MacBook M2 versus M1

[CoolHandLuke]

Anyone gone to the new M2 chip MacBooks and what are your comments

[Arcadian]

Hey Luke, got mine on order! won't be able to comment for a couple of weeks yet. Thought they were being released today ?

[LevisL]

9 hours ago, Arcadian said:

Hey Luke, got mine on order! won't be able to comment for a couple of weeks yet.

 

I just ordered one as well. 14" MacBook Pro M2 Max. I can let you know in a couple weeks. I'm hoping it'll blow the 2020 iMac out of the water (I currently have the exact same machine as you@CoolHandLuke)!

[JMininger]

Any update on how the M2 chip Macbook Pros are performing with CA?

[Arcadian]

Still waiting !! ... (Grrr)

[LevisL]

On 2/27/2023 at 9:04 AM, JMininger said:

Any update on how the M2 chip Macbook Pros are performing with CA?

 

I've been using my new MacBook M2 Max with X15 Beta for about a week now and so far so good. Rendering speed is very good compared to my 2020 iMac in the plans I've tested so far.

[SNestor]

@LevisL - can you use PBR in X15 with your M2 Mac?

[cw2015]

To those now running Chief Premier on a Macbook Pro with the M2 Max chip, did you stick with the standard 32GB unified memory configuration or go with the 64GB or 96 GB options?    I have been putting off upgrading my 2015 13" Macbook Pro in hopes that the "next" MacBook version would enable real time ray tracing similar to a PC.   My Macbook has deteriorated to the point where I can no longer wait, so would like to place my M2 Max order this week. 

[SNestor]

It’s not that the M1 or M2 can’t produce RTRT…Chief hasn’t written their software to take advantage of the ARM chip design. Other rendering software companies have done the work and written their software to work with Apple…still waiting for Chief. 
 

But - in X15 we can make custom arrows! Wooo!

[LevisL]

I went with the 32GB. So far so good, but I don't do a lot of PBR renders. I mostly use the standard renders and line drawing techniques and a lot of my work is con docs. That's all really fast with my M2 Max. 

 

If you do use PBR's a lot, you might want to up your memory. I just did some testing this morning on interior and exterior PBR's and they were generating in 10 seconds or less. I still don't have the magic touch to adjust the lighting, etc. on PBR's though, so I'm not posting my results on here! They're either too dark, too bright, or some materials look really weird/off! 

[DefinedDesign]

20 hours ago, LevisL said:

....so I'm not posting my results on here! 

Please do post, I would find very helpful to see what your Macbook Pro can do. 

[SNestor]

@LevisL - I don’t believe that RTRT is supported for the MAC. That could be the reason your renders don’t look great.
Apple uses “metal” as their graphics engine and I don’t believe Chief has optimized their software to use this. I could be mistaken….maybe someone from Chief could jump in here and set us all straight?

[Ryan-M]

7 hours ago, SNestor said:

@LevisL - I don’t believe that RTRT is supported for the MAC. That could be the reason your renders don’t look great.
Apple uses “metal” as their graphics engine and I don’t believe Chief has optimized their software to use this. I could be mistaken….maybe someone from Chief could jump in here and set us all straight?

As of X13 we do use Metal.  We also run natively on ARM as of X14.  Ray tracing is independent of both of these things.

 

Mac ray tracing is something we regularly evaluate.  Here is why it hasn't happened yet:

• When it comes to GPU code for non-ray tracing functionality, we're able to author it such that it "just works" on both platforms. This doesn't apply to ray tracing. Without going into too much detail, this is a considerable technical problem that doesn't have a great solution right now.
• There is no hardware acceleration for ray tracing on any existing Apple hardware.  "Hardware acceleration" means dedicated hardware for tracing rays, e.g. the kind of hardware present in NVIDIA RTX and AMD RX 6xxx GPU's.  This doesn't mean it's impossible to perform ray tracing on Apple hardware, but it does mean it will do so much more slowly than other hardware.

