This can use Team Render or Deadline. This was all i need to interact with the pc is turn it on run the teamrender client and thats it. Octane should be able to do cross platform rendering in a few versions from now in the 2023.x release eventually.
Keep in mind the Mac in this video is using an M1 Max (same as in my laptop, in fact), not an M1 Ultra. The ultra has twice the CPU cores and would have done correspondingly better. The price would have been twice as much, of course, but I think it was mentioned that the workstation costs three as much as the studio and he's doing that comparison (though to be fair, his gaming PC costs half the Studio, and it does quite well).
Blender's a lot more dependent on GPU power rather than the CPU, and I can guarantee you that a 4000 euro workstation with an RTX 4090 would run circles around the Ultra
Thanks a lot, benchmarks youtubers fooled me i bought an m1 and i was shocked when the render time was 4hours while on my pc only took 23mins
Well, yuo learned a good lesson : Dont beleve in yuotubers , its a bussnes
Great to have some in depth Blender comparisons instead of yet another meaningless render time bar chart
But...But.. where's the classroom render benchmarks, or the BMW? I thought that's all TH-camrs knew how to do 😜
No doubt! That's why this video (and a couple other's he has done) are so useful! Not just a benchmark or final-render-showdown, but a better idea of working in the apps. :)
I rendered the Classroom demo file in 1min51s with the Mac Studio. It took me 33 min with the intel mac mini! So it's not the fastest in the world but I'm very happy I migrated to the Studio!
my 1100$ pc(Ryzen3700x+ RTX2060) rendered class room demo in only 41.67 seconds haha
@@user-oi6ff3lg8d that's really nice! If I could do without a Mac, I would have gone for something like that!
Please do the same test with the new Mac mini m2!
This video excellently demonstrates why render time matters. There are lots of times where the final render has glitches or issues so the fact that you can find those glitches and re-render a few times in the time it takes for Apple to render once matters. I have to wonder how a 5950x or 12900k would perform in terms of the simulation baking compared to an m1.
It is amazing what Apple made.. this thing lacks power ar this moment, but lets appreciate it that it sips power from the wall compared with a pc. I dont see the table turnes soon for Apple, but there can be a lot improved on Blender side to get everything from the ARM CPU
Thank you. This was exactly the test I wanted to see. As I mentioned in your previous video, I was shocked that my M1 Max MacBook Pro ran circles around my 3-year-old 10-core i9 IN SIMULATIONS. Rendering was not even close when running Redshift and my 3090+3080s. So in my own test, I can completely back up your results. This is very disappointing. I Hoped that Apple's investment into the blender foundation would leave the blender to show off some secret sauce that would make Metal Shine... but it looked like all we go was better compatibility with the mac. As I feared, PC hardware and software are way ahead of Apple in this first get M1. And even with the M2 right around the corner, I just don't see Apple being able to make up this much ground against the PC hardware. If anything these results should be seen by Apple that their fight with Nvidia is a liability in the 3d rendering space. Until that performance gap is overcome...we will still be buying PCs.
Curious how the apple development on blender will go. Hope they can get to be more optimized. I mean the machine isn't that old so I guess it has not reached its full potential for blender yet
The M1 simply has no RT cores. But still is too slow in blender. Go to the blender benchmarks and compare equal cards (theoretical 10 tflops): 6600 XT, 1080Ti , 2080, 3060, M1 Max 32c
Make sure to uncheck OptiX to have benchmarks without the RT cores involved. You will see that the M1 Max underperforms compared to the other architectures.
Interesting stats, especially the Mac being quite speedy with caching the timeline. I suspect over time the speed will increase as native M1 support in the code increases. Would love you to do the same thing with C4D
Ci sono già dei video su Cinema4D; il programma si comporta molto bene con M1
Thank you for this.
I have been using Mac and PC for 3D development (Maya, Modo, Zbrush, substance...) for over 2 decades. When Apple dropped support for Nvidia, that it was all downhill for 3D art. In 2020 I replaced my heavily upgraded 12 Core 2010 Mac pro w a Ryzen/Nvidia PC as my main 3D dev hardware. I do have 14" 2021 Macbook M1 that I use for non-production work, and it is fine for what it is, aka not a production tool.
