Messages

16

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: CRITICAL SPEED ISSUE WITH APPLE M SYSTEMS

« on: 2023-10-21, 15:00:43 »

Not a Mac user anymore. But I was wondering and rendered this scene on my Threadripper 3990 Win 10 build.

Using native C4D Bitmaps: 2:15
Using Corona Bitmaps: 1:05

Honestly, I was not aware of such a speed difference between Corona and C4D bitmaps!!
Only downside, the Treeline in the background rendererd very blurry. Changing interpolation didn't help. Is there a known issue for non-square textures? (The tree texture has a resolution of 7000x1138px)
Just wondering, because everything else rendered fine…

Hello

Thank you very much for sharing your results. The issue with the blurred background appears to me as something alarming, as it is true for almost all objects in the the Cosmos browser in general ! Once you move objects around 100m far from the camera textures will start to blur and loose sharpness. It becomes visible, once you scale up objects in the distance. It is easy to test, by just applying a texture to a cube and move it to the background. It can be avoided manually, setting the Blur Scale to -100% and make it sharp again. I believe this could be an undetected bug. There also is a thread on this, showcasing the trouble. See link with no statement yet.

Maybe that is also why it renders faster when changing the scene to Bitmap ? Not because it is a Bitmap, but because there is less accuracy / sharpness !

https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=41149.0
_

This might be a bit off-topic but it could also be connected with the way Intel-chips or M-chips deal with textures.

A

17

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: CRITICAL SPEED ISSUE WITH APPLE M SYSTEMS

« on: 2023-10-20, 14:47:29 »

Thank you too! Hopefully we will be able to reproduce the slowdown and then it should be possible for us to find out what exactly is causing it. If we won't be able to immediately provide a solution, we should be able to at least explain what is going on.

I totally agree and I am happy to assist and do some testings as well :)

Sometimes an explanation is already helpful to understand things.

Thank you.

18

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: CRITICAL SPEED ISSUE WITH APPLE M SYSTEMS

« on: 2023-10-20, 14:42:12 »

Hey guys, sorry, but there so much information here that soon it will become impossible for us to go through it all. What we need is simple:
- a sample scene (archived with all textures and other assets)
- the render time you are getting
- your exact hardware
- your version of Corona and C4D
- if you wish, you can also include a comparison with other hardware
- any other relevant information such as render stats are welcome, for more information on how to correctly prepare reports, see: https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/4648898278545

We need this as a support ticket sent here: https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Once we have all the details, we will investigate ASAP!

I understand. I will take care of this and sending in the scene and my results.

Thanks a lot for you efforts !

A

19

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: CRITICAL SPEED ISSUE WITH APPLE M SYSTEMS

« on: 2023-10-20, 14:31:23 »

Just copied pasted the scene in to a new file. Result 14:26
A lot of difference...
I don't know but maybe there is something with this file.
Maybe good to check with something more recent before coming to conclusion on the Mac Studio.
I don't know if intel chips have as well big differences depending on scene type. You test scene hardly makes use of render instances.

14:26 ? So even slower in a new file ?

I am open to test scenes that render around 10-15 min. If you want to setup up something it would be great to compare. Maybe including some basic textures, shaders, objects, instances, round edges, displacement and so on ? So we could eliminate certain categories ?

Thx for your interest in this topic. A

20

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: LOD for Human models from the Cosmos Browser

« on: 2023-10-20, 14:10:03 »

Are the proxy units set to auto or something else? If I change the scale of my project, the following happens with different units on each proxy. Some of which are blurred. ;)

Hello

It might have nothing to do with settings in the Proxy at all, as this problem seems based on the texture-settings itself. It was already pointed out that changing the Blur-Scale affects this issue. Even if I duplicate the proxy to a mesh the problem stays the same. No difference in mm, cm, m. See screenshot.

I even just tested the same texture on a simple cube. Same behavior !

Or speaking the other way : What setting in C4D (scale, units) is correct so that the textures would always appear sharp ? I am curious.

