Move from Octane GTX 3090 to Apple Silicon

[haffy]

Hi,

I want to do the move from my current Razer Blade with eGPU GTX 3090 to an Apple Macbook Pro M1 Max, I know that there will be a drop in performance. I just want to know how big it will be, and if I can live with it.

I will use render farm (wich one is simplest, press and send?) for final render, I did that with Octane too.  One day maby I will buy a render slave with like Threadripper or something, but the market is crazy right now. Will Corona work with a slave with another type of CPU?

Has there been any new tests between these two beasts, GTX 3080/3090 and M1 Pro/Max?

I am very greatfull for any real world answwers I can get, I have had enough of problems of late with computers and rendering.

[TomG]

"Will Corona work with a slave with another type of CPU?"

Yes, for all forms of network rendering, Corona will work with any mix of CPUs.

[haffy]

Anyone ? Is the future for Mac and rendering so dark?

[davetwo]

There are many, many variables so I'm not sure you can make direct comparisons to be honest. All I can say is that I've been very happy using Corona with my my macbookpro for all my concept work (stills, 2.5K).

I use a workstation for bigger/final files. But hear that Ranch and Rebus are both reliable and reasonable  if you want to use a farm instead.

PS. In my not-very-extensive testing, much of the supposed speed gains from Octane just weren't there compared to Corona, as I always needed to crank-up the various settings to get a decent result.

[haffy]

Interesting davetwo, very much so. Do you know if there is a benchmark with the latest patch/version out yet? Would love to see some speed data before changing my current setup. I tested a Blender scene in cycles, on my Blade it was 19 min and on the Mac it was 6 hours. Anything under 30 min and all would have been good, but 6 hours was to bad. That is why I want to see some data.
My trial is out..

[BigAl3D]

@haffy Now I'm curious what Blender scene you rendered and what the settings were. I'm a Mac user as well, but I have an iMac Pro which holds up pretty well.

[haffy]

BigAl it was a interiour scene i had laying around for a client, wich I remade the materials in Blender and tested. I have now made a new scene, a much more simple scene that I am testing. It's somthing, but it's probably not the best way to test. I just want a solution on Mac..

[BigAl3D]

Ah, I thought you rendered one of Blender's free sample scenes. The M1 is Apple's last hope to get back in the render game. Seems promising, but I need to wait for the pro machines. The idea of the built-in GPUs makes me nervous as they've had AMD, a major player, and still did not optimize the performance after all those years. Then of course, they tended to always pick the wrong vendor. That's why I love Corona since it works with many CPUs and at decent speeds.

I get very responsive real-time previews on this 2017 iMac Pro (2.3 GHz 18-Core Intel Xeon W), so I'm hoping for the best. Good luck!

[Philw]

Think of the M1 as a normal 8-core Mac CPU for Corona - but without the fan noise! The GPU aspect of M1 is irrelevant for Corona. For GPU comparison (if that helps you) - on a full Redshift benchmark the M1 Max comes out about the same timewise as an AMD 5700XT - but the extra VRAM definitely helps in real world lookdev/scenbuilding - very responsive and snappy.

[haffy]

Thank you all ! I have now oredered a new Macbook Pro 16" M1 Max 64GB and so on. My test's are as follows, hope it helps someone. The scenes used are as close as possible in regards of settings and materials.

# Razer Blade
Octane 4 min 5 seconds
Corona 12 min 36 seconds
Blender 5 min 8 seconds

# Razer Chroma X RTX 3090
Octane 2 min 0 seconds
Blender ~2h 19 min  5 seconds(ended after 15 min..)

# Mac M1 Pro
Octane 10 min 6 seconds
Corona 13 min 20 seconds

# Mac M1 Max
Octane 5 min 22 seconds, high energy
Corona 14 min 28 seconds, high energy
Blender 1h 15 min

[Philw]

Bear in mind that Ocrane X is still not M1 native too.

[haffy]

Yes that's true. And I am hoping that it can match the notebook 3080, for now.. I also hope Corona will gain more speed, as it is so nice to render over LAN. A threadripper in the closer is a nice solution to my laptop limitations.

[Philw]

It won't match a 3080. Apple suggesting it would (kind of) in their press was a bit naughty. We are more in line with a 1080 -but the tech is not like for like so its difficult.

[frv]

I don't fully understand this test. The m1 pro and max seem weird in their test results. Octane although a GPU renderer renders very fast on the mac's. Corona is slower on the max then on the pro ?
Can you post the rendered images ?