IMHO using a Mac for professional 2D/3D works is a waste of time and money. These days, apple only cares about is selling iPhones. Sad as I have been using Apple computers since 1995. FU Apple.
Good idea including a PC part list. IMHO tho any decent mid-range Laptop such as the Razer will work very just as well for 90% of people but wo software/ hardware trouble shooting.
I really gotta disagree with you. M1 is their first go at putting their own chips in their computers and they're already blowing competition out of the water. The M1 Max fits inside of a MacBook and it almost competes with high end desktops. In a few more years I won't be surprised if the fastest "graphics card" you can get is in some kind of Mac Pro
Excellent video and analysis. I'm watching all this stuff closely, as I hoped the Apple Studio was my long-time dream-machine. But, it is kind of looking like some broken dreams are in my future from Apple. I really hope we find something out in June (WWDC) that counters this (like eGPUs are back!), but we might have to wait for an M2, M3, M4, etc. until we get more realistic GPU performance.
The good news, is that for certain tasks, they might perform fairly well. I'm trying to work back into BIM & ArchViz, for which the large amount of video RAM might make the Studio perform well at least in scene creation. But, those viewports and render-times look problematic, and I'm not sure how much software optimization is going to solve some of that. It's probably just brute hardware coming in to play in the nVIdia system.
For now, I guess I stick with my i7 mini and eGPU and try to hold out a bit longer (or, buy a lower end Apple Silicon model if I need to get into one sooner). Thanks for all the work!
For audio work the M1 Ultra has been my long-time dream machine and I couldn’t be happier. As a 3D hobbyist I’ve been pleased by the significant performance boost with Blender 3.1, but it’s obvious there is still a long ways to go yet.
@@tronam I looks like my dream-machine, but it just isn't there yet. I fear I'll be waiting for eGPU support (which might never come), or a few more M-iterations until we start getting specialized capabilities for the GPU cores, like ray-tracing. If their plan is to stay 100% Apple, they'll do it, but we might be waiting a few years.
@@cgWerks The problem is that Apple puts a large premium on low power consumption, as most of its devices are thin and / or battery powered. Monster GPU cores, great for 3D rendering, fly in the face of that. They're not going to go to great expense to make something special for a small part of their user base; they'll just let those customers go. Especially as they have no interest in catering to gamers, who would be the other beneficiaries of decent GPUs.
Fundamentally, the iPhone is their core product, and everything else is scaled from the latest A-series core. Massive GPUs are too much of a step away from that; the economies of scale just aren't there.
@@axi0matic I somewhat agree, though there is a massive difference between an iPhone and a Studio Ultra. Yes, same core tech, but the customization and scale is also rather incredible.
I think the main issue is they need to add some of the special silicon nVidia and AMD GPUs have, especially around RT. They are otherwise starting to get competitive, or even better. That said, I'd like to have the choice (as I do with my Intel Mac, with GPU/eGPU). Having the Apple Silicon GPU (with access to massive RAM) and eGPU ability to access an AMD, for example, would be best of both worlds. But, I kind of doubt they'll do that at this point. Hope I'm wrong.
@@cgWerks The disadvantage with their SoC approach is that if you want lots of GPU, you have to get loads of CPU as well (and vice versa).
If the Mac Pro gets 2x Ultras, you’d get a comical amount of CPU cores for only a about an RTX3070’s worth of GPU cores. When some people might want an Ultra’s worth of CPUs with 2x RTX3090 worth of GPU.
thank you for the video, as impressive as those mac are, GPU powers is heavily limiting them. The moment apple hopefully allows us to connect external gpus again, the game will change and I'll probably switch to a mac for work.
Wow someone who actually knows how to use a program other than Geekbench.
fortunately all reviewers don't get corrupt by apple, thx for you honesty
2:44 I have used Blender for 3 years semi professionally and never once had blank menus. I use windows
Thank you for sharing this and running your tests! Really appreciate seeing Blender tests, and your AE M1 native video was very helpful. 🙌
My understanding is that while Blender is native for M1 processors, it’s not yet optimized. Other reviewers suggest that most GPU work in Blender has substantial bottlenecks, and the graphics cores actually sit idle for most of the render times.
Of course, Apple is working with Blender and a fully optimized version should land in late 2022. So this review is more than fair, but not the final story.