A

21

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: CRITICAL SPEED ISSUE WITH APPLE M SYSTEMS

« on: 2023-10-20, 13:05:15 »

Thanks for the detailed updates.

As you've mentioned here and on the other thead - there is definitely some missing link between the M1/M2 in real life and how it scores on benchmarks. I suspect its something to do with the Intel Embree Apple Silicon implementation still being quite "new".

Yes and No.

You have to understand, that in some scenes the M-Chip performs perfectly and according to the Benchmarks ! So the performance really is there !

It is just that in certain scenes (In my case almost every scene) there are massive performance drops happening, sometimes they are more dramatic, sometimes they are less dramatic. There is something happening, maybe it has to do with Textures, Shaders, Objects, Settings, which causes this problem on M-systems.

Hopefully we have some answers soon.

Best – A

22

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: mac studio / mac pro m2 ultra

« on: 2023-10-20, 12:07:56 »

Hello Community and contributors to this thread

I wanted to invite you to look into a critical performance issue I am having with my Apple Mac Studio M2. See link below.
_

Maybe you are affected as well, having your M-chip performing up to 5 times slower in some scenes and not noticing it.

If you have the chance to render a a recent scene on an Intel Mac in comparison with an Apple M System I would be interested in the speed difference in relation to the Corona Benchmark results or Cinebench. Are the values/differences accordingly ?

Maybe you can also generate a basic scene (with objects and textures) that renders around 10-15 min on your Mac Studio so I can test it on my iMac i9 to have some results ? That would be great.
_

See the other post :

https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=41180.0

Thank you

Best – A

23

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: CRITICAL SPEED ISSUE WITH APPLE M SYSTEMS

« on: 2023-10-20, 11:58:44 »

Just tested your scene on my m1 20 core 128gb 2tb system using CR11 (daily build), OS Sonoma and C4D 2024.
See attachment.  11 min 36 seconds.

Thank you for testing and adding your result

So same issue. Based on the benchmarks and tests with old scenes your M1 system should render this file in no longer than 3min. So your system is 4 times slower on this scene as it should be. It is mysterious.

Best – A

24

[C4D] Daily Builds / Re: v9 - Cinema 4D 2023 - Colors

« on: 2023-10-20, 11:50:08 »

SOLVED | It depends from color profile preferences in C4D. Linking with display profile, instead of default solve the issue.
Usually I don't use this option, scared by note about performances. :)


Happy Render

Hello

That works ! Great ! Thank you for pointing this out :)

Best – A

25

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: CRITICAL SPEED ISSUE WITH APPLE M SYSTEMS

« on: 2023-10-20, 09:54:42 »

"the known living-room sample-scene" - is this some very old scene that would have been created in a Corona several versions old? That might point to things that are new, like bucket rendering, 4K cache, etc. so it would be good to know how those "some scenes work as expected, some don't" split out, whether it is older vs. newer scenes. TY for the info!

Hello Tom

Yes the scene I am referring to is known, as it was used frequently to compare speed. It is this scene created in 2014.

https://blog.corona-renderer.com/making-of-corona-sample-c4d-interior/

This scene renders perfectly on my Mac Studio, also having the expected result in comparison to my Intel Mac, which is about 2.2x faster.

Thank you for your investigations

Asimo

26

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: CRITICAL SPEED ISSUE WITH APPLE M SYSTEMS

« on: 2023-10-20, 09:50:54 »

I'm probably not adding much here  - but for what it's worth it rendered at 7:52 on my M2 MPB/Ventura/64gb (with a couple of other apps running too).  I'm not sure why the ultra speed is so slow in comparison.

Renders in 5:02 on my old threadripper, which has a worse cinebench score than the MBP on paper - but better performance IRL.

The scene does contaiin all legacy materials, plus native c4d compositing tags, which may or may not have some sort of effect. (I dont see why it should TBH).

Hello

Thank you for testing. Also very interesting, that your M2 MBP already is 2min faster than my M2 Ultra. That also is very strange.

