Chaos Corona Forum

General Category => General CG Discussion => Hardware => Topic started by: 3dsgar on 2023-05-29, 10:35:45

Title: PC vs Macbook Pro for rendering speed
Post by: 3dsgar on 2023-05-29, 10:35:45
I'm thinking of changing from a desktop pc to Macbook Pro as I need to be more mobile.

I know there's a lot more to it than just the hardware so hoping someone has a relatively straight forward answer for me...

Would a Macbook Pro perform better/worse or similar to an Intel setup based on the comparison below.

I'm currently running a fairly old Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz   3.41 GHz   (32GB RAM)
What I'm looking to replace it with is the Macbook Pro Apple M2 Max with 12‑core CPU, 38‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine   (96GB unified memory)

Appreciate any answers that'll help me make my decision.
Title: Re: PC vs Macbook Pro for rendering speed
Post by: James Vella on 2023-05-29, 13:53:09
Im sure people here with experience with both platforms can give you better insight, but just looking at the benchmark results can give you a rough idea:

(https://i.ibb.co/pQHs3jd/bench.jpg) (https://ibb.co/68Kp40F)
Title: Re: PC vs Macbook Pro for rendering speed
Post by: 3dsgar on 2023-05-30, 03:25:16
Exellent, thank you James!

That's the answer I was looking for.

Although I failed to mention I use Corona (so CPU and not GPU based rendering)
Would this chart be GPU benchmark only?
Title: Re: PC vs Macbook Pro for rendering speed
Post by: James Vella on 2023-05-30, 07:22:44
This is from the Corona benchmark, so only CPU scores.

https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark/results
Title: Re: PC vs Macbook Pro for rendering speed
Post by: 3dsgar on 2023-05-30, 07:39:52
Thank you, much appreciated!
Title: Re: PC vs Macbook Pro for rendering speed
Post by: CambridgeCreative on 2023-05-30, 13:03:36
Going by price, i can see a Macbook Pro Apple M2 Max for around £3500 on the internet. You could get an intel i9 13900HX with 64GB RAM and NVidia RTX 4090 for £2778. The Cinebench R23 single and multicore scores for the Intel (13900K desktop version) are quite a bit better than the M2 Max. The laptop version won't be much slower than the desktop.
Title: Re: PC vs Macbook Pro for rendering speed
Post by: CambridgeCreative on 2023-05-30, 13:29:13
Some interesting Cinebench R23 scores can be seen here https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-list/cinebench-scores or https://www.cgdirector.com/cinebench-r23-scores-updated-results/     Most PC and Mac CPUs are listed on these. When speccing my PCs, i usually have this website open and have a custom PC website open at the same time, to see what is the most affordable for my budget and modelling/rendering needs.

Title: Re: PC vs Macbook Pro for rendering speed
Post by: 3dsgar on 2023-05-31, 07:17:20
Thanks for that info, it has me thinking now...
BUT
I really have my heart set on converting to Apple as all my other devices are Apple.
Will definitely look into this a bit more before making a final decision!
Title: Re: PC vs Macbook Pro for rendering speed
Post by: Juraj on 2023-05-31, 09:16:30
As long as you will have powerful windows desktop or use cloud services to render bigger final images, you will be fine.

Contemporary Intel and AMD laptops are roughly 2X faster in multithreaded rendering, but they only got that fast in last year, before that, M1/2 architecture decimated everything.
Also, the big Windows workstation laptops are heavy and loud machines, while Macbook is beautiful, still very thin thing.

If you want to get Macbook, get Macbook. It's not purely rational decision, you need to enjoy working on the machine and if your heart is set you would just be dissapointed by else.

Title: Re: PC vs Macbook Pro for rendering speed
Post by: 3dsgar on 2023-05-31, 14:31:47
Thanks, I appreciate the honesty.