That only really applies to the M1 Ultra and the 32 core M1 Max to a much lesser extent. The 24 core GPU is fully utilized in rendering workloads. I saw no drastic dips in frequency, power draw or utilization.
I read a bunch of images/screengrabs about that on a Max Tech video recently and tried to understand. The problem is (if I understand correctly), it would take some substantial core re-write to address, not just porting and optimization and converting to Metal. It was an issue around how CPUs/GPUs work together to keep each other 'fed' and how dramatically different Apple's new approach is. Apps designed ground-up for Apple's architecture (ie. SoC) should fly, but how many apps will get a complete re-write?
Great stuff here! I'm likely getting the mac mini, but that's mostly because I live in a tiny condo. Right now I have a giant PC and the constant whiring of fans is driving me crazy.
Yeah, that's the other side of the coin. We're in a small condo here too and I have very limited 'desk' space. Having a big PC box isn't idea, space or noise-wise. But, it isn't looking like these machines are quite going to cut it either, depending on one's needs.
@@cgWerks I guess I gotta get better at using Eevee to save on the render times!
@@funnyberries4017 Oh yeah, at final-render time, there are lots of options, especially these days (or, even distributing it to cloud services). I come from Electric Image days, and the quick render times were a key selling point, as well as the distributed rendering engine. There are also a lot of 'old school' techniques to bring render time down. (ex. the falling-knife from the original Mission Impossible was image-mapped, not ray-traced. A big aspect of being a 3D pro in those days was knowing how to cheat effects and save minutes or hours per frame.) So many options these days and so much for me to learn.
@@cgWerks it looks like the mac mini m2 is coming out in june, and it's going to have 2 more gpu cores. Still won't be as fast as the mac studio, but I think for me it'll get the job done
@@funnyberries4017 I think we're going to need some specialized cores/engines before it will compete more across the board. Currently, it seems it will be quite fast at some things, and not so fast at others (GPU-wise). Not sure if we'll see those in the M2, M3, etc.
Thank you for this video as is very scientific and informative about the Mac Studio and running Blender on it. I am a hobby PC builder. I own and use a 2019 4K iMac.
Thanks so much for this review. I have a 24-core M1 Max and only need to make stills in DAZ to create panels in comics. I appreciate you telling us it should be fine for that, but anything animated would take much longer to render. Exactly what I needed to know. 🙂
Wow best video on this subject I’ve seen! Amazing coverage of all aspects I was interested in, like you read my mind! Thank you so much, this expertise couldn’t have come at a better time. I have a deadline coming up to render out a hyper real animation, 3k to invest in a new computer. Was going to buy the Mac studio but after seeing this am thinking windows for faster render times. Even if it was the upgraded M1 Max or ultra, do you still think the 3080 would beat it?
Yes a 3080 rendering with OptiX, it's no contest.
@@ElevatedSystems thanks for the info!
Render speed is clearly an issue. But what about the volume? I assume the two PCs become "vacuum cleaners" during rendering. And how loud will the Mac Studio be?
Awesome video, thanks for the hard work! Small note: Next Gen (2018) was rendered with Cycles, not Eevee.
It’s not the fact it is an integrated gpu, it’s a lack of ray tracing hardware in the gpu and a lack of Blender being able to utilise that - it’s essentially CPU vs GPU rendering
Thank you for this review. Would love to see a review with the new MacBook Pro 16 inch max at 128 core. It’s my understanding you can order one from Apple and return it for any reason.
Thanks for making a video that directly answered my question. Cheers.
Hmmm it would be more interesting to just see Blender being used as most people use it, modelling, shading, some animation, how quickly the viewport optimises itself with various lights and Cycles, rather than simulations and renders etc,, I've used Blender for years now and simulations are not my thing and most Blender Pros would be on a PC still, I think the Mac Studios are great for beginners and Intermediate Blender users and once Metal is properly optimised, things can only get better....
This guy has a sorta Chistopher Walken accent sometimes which was making me chuckle a bit.
Compared to my Mac mini (late 2018 i7, w/external Radeon RX 580 GPU), my Mac Studio M1 Max is a significant jump in viewport and render performance. But it's still significantly less performance than my PC with a RTX 3080.
Does RTX 3080 play a big role in 3D rendering tho? I thought that the most important is how powerful your CPU is when it comes to rendering.