A

27

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: LOD for Human models from the Cosmos Browser

« on: 2023-10-19, 15:33:51 »

I just did a project and had the same problem with bark textures on trees. I set the blur scale to -100% in the bark textures and the trees looked much better in the distance. I wonder if this setting can be done globally instead of having to adjust all textures that show up at a distance.

In another case I had a user was also having blurry bark textures in their scene. After checking the scene and adding a figure primitive, I could see that their scale was way off. ;)

Hello

It is not a scale/units problem. It is easy to test. Setting my scene to mm, cm or m does not change anything. All objects are correctly scaled and still the issue appears the same way.

Best – A

28

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: LOD for Human models from the Cosmos Browser

« on: 2023-10-19, 15:24:24 »

Hello

I can confirm that almost every object from the Chaos Browser, using a Bitmap set to 0% Blur Scale basically renders blurry. You might not notice it, but textures start to blur out when you move them approximately 50 to 100 m from the camera. This should not be the case. As long as I am using no DOF everything should stay perfectly sharp. My scene is set to cm and works perfectly in terms of camera and imported objects.

I attached two examples showing the issue. It is the same figure. The distance to the camera of the person in the foreground is about 5m. The second person in the background is in 120m in distance and just scaled 10 times to appear larger. Both should definitely display perfectly sharp. Only when setting the Blur Scale to -100% it appears correct. You can see in the second image.

I better not check all images and far objects I rendered in the past 1-2 years ...

Why is it even set like this as default ? It really is a quality issue.

Best – A

29

[C4D] I need help! / Re: Beginner question about materials!

« on: 2023-10-19, 15:23:37 »

Hello

I can confirm that almost every object from the Chaos Browser, using a Bitmap set to 0% Blur Scale basically renders blurry. You might not notice it, but textures start to blur out when you move them approximately 50 to 100 m from the camera. This should not be the case. As long as I am using no DOF everything should stay perfectly sharp. My scene is set to cm and works perfectly in terms of camera and imported objects.

I attached two examples showing the issue. It is the same figure. The distance to the camera of the person in the foreground is about 5m. The second person in the background is in 120m in distance and just scaled 10 times to appear larger. Both should definitely display perfectly sharp. Only when setting the Blur value to -100% it appears correct. You can see in the second image.

I better not check all images and far objects I rendered in the past 1-2 years ...

Why is it even set like this as default ? It really is a quality issue.

Best – A

30

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: CRITICAL SPEED ISSUE WITH APPLE M SYSTEMS

« on: 2023-10-19, 14:42:26 »

I have a Mac Studio 20 core 128Gb ram and a 2Tb harddisk. My experience is actually very good in general.

It's important to understand that the M1 or M2 don't have very high numbers in terms of megahertz per CPU. This could result in some operations not being all that faster than a older  i7 or even slower.
Apple had to increase the core count on the Mac Studio m2 otherwise the speed difference compared to the m1 would have been zero. A 28 core i9 with hyperthreading will be at least twice as fast in multicore tasks than anything Apple (no hyperthreading) has to offer.

I do notice significant speed improvements because of much faster hard disk (built in SSD) access and RAM for loading maps and so on,  so parsing is much faster compared to my older systems. Generally modelling and all other stuff aside from rendering speed is very fluent and crash free on my Mac Studio. If you do images that take hours to render really a PC costs much less and is a lot faster. I am thinking of going for a render PC and a Mac laptop in the future. Best of both worlds and C4D and CR runs on both as well.

F

Hello

Thank you for your response. Of course a 28 core i9 is way faster than the recent M-chips. In my comparison it is a 10 core i9. So something really different. The speed itself is not the issue. I can prove that my M2 Ultra is indeed performing 2.2x faster than my iMac i9 of 2020. In regular files and in the benchmarks.

The question is, why the performance still is scene based. Why is CoronaRender performing up to 5 times faster using an Intel-Chip based on the exact same file. This is not understandable for me.

Best – A