The two major takeaways here are:

1. Right now, the performance we would be able to get on this hardware makes it very difficult to justify the implementation and maintenance cost (which is very high).
2. Even if the hardware becomes available tomorrow, we wouldn’t be able to flip a switch and make it work on the Mac. There’s substantial effort involved to get Chief to the point that it can leverage said hardware, and this would involve the planning and budgeting of engineering time well in advance.

Here is an article that compares M1 GPU ray tracing performance against various CPU's and GPU's.  The short of it is that the M1 is between 30x and 40x slower than an RTX 2070 (mid-range first-generation NVIDIA card).  Granted, this is the base M1 model.  If we assume the M1 Max is in fact 4x faster than an M1 as seems to be the claim from Apple, then it's still upwards of 10x slower (at tracing rays) than a mid-range PC GPU from 2018.  Modern ray tracing-capable cards have improved in ray tracing performance comparably to the M1 Max improvement over M1, so we're still looking at a 30-40x performance difference between a modern Mac and a modern PC.

 

This is a topic that we internally discuss routinely. It's a complex business decision, not something we're withholding for arbitrary reasons.  The equation changes over time, and we’ll continue to evaluate where we’re at as new technology becomes available and our PBR implementation evolves.
 

[SNestor]

@Ryan-M - Thanks so much for that great explanation. Lots of things I did not know.

[Chrisb222]

So my hunch has been correct all along. Basically any computer capable of running X15 can perform PBR ray tracing, it's just that some cannot do so in "real time." (Even though real time is a misnomer, since even RTX cards are not performing in "real time.") But, those cards are fast enough to get away with using "real time" as a marketing term, which is a buzz word in the industry right now. So the feature has been disabled in systems that perform under a certain threshold, in order to be able to leverage the buzzwords.

 

Chief Architect:

This doesn't mean it's impossible to perform ray tracing on Apple hardware, but it does mean it will do so much more slowly than other hardware.....It's a complex business decision

[SNestor]

@Chrisb222 - Yea, I'm not sure if this is an Apple problem, such that Apples graphics hardware is extremely sub-par, or...is it that Chief is unable to justify the resources required to play in the Apple world. That's what it sounds like...but, it's hard to know. 

 

It doesn't matter that much to me (I hardly ever need RTRT) however, for MAC users that have invested 5K or more for a robust M1 or M2 Apple system it must really piss them off that this feature is not accessible to them. 

[Chrisb222]

4 hours ago, SNestor said:

@Chrisb222 - Yea, I'm not sure if this is an Apple problem, such that Apples graphics hardware is extremely sub-par, or...is it that Chief is unable to justify the resources required to play in the Apple world. That's what it sounds like...but, it's hard to know. 

 

It doesn't matter that much to me (I hardly ever need RTRT) however, for MAC users that have invested 5K or more for a robust M1 or M2 Apple system it must really piss them off that this feature is not accessible to them. 

 

Hi Steve, it doesn't matter to me either since I do zero PBRs, and only few ray traces, and CPU RT works just fine for me, and rather fast now on the M1.

 

My understanding, in a nutshell, is that "real time" RT can only happen that fast on a dedicated GPU, no matter what software. The RTX et al cards are specific hardware just for super-accelerated graphics, and the PC platform is designed to harness this technology whereas the MacOS is not. Apple seems to want everything to happen on their dedicated ARM chip, and to not utilize third-party GPUs.

 

Can the Mac architecture perform a PBR RT? Yes, as has been my hunch for some time.

 

My post was simply to highlight that CA implicitly stated that the Mac can perform PBR RT, just not at a speed that's commensurate with labeling it "Real Time." As they said, it was a business decision. I don't necessarily think it was a bad decision, or the wrong decision, but suffice it to say they arbitrarily defeated the feature for Macs and any older PCs, so they could label it "real time." I've suspected this for some time, but it's interesting to know it's true. That's all.

 

If CA unlocked PBR RT for the Mac, I suspect those $5k macs could do it fairly quick, maybe faster than the current CPU RT. But that's just a guess, and again, it doesn't really affect me and of course, CA has every right to do whatever they feel is in their best interest.

 

BTW, I don't think I ever told you directly, but you provide some really great instructional videos here, and you have a great presentation style. Thanks!