Maxon's Redshift Now Available for macOS With Support for Metal and M1 Macs

[vinegarshots]

Jesus, the difference in speed is just... wow, ridiculous. On the OpenCL part, you mean the OpenCL version when it was still supported it was even slower than today’s Cycles CPU-mode?

Yes, that's correct. I found a post on the Blender Artists forums from another person who had a similar experience as me (post is quoted below):

"I just did the same test on an iMac Pro at my local computer store. My computer at home is the first edition iMac 5K (so four years old), which I got before I planned to get into 3D (but I did get the best available GPU for it). At home the BMW render took 5 minutes on the CPU, 50 minutes on the GPU. On the iMac Pro it was 4 minutes on the CPU, 15 minutes on the GPU. Something doesn’t seem quite right. On the other hand, there is the AMD ProRender plug-in for Blender, which should work better, although I didn’t get the chance to try it out.

I am also told that you can download the latest OpenCL drivers directly from AMD, which surprised me, because I didn’t think you could manually install drivers on the Mac OS (I assumed you had to wait for Apple to release the next version of the OS)."

 

[iPadified]

I know this isnt quite an apple to Apple comparison, but:
On my iMac Pro, rendering the BMW test scene in Blender using CPU rendering (Blender removed OpenCL rendering support, which is the only way you could GPU render on a Mac using Blender Cycles renderer) took somewhere around 3.5 minutes. On my PC with a 3080 using CUDA/Optix, that same scene takes 12 seconds to render.

Cycles has been developed for NVIDIA GPU through a decade or so and cycle has always made a dogs dinner of render times when using OpenCL and CPU render is slower. This is not surprising so Blender has some work to do to optimize cycles for Metal.

I believe that this is what redshift made and was pleasantly surprised by the speed enhancement. I totally agree that the NVIDIA is a better choice for GPU rendering (mac or PC). What I do not understand in this tread is why redshift running well using Metal is a problem. It does not make the 3080 card any slower.

 

[iPadified]

But it’s not the Apple hardware rendering, it’s just the GPUs and the GPU’s listed are available on PC. They’re also slower than Nvidia’s 3090 cards. It’s impossible to know how quickly they would render on the 3090 but they would definitely be quicker. Here’s a comparison

The article shouldn’t make people think that this is down to the Apple hardware when it’s down to the fact that developers have finally released a much faster type of render engine on a Mac that has been released on Redshift for years. It’s hilarious that they still used CPU rendering on Macs when they could have joined the GPU revolution years ago. I prefer macs but I only use mine for pre-production and animation. As soon as it comes to texturing, lighting and rendering I move to my PC.

Interesting, the link shows a comparison between a 28nm process AMD card from 2016 and a NVIDIA card on the 7nm process from 2020... I know fully well that NVIDIA still is king on the performance throne and partly it is because render engines are optimized for it. Look how poorly OpenCL performed compared to NVIDIA in Cycles. It is not only the card, it is also the software.

I think we agree fully that this is about software optimization to metal and not unique hardware. That is quite clear from the text when I read it.

 

[maikerukun]

It’s funny how this article doesn’t link to their article. Macrumors are trying to make it sound like it’s down to how amazing Apple hardware is when it’s purely down to switching to GPU rendering. It’s like me using the Physical based renderer and then firing up my 3090s and saying how much faster it is on Windows. It’s nothing to do with the platform, you’re just using a faster render engine.

I absolutely agree with you. It was framed in a really sneaky way and I don't like that they didn't link back to Lunar. I love that studio and in fact modeled my own studio after theirs which is the only reason I knew about them in the first place. This really should have been linked back to their articles and coverage over the years.

 

[maikerukun]

It's crazy to me is that a production studio would be fine with wasting 25 minutes per frame rendering content that they could have done in a fraction of the time if they'd just used a PC with a Nvidia GPU installed instead of using CPU rendering on a Mac Pro. I understand why people like MacOS and Mac hardware, but that is ridiculous.

It's really not if you go look into the history of the company and their work. That said, the point will still be moot by the end of 2021 with the M1X iMac Pro and it's 64 gpu core, and in the middle of 2022 with the launch of the M2 Mac Pro and their 128 gpu core. Octane X and Redshift have vastly improved my workflow and since my studio is very similar to Lunar's, all of my clients and partners have come to expect my production house to be a Mac based pipeline for everything pre to post production since 2010 or so.

Everything isn't about getting a used PC lol. My gaming PC is exactly that, for gaming, and if I were to ever get a PC for work related reasons, it wouldn't be used, and would cost north of $50k to make up in singular artist render times for not being directly plugged into our entire pipeline.

 

[maikerukun]

Can you link that article you mention? I would love to take a look at what is it about. Did a quick search on the phone (“Lunar Redshift”) but it gave some results and even some Rene Ritchie’s YouTube video on this.
Is it the “Lunar Animation” GPU rendering with a Mac Pro case study with many DCC tools and renderers?

Sorry for the late reply my friend, and yes it is. Here's a link to the article.

The Mac Pro - a year in the studio — LUNAR ANIMATION | CG Animation & Visual FX Services

Today we’re going to give a 12 month 3D computer animation perspective on the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR.

www.lunaranimation.com