Please correct me if Im wrong 🙈 Im just asking and would love to get a clear say on this from anyone that works with more complex 3D animations etc 😊
@@bonndell The GPU is the most important part in my experience as it speeds up the rendering in Cycles over CPU.
For example. A model I created takes about ~45 seconds per frame to render by CPU, and this is an i9-9900K.
The same model with my RTX 3080 takes ~7 seconds per frame.
Rendering is what the GPUs are for, but you would also benefit from a powerful CPU for other tasks, such as cloth sims.
00:54 3ds Max has always been a Windows only app, but I get your point.
Great and Objective Comparison! Thank you!
Thanks for the good information, looking forward for this Tech comparison
Great and honest assessment. Appreciate you making this video!
Thanks for the in-depth review. I’m interested in Blender3D mostly for modeling solid objects into USDZ for use in Motion 5 projects. I think the base M1 Max should be able to handle this fairly well.
It’s also can handle animation and rig ?
@@user-uj6pe7yv7t yes, basic stuff. Motion is pretty powerful.
@@NineVoltDigitalCinema rtx 3080 ti better than m1 max in animation rig ?
@@user-uj6pe7yv7t well, i think its a better inversion , yes
Uhh, 3ds Max never supported MacOS, even back in the late 90s, more than a decade before NVIDIA and Apple fell out.
You should’ve did this test with the maxed out Mac Studii.
You must be under the illusion that all TH-camrs are rich.
You just saved me a ton of research. Thank you!
Very beautiful video. This was extremely helpful to me
It'll be interesting to see the direction Apple takes regarding GPU's. Will they continue to integreate GPUs with their CPU's or will they embracer GPU expansion?
I think they'll continue to do it the way they do now but they'll get a lot more powerful over time.
Interesting, I would definitely be curious to see the performance of the other pro 3D apps you mentioned (especially on M1 Ultra) as I've heard Blender isn't particularly well-optimized for M1 Max/Ultra yet. Especially if any of those apps do release more optimized versions in the future...
Blender and Cinema 4D are the only two I know of that run natively on Apple silicon as of now. I saw no hardware performance problems with the M1 Max GPU as it ran at full speed and utilization while rendering in Blender. I think the problems are limited to the M1 Ultra and it's architectural limitations.
I used to do a lot of 3ds max 20 years ago, I can’t believe render times have gotten worse overall. \
Well done and well said, finally an unbiased as possible review!!!
Thank you for your great tests.
thanks for 3d comparison. Bravo
a "GPU" is a bundle of specific computational hardware that each task uses a different (set of) part of the GPU, and a different proportion of composition (architecture) of course would give different performance scaling in different tasks and not a single number for everything.
This video is specifically focused on 3D rendering which basically all applications use some evolution of the Monte Carlo Path Tracing algorithms. The only significant difference is if the application is able to utilize specialized hardware rendering cores or not to do the calculations.
@@ElevatedSystems "if the application is able to utilize specialized hardware rendering cores or not" and "if the specialized cores are capable of doing the calculations meaningfully faster than the CPU or not"
Hardware accelerated rendering has been "meaningfully" faster than software rendering since the '60s. I don't think it's going to change any time soon.
@@ElevatedSystems I mean not all functions exist in some particular piece of hardware like you can't accelerate ray tracing on older GPUs
@@josir1994 Are you talking about accelerating ray tracing on the GPU (versus CPU/software), or are you talking about specific RT functionality on newer GPUs?
Compute shaders have been around since ~2006, CUDA was initially released in 2007.
Thank you 💜💜
This is the video I want! Thank you :)
Thank you for this great video! I'm coming from graphic design and illustration but slowly getting more and more into Blender. I'm currently working on a Macbook m1 Max 32 core and it is enough for everything i do at the moment. But i also get tempted to try out more realistic things. So my question is, if i would invest in a desktop pc for heavier workloads in Blender, would i have problems with moving around files betweens mac and pc? Or does a Blender file work on every system, no matter where you created it? (Still a beginner, sorry if it's a stupid question haha) Thanks in advance!
water simulation should be a scene of "20 miles area of ocean wave beaching in the winter time"
3:31 workstation spec followed with pc spec, please put this somewhere on the screen for the skippers. thanks
Hi! I'm set on a Mac since I mostly use Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects for simple stuff, and Blender for occasional 3D typography (not huge environments at all). Do you think the Mac Studio is good enough, or would the Mac Mini M2 be better?? Thanks a lot for your reviews!!
