OK, I was thinking about getting new Mac, but this thread, oh my. This does not look good.
The original scene from the first post was rendered in 7:40 on my iMac 2020 with i7 40GB RAM, Big Sur.
So, it seems like M chips are useless for rendering and Mac is officially a dead platform for 3D or? I see most M2 Ultra results are around 9-11 mins, even if it would be 6 minutes, it would still be bad. :-/