It is taking time but Apple has sponsored work on Blender. Are you aware that there is a beta Metal option you can enable? The work is not finished and there are shortcomings but performance has been improved significantly and more improvements are in development."Specifics" from the top of my head: open Blender and do anything with raytraced low quality live preview window just like you'd do normally to model stuff in 3D with nvidia graphics. Try modelling something and see how it goes from there. Or try rendering a final animated piece. Also try using some native and 3rd party GPU heavy AE plugins such as echo/signal/tvpixel/time blend fx. Or custom template effects from AEJuice/ Motion Array. Or use stacks of blur / motion blur for 3D renders in After Effects. Or Element 3D plugin for AE with a lot of objects generated in an array. I can keep going. Stuff that chokes M silicon is still a pleasant, live preview experience on 4090 build. Tech youtubers doing these "stress tests" have no idea how to use the power they are testing, because they are not "pros" working in visual industry. The only thing they can do is some nonsense action applied to a stack of 100 photos with a stopwatchOr just keep compressing 8k footage as if that's what pros do..
The only reason I didnt abandon Mac is because I love Mac OS / hate Windows. But I feel I'm being held hostage right now by Apple. It just would be nice to at least know what their plan is - will they pivot and deliver a real pro machine or do they want to put a Mac Studio in a bigger chasis. Cause if that's what going to happen I'm out and trying not to kill myself relying on Windows
code.blender.org
I'm sure I'll care about ray tracing sometime in the next 5 years, but I'm in no rush. I'll certainly care more when games use full ray tracing instead of just hacking it in for light/shadows.
As for Nvidia, Apple hasn't supported them for ~15 years? Why even ask? The likelihood of it happening is somewhere less than 1%
nvidia game dev software is AI generative/procedural image/3D content creation - it's for artists, not for programmers. I mean, the tools I'm talking about - there are tools for programmers as well of course, but I was referring to the "visual" ones.
I was referring to the absurd Gurman fever dream about Apple trying it but failing after discovering it would be too expensive. Also I believe those leaks about how the connections worked were debunked. But it's still possible Apple is planning this, I just don't believe the details of the "too expensive" thing. Apple sells $1000 monitor stands and $700 wheels, I'm sure they could price it accordingly.
We'd all love for Apple to do something about the shortcomings of their GPUs, but they just don't seem to care. They still don't take gaming seriously. Part of it is due to developers not wanting to use Metal properly though.
Maybe they have a secret agreement with Meta to die together, plunging into the tech abyss
That does seem like a conflict of their current interest's. But if the right emphasis came along they might. The right game can make an amazing justification for a change in attitude. I just don't think anything VR gaming is at this level yet that Apple would use.
I agree. Apple's SoCs have worked well so far for:My bad - M2 Pro memory is 5 times slower, M2 Max memory is "only" 3 times slower than 4090 series cards
What does M1 Ultra performance have to do with anything? The absolute cheapest model of M1 Ultra is $4k currently.
$4k buys you a PC which SMOKES M1 Ultra in 3D / AI / Adobe creative suite applications (single core performance is the only important thing with Adobe - because they don't care and didnt optimise their software). The only thing it *might* be faster in is 4K/8K encoding.
All Apple can do when communicating with someone interested in high performance is lie by showing a misleading graph of how M1 outperforms a 3080 series card at low wattage, which has absolutely no meaning in real life. I have no idea who came up with that graph but it was soooo stupid...
M silicon is cool tech which freed Apple from other (sh*tty on their own terms) vendors such as intel and nvidia.
But the path they chose is not for prosumers. And it was a wise move - it's just a tiny niche market anyway, comparing to the buying potential of all other customers. The benefits of closed architecture vastly outweigh the cons. But they should have declared clearly there is no Mac Pro coming in foreseeable future - since they did declare its coming and didn't deliver. After they realised where the tech world is going (good job not noticing it sooner...), it was fair to announce something, even between the lines, what the future holds. Are we getting semi-open M silicon? Are we getting binned version of regular M silicon? Or maybe a dedicated, GPU-enhanced M silicon just for Pro model? I'm in the market for a Mac Pro, I dont know if I should be waiting or just give up. Considering they didn't deliver on their promise, they owe us at least a controlled leak of what's going on...
The only sucky part with that, is for people that need a lot of RAM will have to pay for the unnecessary (or less necessary) CPU & GPU upgrades to get those higher ram capacities, and same with the other way around.
Is this the old I want to buy third party RAM comparison? SoC with unified memory is a lot faster memory bandwidth.
That's easy. Apple has given up on those pro use cases. Best to move to Windows. Apple has written those markets off already.
It's not for graphics memory. GDDR6X in high end GPU's blows the bandwidth of unified memory away.
UMA is not magic. Much slower socketed RAM on my Windows systems (one of which is DDR4 and not 5) has better performance in many areas since it is paired with a 10th gen Intel and a 3080Ti GPU.
And this is why macOS is as good as it can get. The currently software on macOS and support by devs will NOT get any better if the Mac Studio is the maxed Mac available. When an Intel i9 and NVIDIA 4090 puts it to shame. Don't expect any more developers to port over their Windows software to Mac any time soon.
Well fortunately it's pretty damn good then, because there's really nothing I need that doesn't run on MacOS besides games. I'm curious what Windows software is so great that it's a problem there isn't a MacOS version? It used to be a big problem but it's been years now since there was something I needed to run for any work that didn't have a Mac version. Apple laptops are extremely popular for productivity, and most developers seem to have figured that out finally.
Interesting article from April 2022
www.macworld.com
Engineering is hard but not that hard. It's not like they're designing a whole new chip from the ground up.Engineering is hard and Apple doesn't care if anyone gives them a pass?
A Quad M* Max package is a shockingly complicated engineering challenge. I assume that an UltraFusion PCIe bridge chip they might need is also really complicated.
The plan is the plan until it isn't the plan. Apple's "2 year plan" thing is marketing, as all public statements are. For a huge number of reasons that didn't happen. If people are making personal plans based on a company saying something is going to happen in 2 years, that isn't on the company.
What does "Get out of the way" even mean? You're welcome to give up on Apple, but hanging out on here talking about Apple is your choice, not Apple's.