This is really helpful even with building a system best for 3d! Instant subscribe to this channel
THE HOLY TRINITY 🤯 🤯 🤯 🤯 Mac Studio + Studio Display + #LUMIY lightblade is UNBELIEVABLE! 🤯 🤯 🤯
Thank you bro for this video, you saved my much time
Would be great to see that piece of tech with a giant Twinmotion model. I'm pretty tempted to make the switch from an Nvidia GPU
Hi CJ, does Blender on the M1 Max play nice with your PC's when it comes to network rendering, can your Nvidia cards be utilized in this way using your PC's as a render farm?
That was my first thought.
Let’s see what the Mac Pro Extreme will be able to pull off.
Should I buy the new MacbookPro M3 Max or the Mac Studio M2 Ultra for general use with Blender 3D and Xcode? In some Geekbench tests, I've read that the new M3 achieves similar results to the M2 Ultra. What makes more sense at the moment? Portability doesn't matter, speed and performance are crucial. I'm looking forward to your recommendations. Thank you.
Tough call, I'd wait untill the M3 is out in the wild and fully reviewed.
@@ElevatedSystems Thanks
Don’t worry, I think the new M1 Mac Pro will support external GPU. I don’t think Mac Mini is designed for 3D rendering, it’s more for video and photo editing. Wait for the WWDC.
Very helpful video! I have a question: when the m1 max gpu is rendering a blender project in the background under full load, can i work in Photoshop, Capture One or Davinci Resolve simultaneously? Or is it getting laggy? Any experiences in it? Thank you :)
i love your videos!
2:41 - 😳I have never seen that happen in 15 years of Blender use. _Heavy_ use in the past 5 years...
I think the Macs are power limited because they are focusing on “silent” operation instead of performance.
The GPU is huge in the Mac, even the M1 Max has a more transistors for the GPU than a 3090, if they allowed it more power it should perform better. Maybe they will do better with the Mac Pro, but I am so sick of the “Mac Tech tubers” pushing for quite operation instead of better performance.
Apple needs to the m1 ultra fly. They are desktops who give a shit about power
11:35.
No, pcs with nvidia did not replace macs in hollywood 3D studios because macs were never an option in hollywood for any serious vfx work. And apparently never will be due to the closed system apple is forcing.
Just look at their promotional videos. They brag about rendering massive 3D worlds and yet they show a few young hipster kids, probably social media creators. They will never show 20+ vfx artist with wacom tablets and 3D mouses doing VFX for the next Marvel movie.
Pixar started on Mac Pros
@@ElevatedSystems Oh you really need to get your facts straight. Pixar started (as a part of Disney) long before Mac even existed let alone Mac Pro that debuted in 2006 after Apple adopted Intel CPUs. Then Jobs invested in Pixar 1986 about the time Mac II came out. So, again 20 years before Mac Pro. Mac was never ever part of the CGI industry. In the late 80s to the late 90s Silicon Graphics dominated the industry and after that PCs took over.
When trashcan Mac Pro came out in 2013 they briefly showed a Pixar texture artist working on trashcan in Foundry Mari texturing an asset. Since the trashcan flopped few years afterwards nobody ever considered macs for CGI and animation work any more.
Macs are to closed as a system which by default excludes them from any workflow were GPU and CPU power, expandability and user repairability are a must.
As for M1 macs... M1 is out for like year and a half and only a few VFX apps are apple silicon native at this point. Still no Nuke, no Houdini (only beta) no Maya and the ones that are ported are still way slower than on PC with NVidia. There is slim to no chance Apple will make their way into VFX CGI industry and when they get bored they will drop it altogether.
@@doctorkj5640 So I need to get my facts straight? Pixar started as part of LucasArts, not Disney. Steve Jobs didn't just invest he bought Pixar from Lucas. The first 3 to 5 films were created on a mix of Mac and Linux systems before finally selling the Company to Disney in the late '00s.
