mac studio / mac pro m2 ultra

[prince_jr]

hi corona users
i'm still running a maxed out mac pro from 2010 (5.1) at home > 12c, 3.46ghz, 128gb ram.
but as apple released a new version of the mac studio and finally the new mac pro, i'm suggesting to buy a new apple computer. rather a mac studio than a mac pro.

it would be nice to get some real world benchmarks in this thread. does anybody already have the mac studio m2 ultra on his/her desk and can share some infos about working in the viewport, maybe some render times and other important facts?

@corona-team: i guess corona benchmark v2 (optimized for apple silicon) is just around the corner?

thanks for your inputs and thoughts. i'm curious what y'all have to share in the near future. :o)

[BigAl3D]

I'd like to see this as well. One of the tests I like to run since every C4D user already has the scene, is to open the Grapes scene in the Asset Browser and just hit Render to Picture Viewer. Not a Corona test, but a raw CPU power test. I have several render times from over the years and I believe a thread here somewhere where others tried it with newer Macs. The benchmarks are nice, but it's difficult to apply that knowledge to real-world projects.

A smart decision not to get that "new" Mac Pro. Only peeps that have a need for specific PCI cards could possible justify the extra $3,000 USD for that box. Hoping they're fixing the sudden bottleneck with scaling these new chips. Started off so promising.

[Philw]

The native benchmark is up - would be great to see some Ultra scores up there :-)

https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark

I've put my M1Max and Threadripper up there:
https://benchmark.chaos.com/corona/v10/scores/561
https://benchmark.chaos.com/corona/v10/scores/562

[davetwo]

Oh cool. Just for fun I ran it on my M2max MBP (5,761,541). And my old Threadripper 2950x (5,678,105).
Quite suprised that the MBP edged it!

[Philw]

I stupidly updated to 13.4.1 after publishing that benchmark and it dropped me by 1619013 rays/sec. Why Apple?

[masterzone]

happen to me...before 4.000.000 Ray on my MacBook Pro M1 Max and 3.000.000 after the upgrade...I tried tomorrow and results has changed...very strange...

[prince_jr]

cool, thx for the first impressions and benchmarks.
can somebody run the new benchmark with a mac studio ultra m1 and m2, please?

[jojorender]

In the screenshot masterzone posted the 3,8M r/s score for I9-10910 caught my eye.
It’s running macOS 13.4… In comparison my I9-10850K running Mac OS X 10.15.7 comes in consistently in the 5,2M r/s range. Not sure what to make of this, since both CPU’s should be performing in the same range.
It’s been a while since we heard that a OS update boosted hardware performance, but I never heard of an update throttling performance.

@Phil
Is the benchmark running M chips “optimized”? I couldn’t find any Chaos statement about this and I wonder how this actually works. There is only one Mac installer. Does it have code to run “native” Intel AND “native” Apple Silicon?

@ Chaos
There was some discussion about M1 thermal throttling kicking in after 5 min or so.
Why is the benchmark restricted to 1 min tests? Would be great if this would be more flexible (set your own test time) to evaluate performance over time/ thermal stability.

[Philw]

Yep the new Benchmark is a Universal binary so as optimised as the renderer itself, I guess!

[jojorender]

Thanks Phil, forgot about the universal binary... had gpt explain to me how that works ;-)

[masterzone]

@ Chaos
There was some discussion about M1 thermal throttling kicking in after 5 min or so.
Why is the benchmark restricted to 1 min tests? Would be great if this would be more flexible (set your own test time) to evaluate performance over time/ thermal stability.

I agree...as Cinebench do...it has 10 minutes benchmark...

[ASIMO]

Hello

I am super interested in this discussion. Seeing that an Apple update that should boost power dramatically reduces the output, not only on M machines but on Intel Macs as well, is a nightmare !

I did a test with my Apple Intel i9-10910 running on macOS Monterey 12.6.5. It scores 4536424 which seems fine so far.

This means problems seem to occur with macOS 13 only ?

Also regarding the thermo-throttling – This was only true for the MacBooks ? Is there more Info ?

Would be great to see a Mac M2 Ultra performance.

[Philw]

Yep as far as I understand the CPU variability is "cleverness" due to being a laptop. The Studio is ok as far as I know (don't own one).

[jojorender]

This means problems seem to occur with macOS 13 only ?

Well, so far there is only one benchmark for this cpu/ os combo and we don’t know if this was run on a idle system…
I ran a bench on I9 /Monterey - score as expected. https://benchmark.chaos.com/corona/v10/scores/891
I don’t have any Ventura nodes to test.

@Phil & masterzone
How long after updating did you run the bench? could some background indexing be the problem?

[Philw]

Possibly - I did consider the housekeeping it does after an update. I'll try it again at some point once I can take a breath :-)