Steve-C

I have a 16". The M5 Pro has kicked the fans on a little when I spend a decent amount of time editing in 3D but it's minimal. I will still likely upgrade to the M5 Max Mac Studio whenever they come out.

You might want to consider the M5 Pro. I've seen some benchmark testing where the M5 Pro is on par, and in some cases even faster than the M4 Max. As mentioned above, the over heating is definitely an issue.

Update on my MacBook Pro M5 Pro. As stated before the M5 Max chip I ordered first was too powerful for this form factor in my opninion. It would throttle and had some serious fan noise, especially when using 3D. The M5 Pro chip has had no such issues. For CA users it seems to be the sweet spot for the laptop form factor. Graphics is slightly slower (very slight) but still very solid. Looking at exported images from my Windows machine next to the Mac exports I can't even notice a difference. I originally planned to upgrade later to the M5 Max Mac Studio but I'm not sure I will do that, this thing runs very smoothly. Plus the form factor allows me to take it from my office to the house, and I have two 32" 4 k monitors at both locations. Disclaimer, my workflow is strictly construction docs. I don't use PBR, I only export standard 3D images and pfd's for clients to review. If you use PBR at any level, a Windows machine is your best bet. However, AI is changing the landscape in that world and may be an equally atractive option for Mac users (and Windows).

Speculation is the M5 Mac Studio won't be released until late this year at the soonest. The Sudio is always last on the priority list because they sell more laptops than anything else, which kinda sucks for pro users.

Interesting. I was unaware the memory was such an important factor of graphic performance. I suppose that makes sences because it's an SOC. So the current M4 Max Studio has a base of 64gb, would you consider that to be sufficient? I personally plan on waiting for the M5 Max version. The M5 Pro is impressive so far as was the M5 Max, but the laptop form factor was too restrictive for such a powerful chip.

I plan on upgrading to the Mac Studio when and if they ever release the darn thing. They have been dragging their butts on new releases for that device for years. My system has 24gb of memory, and i never use PBR images.

You should consider an external drive and use a base config. With the thunderbolt 5 ports the transfer speeds are as fast as an internal drive. Impressive that you waited 5 years to upgrade, my max is 3 years lol. I tried the iPhone Max but the thing weighed a ton so I swaped it out for an iPhone Air, which I love! I drove to Best Buy out of town yesterday and picked up the MacBook Pro with the M5 pro chip. So far so good. There is a noticable drop in graphics performance but it's subtle. The trade off is that it doesn't sound like an airplane about to takeoff. We'll see if that holds true after a long day working on it. I did open a couple of my larger plans this morning to try and get the fans to kick on but it has remained silent.

Just an FYI, Best Buy has them in stock (the 2TB variant anyway). I decided to try the M5 Pro and I ordered from them. They have always been good about returns, so if I get more of the same as I did with the M5 max I'll send it back as well. I'm going out of town shortly after it arrives so I may not get to fully use it until the following week, but I will post an update once I have put it throught it's paces.

Interesting. I was considering picking up an M4 Pro just to see if I could get decent performance without the overheating. Apple is in a pickle with this RAM shortage, probably costing them multiple millions a day in lost sales.

If you plan to use more than one external monitor you might as well wait for the Mac Studio. I ordered the M5 Max MacBook Pro (40GB GPU version) to see if it could be my main rig. I had two monitors hooked up to it and it ran well, but after a couple of hours work, anytime I worked in 3D the fans ramped up and the processor was obviously throttling. It has incredible power but it's probably too much for that form factor, at least it is if you use external monitors. As for the Mac Studio, you can't find a new one anywhere, they are months out. You can find the occasional used one but they are gouging the heck out of people right now because that's the only way you can get one and probably will be for a while. I've seen some listed for as much as 50% above retail price, crazy! Apple has been craming so much RAM in their systems that they have created a production bottleneck.

I recently started using X17 regularly and noticed this off the bat, text leaders all over the place in elevations. Hope it's resolved soon, very annoying.

That did it. Disable GPU ray tracing in prefernces, then enable Ray Casted Sun Shadow in your active view. Thanks a million Brad!

Tried that. Also turned bloom on and off, adjusted ambient occlusion, adjusted sharpening and super resolution, none of which made any difference. I should mention that this has been the result on multiple Mac devices and is why I use Windows machines at my home office and work office. I only use Mac for site measures.

Settings are the same for Mac and Windows

To compare here is the same image from Windows Mac used to have a "sharpen image" option a few years ago but they got rid of it. I have messaged tech support about this a couple of times but they gave me some BS about having to create a new template every so often when using a Mac. I tried that and still had the same results.