@@ElevatedSystems For Lucasfilm yes, my typo from the top of my head, you re-typed it correctly from wiki. :-) But for Macs you are utterly wrong. Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems workstations were used because none of the PCs and Macs of that period were powerful enough. They also used NeXT workstations to some extent because they were far more powerful than Mac then (Since Jobs wasn't even in Apple any more and started NeXT) But, again, these were not Macs. By the time Jobs returned to Apple and NeXT died, SGI was the standard. After that Jobs shaped MacOS to be like NeXT but lost interest in that field and steered Apple in some other direction. No VFX and animation studio in Hollywood (or anywhere else) is using Mac for anything other than editing or maybe color grading. Linux is like 60% and Windows 40%. Give or take.
Finally a good test!!!
I wonder if the upcoming Mac Pro will have dedicated GPUs dedicated to 3D graphics so it could compete with Nvidia/AMD dedicated GPUs. So they maybe can win back former customers on high end when it comes to 3D graphics.
Well, just as Nvidia put its own physical core for ray tracing for 3D, Apple put its media engine for video editing. I don't think Apple is going to put anything else in for 3D. Apple seems to have taken a firm line on video editing.
@@user-oi6ff3lg8d For the package they have in the computer (M1 for current releases), sure. But I am talking about separate (dedicated) GPU, there they could have other special purpose cores than just media engine, like for ray tracing in 3D.
hello friend! excellent video as always! I would like you to use Sketchup 2022 (optimized for m1) together with the plugin V-Ray 5.02 (optimized for m1)! and render some interior design! it is very important in my purchase decision, because I only use these two softwares! V-Ray is very good at rendering on CPU, so I believe it will perform well! I see many forums and many people with the same question, I believe it would be a good video! thank you very much and congratulations for your content! 👏🏻
This video make me try to redo the water scene with the monkey head replaced with my own head as model. Do you have the monkey scene available for download? Or a tutorial to build it myself. I’m just a very beginner with blender.
What about a production scene that requires 80 GB of VRAM? Tutorial scenes don't really cut it when trying to compare to a production scene. Productions houses routinely render on CPU-only render farms because the RAM usage is so high. Can you do a test on a complex scene that uses over 30 GB of VRAM?
Great video and efforts. I’d appreciate a similar comparison using Cinema 4D as it’s more popular in production.
Thanks a lot 👍
You do deserve much more subs!
The problem is the money, with the same money for a "m1 something" i can build a powefull pc that can do Everything (Video AND 3d Rendering), so PC is better deal
Out of interest, has blender become any more optimised on the Mac in more recent releases, or is performance much the same?
Oh, look at that 12:51 prices !! In my country - Brazil - it triples !!
Great video!
Could you test blender 3.3 render test on m1 ultra 48? Thanks
Great comparison. I really wonder if this is a software thing though, since in Unity for example the M1s compare quite well to Nvidia in the same project.
Not sure how any software optimisation is going to close such a huge gap. Blender runs natively on M1 and uses the metal API. It has been doing so for almost 6 months. The harsh reality is that M1 isn't going to be the best option for 3D/animation work. This is evidenced by pro 3D/animation studios using only PCs
@@FunFactsAboutTech That is not true, M1 CPU is supported since 6 Months, but Metal / GPU only for 1 Month.
I also doubt that it will fully catch up to Nvidia, however I still think there is room for massive improvements.
@@tobi6758 I mean he is comparing it to a 2080 that is from a lot of years ago. Even 3080 is like 2 years old now. So the "real gap" between NVIDIA and Apple Silicon is pretty big. The only reason to buy the Mac Studio is for Adobe Suite and video editing as stated in this video I am afraid.
Does your budget build list still hold up? Would you change anything if you were building it today?
Still a solid build and even cheaper now.
How was Fusion360? I heard mixed messages, some say it's great the others say it gets blown away by a desktop pc
Great and informative. All your testvideos with the M1 Max.
Maybe you can estimate the following question out of your experience.
Most of my work is with Blackmagic Fusion
My system now: AMD Ryzen 9 3900xt 12 core with 128 GB Ram / Nvidia GTX 2080 TI
Do you think the M1 Ultra with 128 GB of Ram will beat this system ?
Your opinion on this could help me a lot to decide
Thank you very much
Holger
are you on drugs?
I dont think so
Wouldn’t the m1 ultra would be the computer needed for that??????