Corona for Apple Silicon M1?

[Philw]

Yes it makes a big difference. For example, time to first pixel and general responsiveness on M1Max with Redshift is better than on my Threadripper with an RTX 3090 and 3080TI - due to reduced swapping about between memories and buses. Not 100% applicable to this situation but important to know nontheless.

[frv]

Tx, thats good to know indeed. I would hate to switch to PC and see the most of my daily work slowed down by 50% just to have final renders finish somewhat faster.  Those final renders are about 2 to 4 images every two weeks. They render at night or in the weekend.

When you need to do animations I understand its a whole different thing. Lumion on a PC might be a far better option as I see here at the office. Animations though are very time consuming to set up compared to stills regardless of the hard-software used.

[ASIMO]

Hello

Is there any short answer on how much speed I would gain from running a M1 Ultra in comparison to an 3.6 GHz 10-Core Intel Core i9 iMac ?

Since I read that not all benchmarks are accurate. What can I really expect ?

Thank you for your opinion :)

[frv]

depending on your ram not much of a difference.
I am working with a M1 Ultra 128Gb. 20core.
Most reviewers find that the ultra compares with the hypertreaded intel cpu's. So a 10 core Intel with 20 threads is about the same speed as a 20core m1.

I think though that the Ultra is very fast with memory intensive tasks. Such as starting renders, opening large files and using the asset browser with assets on the internal harddisk. It all depends on what your models look like. Lots of asset placing, trees vegetation and so on that's I think better in the ultra. I rendered today a scene with a lot of ground cover vegatation by Maxtree and Graswals, high polycount. And still there was only 8Gb involved in the render. Then I added about 20 Maxtree trees and the memory usage was close to 125Gb.

[dacian]

Does anyone remember where was the info on ssd speeds for the Mac Studio?
I seem to remember that the 4tb version is much faster. But by how much?

[masterzone]

I'm looking for MacBook Pro M1 Pro Max....I love the portability and Corona is very fast on my actual Intel i7.
Any experience about this processor?

[lamfadel]

I want to buy such a model, but 16 GB of memory confuses me ... Maybe someone has experience rendering on such a laptop?  I usually work with apartments and small houses with an exterior.  I previously had a 2017 Macbook with 4 cores and 16b of memory and it barely managed some exteriors and simple apartments.  I think this M1 should do it better because the memory is faster...?
I understand that there are more powerful ones, but this is a matter of price ...

MacBook Pro 14″
Apple M1 Pro Chip
8-Core CPU, 14-Core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
512GB SSD
16GB

[BigAl3D]

In a VERY simplified way, 16 GB of M1 Unified Memeory is similar to 32 GB of traditional RAM. The new M1 chips don't have to transfer data back and forth to separate chips. Everything is in one place so the memory handling is much more efficient. Since it's faster, it can handle new data sooner and essentially allow you to do more work with less memory. In some situations, this doesn't work as smoothly as the fancy presentations show however. Again, this is just my understanding.

The rule of thumb is, always buy the most RAM you can afford or even just past what you can afford. You can't upgrade later and your new system will most likely last you for years. You will be glad you got more memory down the line.

My two cents.

[frv]

I have 128Gb of ram in a Mac Studio Ultra. I noticed that it's always rendering my scenes at around 125Gb ram usage where before I could do with 32Gb sometimes swapping some memory. Because of the large amount of ram I I also got a bit lazy optimising my scenes. Just scattering vegetation every where without much intelligence is a luxury but even 128Gb will not be enough.
I think with a little bit of conscious modelling 64 Gb could do just as well.

[lamfadel]

Thanks everyone for the replies.  I decided to buy a new model :)
I'm working on an iMac 2020 i7 with 64 Gb RAM and it's enough for me, although it almost always asks for disk space.  I'm thinking of buying an M2 MAX with 32 Gb RAM and I have doubts that the new memory will be enough... of course it's fast and works differently... maybe someone has experience with M1 MAX with similar memory for rendering exteriors and interiors of private houses,  a lot of grass, forest, bushes and more ...?

[BigAl3D]

One thing that makes these ARM chips faster in some ways, even when swapping between memory and the hard drive, is that the HD is a super-fast SSD and close by so you don't get as big of a hit as other systems with spinning drives. So if you have a 512 or 1 TB SSD, it's "almost" like having a ton of extra RAM (yes, I know RAM is usually faster). In the old days, people would partition large drives into smaller volumes for faster access or to keep one for cache files or swapping. One for applications, one for scratch, one for this, etc. Since today's drives are usually SSD, this might not matter too much anymore since this technique was to address the amount of time the drive head would take to search a massive drive to access items scattered all over.

I personally would like to keep working on Macs, but am a little nervous about Apple's issues with the scaling of the new chips. Fingers crossed that the M3 line will be a huge jump in power.

[lamfadel]

The DDR4 memory on my iMac is 20Gb/s and the memory speed of the new m2/m1 max is 400Gb/s.  64 at 20 vs 32 at 400… will Corona run as fast with 32…?

[frv]

Apart from slower you will also crash more with insufficient ram. I just made this image and it took about 125Gb of ram according to the app activity window. My system a Mac ultra with 128Gb and 2Tb is rather fast but since I tend to model vegetation without much thought everything is back to slow again as it was on my old iMac :-).  The gravel in this image is all mesh by Arroway. No displacement.

If you are a smart modeller and put only vegetation where you need it and use displacement with care you could make the same image with 16Gb without having to swap memory. But a careful or smart model is also much more work.

[BigAl3D]

In my experience, most 3D apps use the RAM for loading all the textures for faster access. Is that not how Corona works? Are you saying you have 125 GB of textures?

[Nejc Kilar]

In my experience, most 3D apps use the RAM for loading all the textures for faster access. Is that not how Corona works? Are you saying you have 125 GB of textures?

Hope I can help here by offering a super simplified answer :)

Corona (and any other renderer / software really) needs stuff to be in RAM so that when a ray travels through the scene and hits something it then "knows" what exactly is there and how its set up.
If your RAM is full then your SSD / HDD will act as an extended RAM so to speak - but because that hardware is slower in general it'll be orders of magnitude slower than accessing stuff from RAM. Hence why you can still render stuff when you run out of RAM but its really slow.