Mac Studio Experience?

[frv]

The Mac Studio Ultra is sold as being equal to the newest 64 core AMD but regretfully the truth is it can't keep up with a 5 year old i7 16Gb PC.....
If budget & performance is of any concern forget about Mac's now and foreseeable future.

It needs to be said as well that the whole Mac experience remains very pleasant and with the new Studio (Ultra) feels fast for most especially if render times are not really bottlenecks in your daily workflow. Business wise a few 1000 more or less is over a period of 5 to 7 years also not huge concern and might be covered by the resale value.

Photographers buy Leica's for the look and feel alone. I understand it. You live only once and spending year over year with tools you can't stand the look of is not smart either.

Something I don't know is if the Mac Studio Ultra with its ultrafast SSD and RAM is noticeably faster in editing, pasting assets and working on materials. Speed is not rendering alone. Much work in C4D is single core like displacement mapping.

[jojorender]

Hi frv
ah ok, SL stands for passes. That makes more sense than noise level…
I saw your benchmark test but you forgot that corona benchmark runs in rosetta not M1 native - big difference.
We ran a bunch of test in the “Corona for Apple Silicon M1?” thread
The Ultra running M1 native corona would score somewhere in the 10M rays/s not 6.7M r/s as in rosetta.
If you are interested you can find test & results here. https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=33540.60

If someone “suffered” the last 10 years with “slow” render speeds on macOs and now that M1 (and soon M2) is out concludes that it’s time to go PC… well, that does not make a whole lot of sense to me.
For me, seeing how well M1 ultra performs was just to evaluate if it’s time to go Silicon or stick with Intel Mac just a little longer.

One thing that remains the same since forever, is that many tasks are “single core” .
Squeezing significantly more performance out of a single core is probably unrealistic on x86 or arm. Unless these processes can be converted to multi core, I don’t think we’ll see much real world workflow speedups in the foreseeable future.
Even in max, people choose the 32 core ripper over the 64 core for better single core performance.

“I must say as well the Mac Studio Ultra is a thrill to work with.” …I would say go with your gut feeling and leave the Windows BS (BS stands for amazing render speed) to others.

[frv]

Well, the PC & Mac world differ on many levels. I see co-workers with Lumion, Unreal and Twinmotion doing fantastic work that is loved by our clients. Rendering fine-tuned photoreal images seems to be something of a lesser order especially when it is much more time-consuming. The difference between real time rendered images and the typical press a button and wait image is fading. Most clients don't see it anymore. I do, but I am a photographer that would rather carry a 4x5 than a mirrorless.

But I don't want to be stuck in the past or be a one trick pony with C4D/CR, I am afraid the future is with hardware raytracing and Apple is not going there and not planning too. Another thing to consider is an economic crisis I see developing. Subscriptions C4D & CR plus a Mac Studio Ultra will cost me over 10k euros extra over the next 5 years. Compared to a free Unreal experience  and a bit cheaper PC that can be upgraded.

Whatever the choice is, the Mac Studio Ultra will be a delight to work with as I already see by my borrowed Ultra 128Gb.

[frv]

I before wrote that the asset browser in C4D does not work properly or even at all. Maxon support helped me out very well and solved the problem by letting me know to delete the index file in the database and rebuild it in C4D. Now on my Studio Ultra all works really well. The assets are loaded instantly especially with the option in R26 to assign a local database to be indexed.

As I was told here on the forum my testing with the Corona benchmark is useless since it is still not native m1 and running Rosetta. So the Studio Ultra is lot faster than what I wrote here.

[frv]

Benchmarked my iMac late 2015 i7 4 core 32Gb. About 3.11 minutes.

I submitted the result under frv. But can't find it there since there is no search based on name of the poster.

Anyhow, my new Mac Studio Ultra with 128gB is about 3x as fast with the benchmark (Rosetta). Considering Rosetta the Ultra most like is about 4 to 5x times as fast.

[frv]

One other thing is I can't get de Cosmos browser to work on my Mac Studio Ultra. Corona support is trying to help out but so far no luck. The Cosmos brwoser downloaded one asset but at 77% stalled. Then at reopening the Cosmos browser I get a white window without assets.

[Philw]

Cosmos has been that way on and off on my M1 since v8. It will be ok for ages then start being stupid like you describe. Unsure what makes it crap out.

[jojorender]

Then at reopening the Cosmos browser I get a white window without assets.

Same on Intel mac. Sometimes just blank for 10-30+ mins then suddenly loads.
I always thought the server is overwhelmed. Search still kills C4D completely.
I gave up on the constant updates when opening, because always something funky going on after update.

[frv]

Tx, I am having a session with support to fix this next Tuesday. My Intel Mac is just perfect always and the Studio Ultra beside it never connects to Cosmos for more then a one download at 70%. Very frustrating. My Macbook m1 has no problem with Cosmos either but then I only use it later in the evening. But I did notice downloading the daily builds is slow and it looks like Chaos has a server problem.

I must say that it feels a little unprofessional. Usually Coronarender was rock solid.

[Atlantis]

I just completed the Corona benchmark test.
There it shows that my Mac Studio Ultra with 128gB is the fastest Mac so far.

But slow compared to much cheaper Windows PC's of even years back.

Are you sure Corona Benchmark is running natively on M1?
I would guess it is running under Rosetta.

[frv]

Its running Rosetta. Can't change that. So most likely the m1 get too about 50 sec. natively but who knows. I do see that a co-workers PC with a AMD 16 core finishes at about 50 sec.

The m1 Ultra is not super fast but ok. I do think its faster for general workloads aside rendering like modelling, texturing, the asset browser for instant is completely instant if you have your databases on the Ultra's ssd.

The biggest issue for me is wondering about the Mac in general is that my co-workers have great fun with apps like Twin Motion, Unreal, Lumion and a few others that for me or unavailable. I am certain that the main workflow at the office will go through these apps rather than through me with C4D and CR. Looking a few years ahead it might be better to switch now to PC. Actually I had already expected to be far behind but the image quality is still lacking enough to give me an edge over what my colleagues are producing.

[kade]

Twinmotion and Unreal both have a Mac version and run great on current hardware. You should give them a try.

[frv]

I heard co-workers say it doesn't run well. Crashing and so on.
Enscape is coming to Mac I understand.

Today I had clients over and I really need tools to give them a bit of a look and feel with a real time app. C4D / CR is better suited for fine tuned images. The UI of C4D / CR is also not really for a client / architect meeting.

[kade]

Twinmotion was crashing quite often on low video memory systems of old (Intel). New M1 systems (with 64GB for example) run it very well. It’s really better to try it by yourself. I’m working in it almost daily.

[frv]

Ok, Tx. Will surely try it again then. But I have a co-worker here beside working in Twin Motion but the work I see done uses the path tracer. And that as far as I know does work on a Mac.